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I feel like news reports of invasive species usually end up with the invaders becoming endemic. Nice to see a successful eradication for once!

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Yes, but it also demonstrates how difficult complete eradication of invasive species actually is. In this case, there was only a single location, and eradication still took decades and large amounts of money. Now imagine if there had been colonies at several different locations.

Most invasive species are only noticed when they are much more established and complete eradication is no longer an effective strategy.

And it just takes another crate from a country where they exist to have to start over again...

I visited Flinders Island in South Australia a few months ago. It's fairly isolated but they have a mouse/rat/cat population they are working to eradicate at great expense. Mice supposedly last arrived in the tent bags of visiting campers. Which of course made me wonder if that could happen again quite easily with mice stowed aboard an another visiting boat, etc.

It's actually fascinating to me that any individual with a grudge against England could singlehandedly make termites endemic, spreading them to a few hundred sites with basically 0 chance of being caught, but nobody ever bothers.

(same with zebra mussels, asian carp, etc etc in the US)

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