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Comment by Exmoor | Hacker News Reader

It makes me a little nauseous to think about all the resources going to tracking down these insects, but this is truly an area where an ounce of prevention is worth many pounds of cure.

The scope of North America's invasive species problem is enormous. For many folks in urban areas, it's possible that you might go your whole day only encountering one native bird species (American Crow), but a whole host of invasive species (Rock Pigeon, House Sparrows, European Starlings).

History shows that early, active intervention can pay enormous dividends. For example, Alberta remains the only area in North America without non-native rats due to a major interventions: https://www.alberta.ca/history-of-rat-control-in-alberta.asp...

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‘All the resources’ make you nauseous? Seems like a weird reaction.

Washington State department of agriculture’s budget is public information; they spend about a quarter of a billion dollars a year on all their programs. I can’t imagine this particular operation is making much of a dent in that overall spend. According to the captions of those photographs, they have entomologists and pest control specialists on staff already. Salaries are also public. Sven Spichinger, shown in one of those pictures, Managing Entomologist, is on $87,000 a year - whether he’s hunting for murder hornets or not, presumably. There are three different levels of ‘Pest Biologist’ job in the department. It kind of looks like this is a project that is taking up the time of a few people who they already had on staff, to deal with exactly this kind of problem.

Does all government spending make you nauseous, or only when it’s visibly helping?

Now how much money we spend eating out when we could be saving by cooking large meals and eating leftovers, that makes me nauseous.

If you're cooking anything with meat or imported produce, you're still damaging the environment, regardless of where it's cooked. Also your leftovers need to be put into something(often plastic) and stored in a refrigerated or frozen environment(electric/carbon costs), then reheated(electric/carbon cost). If you get tired of eating the same thing after 3 days and the rest rots away in your fridge, you've just created a ton of waste, or if you think to yourself you're going to spend 3 hours doing weekly meal-prep, but then flake out and don't do it, you just wasted everything. Some people are just terrible chefs or do not have the energy for it after working 50 - 60 hours in the week.

Also you could make a case that large houses with nice kitchens also have environmental costs to build and maintain, and living in small apartments with communal kitchens or restaurants nearby is better.

You make some thought provoking points, but there are a lot of "ifs" there. So, even a chance that some savings might be achieved by cooking staple foods at home once in a while seems worth considering.

Most people end up leaving a lot on the table when eating out, and 100% of that food ends up in the trash / wasted.

If you want to save money then cooking bulk foods at home might make sense, people just need to make sure they're really calculating the costs properly. If you want a balanced diet and varied menu, then it can be expensive and labor intensive.

If you want to save the environment, then you should reconsider your whole diet. Reduce meat intake and make smaller meals with more environmentally conscious ingredients(likely more expensive).

Regarding leftovers, plenty of people put restaurant leftovers in a container and take them home to eat later. The people who don't would likely waste food at home too.

Every effort we make today involves producing lots of plastic, burning diesel, and other ways which wreck both human and animal habitats.

This effort to destroy one hornet's nest probably had direct result of bringing someone a little closer towards having asthma and indirectly, through supply chain effects, costing a few dozen insect colonies, animals, and plants their lives somewhere else in the world.

Now that you mention it, it does make me a bit nauseated.

>> I can’t imagine this particular operation is making much of a dent in that overall spend.

When I read the article I thought there are likely other nests nearby. Perhaps they should use some of the forestry budget to do a controlled burn in the area. It'll reduce severity of future fires and get any of any hornets nearby ;-)

Or the fire will cause them to spread out.

It's thought that these came south from Canada. That's a fairly significant distance. They can fly miles in a single day [0] and specimens in Washington have been found 50 miles apart.

If there's evidence of multiple other hives in the area, a controlled burn may get some of them, but the scope of the fire necessary could also be massive.

I'm not saying the option shouldn't be part of our arsenal. And if this is an area prone to wild-fires, then as you said it could assist there as well. However, I'm not sure it's a good option at this time, especially considering the side effects on other local indigenous species.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_giant_hornet

Please omit personal swipes from your HN posts. You sparked a flamewar with that last bit, and your comment would have been just fine without it. The first bit too. The middle of the sandwich was good.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The department may very well need more significant resources to continue this fight, as will surrounding states if Washington isn't effective in fighting this.

I'm not against government spending. I think there are plenty of problems that market forces alone cannot solve. I think the government should provide a solid safety net for its citizens. That is precisely why I lament the resources required for this. They are absolutely necessary, and at the same time it means there are fewer resources to go to other absolutely necessary needs.

I don't see what there is to lament. If this is necessary spending (it seems it is) and there is other necessary spending, then it seems we must pay for both of those things.

I guess we could wish that the hornets never arrived here, but the life of a government is solving thousands of problems like these. If not the hornets, it would be something else. The uplifting moment is that this was a successful containment. Money well-spent :)

Yes, we should do both things, and the hornet issue is essential spending. But resources are limited, and there are plenty of people don't consider safety-net spending essential. That's my lament, that between hornets and people, few will dispute the necessity of dealing with the first, while plenty will the second.

I’mfrom Alberta. My favorite party trick when talking to non-native Albertans is to pull up the “world rat population” map:

https://www.pinterest.ca/pin/657947826782505650/

I have no idea how accurate it is, of course.

That is astounding! For anyone on mobile who wants to avoid the Pinterest garbage, here's a direct link to the image:

https://www.vividmaps.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/rats-10...

Possibly a dumb question, but how do I get that link from the Pinterest one?

By clicking on it.

Thanks for the pointer. A direct link (not going thru pinterest) is:

https://vividmaps.com/global-rat-distribution-map/

Vividmaps.com is a great site.

Yeah I don’t think this map is accurate. This maps states that rats don’t inhabit Iceland, but I’ve personally seen them in Reykjavík.

There's a big difference though: It's well known that the rat population in Reykjavik are transitory tourists, often visiting purely for the spectacular volcano tours in the area.

Antarctica is clearly doing something right, I'd suggest we emulate them. A a well-funded coalition of wildlife experts should be deployed to determine what special conditions have conspired to produce such a resistant ecological niche.

Hemelin, Germany on the other hand only found a temporary solution to the problem when the anonymous Pied Piper visited the area. Perhaps he was unaware that some rats can swim up to a mile and simply drove the local rat population to the surrounding area. Regardless, the example clearly illustrates that music-based solutions to the problem are, at best, temporary.

Is there any evidence of such attempts to neuter Mother Nature actually working? Unless, global trade ceases, can this effort be maintained and successful over the long haul?

I'm not suggesting it's bad or wrong to try, only whether there's evidence that the odds favor doing so.

A quick web search may answer your question

https://html.duckduckgo.com/html?q=invasive%20species%20erad...

There are some success stories, like the European Grapevine Moth in CA [1]. The key seems to be aggressive action when the threat is still in it’s infancy and contained. Given that murder hornets weren’t reported in the US until this year, I’m hopeful. For something like the invasive ice plant already covering the West Coast there seems little hope.

[1] https://entomologytoday.org/2019/03/08/invasive-species-succ...

>For something like the invasive ice plant already covering the West Coast there seems little hope.

Perhaps little hope for widespread eradication, but important areas can be cleaned up.

Agreed! I’ve read about certain coastal areas that have been purged of invasive species. But there’s a constant upkeep cost to keep the invaders from just moving in again a couple years later.

For these murder hornets, if we make a big up front investment in eradicating them now, there’s hope that we can prevent them from establishing themselves and becoming another perpetual battle.

Since these hornets didn't arrive in North America "naturally," removing them isn't "unnatural."

"nauseous"

well that's a little dramatic

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