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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Probably because we're not generally in the habit of rendering entire species extinct simply because they've been transported by humans out of their natural habitat?

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If care is taken to ensure that none of the genetically altered species members make it back to their native region (Asia), then we wouldn't extinguish the entire species, just the ones over here, where they're not part of our natural ecosystem.

That's an almost tautological argument, since the premise under which we'd be exterminating them is that we weren't able to prevent that kind of migration from happening.

While any migration of an invasive species generally situates the species in its new region permanently until something kills it off (and as such you must continually guard against invasive species entering), we would only have to prevent re-migrations of the "tainted" species back to their native regions for the amount of time that it would take them to die out due to the sterilization. Much easier.

Edit: relaxed claims.

Another option is to look for genetic markers in the invaders. When a population expsndd from a small base, whatever allelee common in that base become common in the expanded population even when these alleles are uncommon in the species as a whole.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Founder_effect

Care was taken to make sure these invasive species didn't get imported in the first place, but clearly that didn't work... What makes you think preventing the altered species from being transported back will be any more successful?

Because we somehow managed to _not_ import them for several decades/centuries before one finally slipped through, and we only have to avoid exporting them until they die out, which sounds like it would only take a few years.

Obviously, we managed to _not_ import them during eras where travel and trade between continents was far rarer.

Is it necessary in its native habitat either? If it's a pure pest, we should have no qualms about getting rid of it. That we haven't historically done that (except for smallpox) isn't a good argument for not doing it, especially since the technology for making it easy is just now becoming available.

You do have an argument about ecosystem cascades and food chain disruption inveighing against arbitrary extinction of pests, but we should evaluate these things on a case by case basis and not just assume that any species we eradicate is "load bearing". Many species aren't.

I expect we'll see a lot more at least partially serious calls for this as more species have to migrate due to changing climate.

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