The U.S. government is begging you to destroy moss balls
atlasobscura.com
atlasobscura.com
Invasive species are all over the place here in Michigan, too. We've got purple loosestrife, Eurasian milfoil, zebra and quagga mussels, and others at an ever-growing subset of our lakes. Many of these are isolated glacial kettle lakes, swamp- or spring-fed, with fast-flowing outlet streams that keep invasive species downstream until humans introduce them.
The problem with these aquatic hitch-hikers is that it only takes one fool to purge his boat live well or dump an unwanted aquarium fish 'humanely' into the lake to ruin it for everyone. I can be super careful, purging the freshwater cooling system of my boat motor between lakes, but it's a battle you only have to loose once; I don't know of any lake that's been successful in removing zebra mussels after they've established themselves.
As a child, one of five lakes we visited regularly had zebra mussels coating every rock. Now four of those five have succumbed. I know it wasn't me in recent years - I powerwash the boat exterior and purge the freshwater cooling system every time - but a lot of people here don't believe that humans can have a significant detrimental effect on the environment, so I fear all my efforts are for naught.
Granted, the commercial value / usage of some of these invasive species is probably low to 0. And even commercial ventures probably would care to keep the business going ...
And even places that have had open hunting for feral pigs still have problems with them.
I just wonder sometimes... we're good at wiping stuff out sometimes, wish we could harness it for good.
However I think these sorts of programs are tricky because if you make the incentives TOO good you can end up with really bad side effects. For example the (apocryphal?) story about how India created a cobra bounty to reduce the wild population, and people eventually realized it was easier and still profitable to just breed cobras at home. When the government realized this, they stopped the program. With no more incentive to raise the cobras, the breeders let them go, increasing the overall population.
Though the hard details of this story are hard to find.
People largely enjoy hunting enough that they don't need an economic incentive to do so. Pigs are pretty tasty too.
Land owners don't even need a license to shoot them.
However, that hasn't wiped them out.
There’s just so many factors, I never was one to think extinction was necessarily a bad thing for example, but some view it as a huge loss or even as some kind of evil.
I’m sure there’s plenty of species that have been phased out and new ones that adapted into being all throughout history, but we look at it through this simplistic human view and say “we must absolutely do this to preserve or do this to destroy because of XYZ reasons” and given our track record over the past thousand years when it comes to science I have to assume there’s a high chance that we are very wrong in our assumptions.
"...scientists agree that today’s extinction rate is hundreds, or even thousands, of times higher than the natural baseline rate. Judging from the fossil record, the baseline extinction rate is about one species per every one million species per year." [0]
Also, there is also the fact that many species could be directly beneficial to us. Even if we didn't care about "nature" most would care about cures for various diseases and advancements in technology we could get from their study.
0: https://naturalhistory.si.edu/education/teaching-resources/p...
In this specific case, mitigating the spread of zebra mussels through prevention has a clear and explicit benefit, in preserving natural north american ecosystems. The collapse of Lake Michigan's fisheries is a case in point.
[1] https://www.greatlakesnow.org/2020/02/zebra-mussels-impact-g...
Yeah, I know, but hypothetically speaking... what if we could?
Zebra muscles are prolific, and anything that can prey upon them is well rewarded. Like the Lake Erie White Fish.
https://uofmprojectzebramussels.weebly.com/natural-predators...
They are vicious.
Also they are tuff. They have about 1” of skull. They also have platted shoulders. This means that many handgun calibers do little to them. Well placed shots in the eye or ear will take them about. Otherwise you need a high powered round like a .454 or .3030.
This means most creatures can’t take them on. We’ve also removed some that could like wolves.
They reproduce rapidly. Even with wolves, their numbers grow because most alpha predators don’t want to fuck around with them for fun, only for food. Once the pack is satiated, the piggies move on.
Boar are from Spain. They would let the pigs go while exploring. Come back a year later and you have a stocked larder. Hunt pig to get meat back on the menu.
Principal Skinner: Well, I was wrong. The lizards are a godsend.
Lisa: But isn't that a bit short-sighted? What happens when we're overrun by lizards?
Skinner: No problem. We simply release wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. They'll wipe out the lizards.
Lisa: But aren't the snakes even worse?
Skinner: Yes, but we're prepared for that. We've lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat.
Lisa: But then we're stuck with gorillas!
Skinner: No, that's the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.
In 1990, the zebra mussels showed up and quickly covered the lake bottom, taking so much nutrient, that the alewife and then salmon populations were in duress.
That makes 3 invasive species, one intentionally introduced, all creating ecological imbalance. It also illustrates how little we can foresee the unintended consequences of attempting to 'sculpt' the systems.
This is a great video showing how precipitously balanced ecosystems really are. The re-introduction of the wolf to Yellowstone park ultimately led to a greater diversity of birds and fish, for example[1].
[0] https://midwestoutdoors.com/fishing/lake-michigans-chinook-s...