Killing invasive species is now a competitive sport
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
It's very disappointing that they don't link directly to this video[1], unlike the New York Times which always links directly to their sources and references. It seems like the New York Times is the only mainstream news site that's not absolutely terrified of letting their readers go to another website.
This got me thinking - as drone tech continues to improve and drop in price, I wonder if we could deploy a fleet of cheap autonomous fish-killing submersibles. The failure modes or evolutionary pressures might be problematic, but imagine the lionfish we could kill at volume.
Thanks for the FYI.
Sometimes I find myself wishing there were more comments so I can learn more about the topic, and then realize I haven't read the article.
It didn't go well, and the description wasn't great. It left me thinking they maybe hadn't tried very hard, like didn't iterate the design.
Seems like they're a really easy target, though.
You're not the only one with that idea, automated underwater robots [0] are developed to kill crown-of-thorns starfish that eat corals[1]. They can cause a lot of damage to coral reefs and don't have a lot of predators.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COTSBot
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown-of-thorns_starfish#Ecolo...
I’ve continued free diving but I don’t kill fish anymore for personal reasons. Regardless, I strongly encourage anyone interested to try it. Of all the ways to get a meal, getting in the water and selecting the ideal catch is the best I’ve ever known.
Just like the article describes, there are invasive species up for grabs all over the world. They’re usually fine to eat and worth targeting.
It seems like many marine animals are probably sentient. The idea of causing so much destruction on its own is concerning, but to do that to creatures who experience pain and suffering seems gratuitously and absurdly immoral.
Selective harvest is not only incredibly important for the health of the ocean, it seems like the morally correct solution as well.
Of course not all of us have the time, opportunity, or physical ability to selectively harvest. I think those of us that do should seriously consider it though... People would realize how polluted and depleted so many essential populations are, see the trash inside the ocean, hear the excessive boat traffic, etc. They would also see all of the incredible parts too, though. Nothing makes you realize how beautiful and important the oceans are better than getting inside and being a part of them.
I guess it’s similar to terrestrial hunting. It can give you and immense love and appreciation for the environment you’re depending on.
Just curious, where are you diving? I’m in BC, Canada. I’ve always been a little envious of people in warmer, clearer waters.
I'm on the Tutukaka coast in Northland NZ. It's an amazing coast for diving, I'm slowly snorkeling my way around the coast where we live, one bit at a time. Here's a typical scene from my GoPro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wkLZKiPewc.
That is just off shore so it's pretty quiet for fish, though there are usually a few Blue MaoMao which are good eating and have no limit as they are plentiful. On the Poor Knights marine reserve a few miles offshore, the fish are a lot thicker https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=10155868863065128!
Better writeup here: https://ourworld.unu.edu/en/systems-thinking-and-the-cobra-e...
But deliberate capture in nature and releasing in another ocean can be still a problem. And new groups lobbying against its total eradication would surely be created.
Killing invasive species for sport is in the origin of most invasions of alien species of fish in Europe. Probably the same in America also.
[0] https://teara.govt.nz/en/possums/page-1 [1] https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/2434006/A-hard-road-to-poss...
"A female lionfish lays an average of twenty-seven thousand eggs every two and a half days."
This reproduction looks to be so prolific that cheating isn't required.
The ultimate solution to all of these problems is going to be a gene drive.
Especially for the lionfish, edits that leave only male offspring will wipe out the problem in the Atlantic.
The United States may condemn and punish such action, but the rest of Central and South America justly want their fishing industry back, and the outbreak likely came from the U.S. in the first place.
When a gene drive is sufficiently cheap and accessible, one of them will release it.
First, introduced species tend to, by definition, not breed with the 'original habitat' population, simply because they're separated by sufficient distances.
Second, these types of gene terminator approaches tend to work relatively quickly - several generations, I think, but I've only read about these in insect populations where generations are months not years. Anyway, the fallback approach is to maintain a breeding stock of non-edited, isolated somewhere safe, and if the original habitat specimens do get wiped out accidentally you can re-introduce if appropriate.
This is a good solution for mosquitoes - where you basically do want to wipe out a handful of species for a year or more, as the actual intent is to wipe out malaria (Plasmodium). Once that's done, you have the option to safely reintroduce those original-gene mosquito species.
With malaria, I believe there's a tiny handful, 3 or 4 perhaps, of species of mosquito that carry it, and removing those species from environments where other species of mosquito exist is thought to be low-risk in terms of unintended consequences.
The fallback breeding stock is just another thing we can do to provide assurance that we're not about to accidentally trigger the end of the world.
I don't think that this will be a governmental entity, not directly.
A big part of that is identifying foreign species:
https://www.tv-tokyo.co.jp/ikenomizu/
Edit: link to commercial https://youtu.be/Uh_WKODddx4
We managed to threaten even the vast North Atlantic cod population because they are good food: an enormous native population that seemed near-infinite a hundred years ago. Technology drove the cod handling cost low. Commercial fishing is powerful force.
