More American Wildlife: Invasive Species
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This is what most Ash tree forests look like in infected areas now. Those toothpicks sticking out of the ground used to be big, bushy ash trees. The bugs devastate entire forests in a single season.
This is the before and after shot of a street in Detroit when Dutch Elm Disease reached the area. The beautiful trees you see in the top photo are American Elms, which once lined many streets in North America before Dutch Elm Disease wiped them all out. American Elms used to be one of the most popular decorative trees in the Northeastern and Midwestern United States.
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That's how the vine looks going up the trunks of those trees. This thing will tear limbs down and slowly kill forests to replace them with their giant canopies of short-lived purple flowers. And to make matters worse, they are frequently planted as landscaping.
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Another (unfortunately) common house pet, these guys frequently outgrow their homes, and get released. The Everglades are similar enough to their native habitat that they too have been able to start a reproducing population. Since about 1990, they have been surviving and spreading in the Everglades, though at a much slower rate than the pythons mentioned above.
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The fear of having them reach the Chesapeake Bay has led to many prevention efforts, and they have so far been effective. They are still a common sight in the Potomac, and many people make it a sport of fishing for them.
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It would hurt to have one of these fly into your head while boating down the river (which is a surprisingly common occurrence these days). People in affected areas are known to have fishing tournaments where you're only allowed to use a net (kept out of the water) and your boat - the objective is to scare the fish into jumping straight into your net. Needless to say, this large new population of fish has completely changed the ecosystem in one of America's most important waterways.
This map hasn't been updated in a while, but the spread has also been largely slowed down by prevention methods. However, in areas that are affected, it is likely that all future honey bee populations will have some degree of mutation due to established Africanized and further hybridized colonies. The queens of all future hives are bound to pass some amount of Africanized DNA on to their hives.
I've always been a bit fascinated by the spread of invasive species, and when I started making a compilation of cool wildlife native to North America, it reminded me of how quickly the introduction of a new species can completely change the environment. I thought maybe FunnyJunk would find these stories interesting.
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This little guy above is an Asian beetle called an Emerald Ash Borer. They have been devastating forests in North America since the mid 1990s. Ash trees are cheap, easy to grow, and extremely useful for hardwood, so they have been planted extensively throughout North America. Unfortunately, the ash borer does a good job hiding its offspring deep within the wood, which is then often shipped around (though recent restrictions have at least somewhat alleviated this). Once the bug showed up in Canada in the 1990s, it was all over for North American ash trees.
This is what most Ash tree forests look like in infected areas now. Those toothpicks sticking out of the ground used to be big, bushy ash trees. The bugs devastate entire forests in a single season.
And something even smaller can take out beloved trees as well:
This is the before and after shot of a street in Detroit when Dutch Elm Disease reached the area. The beautiful trees you see in the top photo are American Elms, which once lined many streets in North America before Dutch Elm Disease wiped them all out. American Elms used to be one of the most popular decorative trees in the Northeastern and Midwestern United States.
DED is a fungus that spreads with the help of Elm Bark beetles. It is thought to have been brought to North America in an infected shipment of wood (specifically, there were said to have been some bark beetles in a shipment of veneer from the Netherlands in the 1920s). Since then, people across the continent have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to try to keep their elms alive, mostly with little success. There have been recent developments in resistant strains of American Elms, but very few mature members of the species remain.
As long as we're talking plants...
Chinese Wisteria - the beautiful purple death. If you live east of the Mississippi, and you see a bunch of pretty purple flowers all along the road on every tree all at the same time each Spring, you're probably looking at a large outcropping of Wisteria. It was brought here in 1816, and has since spread across forests like wildfire. And here's the real problem:
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That's how the vine looks going up the trunks of those trees. This thing will tear limbs down and slowly kill forests to replace them with their giant canopies of short-lived purple flowers. And to make matters worse, they are frequently planted as landscaping.
But sometimes we import something a little more terrifying than bugs, diseases, and plants. What about when we started releasing these guys into the Everglades?
That's three Floridians holding a giant Burmese python in the middle of one of their home town swamps. These 12+ foot long pythons have been commonly released since the 1980s (they're an unfortunately common house pet), but they started reproducing in the Everglades by the early 2000s. Researchers now estimate that at least 30,000 and as many as 300,000 of these pythons are likely rummaging around Florida now. They've been known to eat pets, and they've completely thrown off the food chain in the Everglades (you should see these things attack an alligator). And this isn't the only non-native creature reproducing in the Everglades; here's a picture of...
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A Nile Monitor Lizard running into someone's bushes in Southern Florida. In case you were wondering how big these things are, here is a picture of a guy holding his pet:
Another (unfortunately) common house pet, these guys frequently outgrow their homes, and get released. The Everglades are similar enough to their native habitat that they too have been able to start a reproducing population. Since about 1990, they have been surviving and spreading in the Everglades, though at a much slower rate than the pythons mentioned above.
Then we have the invasion by sea.
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This is a Chinese Snakehead. They have been released in a few places in North America, including the Potomac River (which feeds into the Chesapeake Bay). They may not seem like much, but they completely devour native fish populations, and they are able to slither across small gaps of land to reach disconnected bodies of water. Add this killer set of dentures, and you have one of the world's ultimate invasive species:
The fear of having them reach the Chesapeake Bay has led to many prevention efforts, and they have so far been effective. They are still a common sight in the Potomac, and many people make it a sport of fishing for them.
And another fish that's a bit easier to catch a glimpse of:
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These are Asian Silver Carp. A whole freaking bunch of Asian Silver Carp. They were brought to America in the 1970s for use in aquaculture, and were immediately found outside of captivity in various rivers and streams. Since the early 2000s, they have taken off in the Mississippi, Ohio, and Illinois rivers, as well as many of their tributaries, turning the Midwestern waterways into a giant festival of flying carp. And these things aren't small:
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It would hurt to have one of these fly into your head while boating down the river (which is a surprisingly common occurrence these days). People in affected areas are known to have fishing tournaments where you're only allowed to use a net (kept out of the water) and your boat - the objective is to scare the fish into jumping straight into your net. Needless to say, this large new population of fish has completely changed the ecosystem in one of America's most important waterways.
But the invasive species that probably gets the most media coverage these days is back to an insect:
Killer Bees (or Africanized Honey Bees). These things are the ultimate honey bees. They reproduce faster, take less time to reach maturity, and swarm more often (which is when they create a new hive) than the European bees. They're also more resistant to mites and diseases, less likely to be affected by smoke, and more willing to defend their hive at greater distances. They were created in Brazil by an entomologist who was crossing for the best traits in European bees with the best traits in African bees; while still running experiments, they escaped in 1957, and have slowly been expanding across the United States:
This map hasn't been updated in a while, but the spread has also been largely slowed down by prevention methods. However, in areas that are affected, it is likely that all future honey bee populations will have some degree of mutation due to established Africanized and further hybridized colonies. The queens of all future hives are bound to pass some amount of Africanized DNA on to their hives.
I hope you found this interesting - I have a good time rambling about nature, and as long as it isn't being negatively received I'll keep putting things like this together once in a while. Let me know what you think.
Don' t (tta firewood,
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it BUG me!
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