They are de-poisoned and mostly safe after boiling. You can still impale one finger into a spine or make a cut in your hand if manage the stuff without care, but the poison is inactivated by heat.
But i've thought and talked about this at the level of a genie with 3 wish's, and you know genies love to do un predictable things with your wish.
Im still saying, if i could make a wish snap my fingers, i'd make it so lion fish and/or mosquitos passed a generational mutation that makes them not able reproduce.
We could pay a bounty for killing mosquitos, but it wouldn't be nearly as effective as draining all the standing water, or introducing birth control of some sort.
If I'm right that they're having no effect, then either a CRISPR solution, or introducing a natural predator is the answer (assuming that the predator doesn't introduce its own problems).
> The Pikeminnow Sport Reward Fishery Program ... pays anglers for each Northern Pikeminnow that they catch that is nine inches or larger. Rewards range from $6 to $10 per fish, and special tagged fish are worth $500.
In 2022 the top earner has earner over $50k, and the twentieth highest earner has over $12k. In 2015 and 2016 the top earner broke $100k (over 14,000 fish caught by a single angler appears to be the record).
[1] https://www.pikeminnow.org/background/save-a-salmon-and-make...
Killing It (2022)
The ecological need is easy to understand, but turning it into a "sport" tells you a lot about the caliber of people we're living with. The people engaging in this activity are worse than poachers; at least poachers kill to earn a living.
There is a responsible way to manage a population. Shooting pigs to get a kick ain't it.
Which states would those be?
I can't decide if doing the same thing with pedophiles and CP moderation is terrible or not. My gut reaction is terrible but after hearing about how traumatizing it is for the people who do it maybe it's some kind of fucked up win win. Because I could straight up not do that job, but that job being done prevents real life abuse.
Sausage is yummy, and pigs do ecological damage.
Depends on a lot of things. Relative cruelty of poisoning vs. shooting the pigs; utility of hunters enjoying pig meat; costs & effectiveness of both strategies; etc.
I suspect you'd probably end up doing both.
On the other hand, it's a bit moot, because I don't think we know how to effectively poison pigs without greater harms. Texas was using specialty-warfarin in addition to the hunting efforts. It's arguably crueler than shooting them.
We definitely do trap wild pigs in many jurisdictions, but this is much less effective than shooting them, IMO.
From what I can recall, it's been tried, but had problems. The USDA has cyanide traps that are meant to kill boars (along with wolves and coyotes). In 2017, one of them killed a dog and injured a boy when the dog went after the trap. They're meant to shoot the cyanide into the animals mouth, but there's an area of effect apparently.
Laying out poisoned food tends to kill near everything in the forest.
The problem with most methods that don't involve humans is the inability to discriminate between problem species and normal species. It's hard to build a device that will kill boars but not deer or squirrels or whatever. Boars are big and hard to kill; most things in the forest are far more fragile.
Better have a chest freezer.
I've not actually done this myself, mind you, but I've enjoyed the hand-me-downs from this process.
If you enjoy undoing environmental damage, you're a psychopath!
A lot of people are drawn to it because it involves shooting semi automatics at fleeing pigs from a helicopter, without even gathering the meat.
Killing an animal for meat/hide/oil or as part of a cull is in a different universe from gleefully shooting at them as a form of entertainment.
>Yeah hunting is not in the same moral landscape as some of the Texas wild hog "hunts".
A hunt is a hunt.
>A lot of people are drawn to it because it involves shooting semi automatics at fleeing pigs from a helicopter, without even gathering the meat.
I don't know anyone loaded enough to dedicate a vehicle that can require up to 10 hours maintenance per flight hour to hog hunting on the regular, but I suppose with all the Cali money heading Texas' way that might be a thing. Fewer still who can even pull off a shot reliably/safely from that platform. That semi-automatics are used isn't even controversial. When you're dealing with a pest that isn't guaranteed to go down in one shot, you don't hanstring yourself with unnecessary handicaps. I also assure you, the maintenance and loading just for the firearm for the expedition is no small investment of time or resources.
Most land owners I know have a rifle and a truck, and even then, it's ususlly a dedicated field truck, because you do not want to get stuck out in bumf Texas. We still have areas you can effectively get lost in.
Stop romanticizing hunting (which is exactly what you're doing when kavetching about how people hunt). It's a fact of life, and an important part of ecological stewardship. If you don't handle hogs on your property when they become a problem, they just stick around and become someone else's.
If you'd like to share the address of your property, I'm fairly sure it would be no trouble at all to wrangle up a few specimens and ship em out to you so you can get hands on experience. Might want to warn your local gov and neighbors though. It can rapudly get out of hand...
You're right, but in the wrong direction. TX hog hunts are strictly necessary for the protection of agriculture.
> A lot of people are drawn to it because it involves shooting semi automatics at fleeing pigs from a helicopter
A) almost no one does it this way - too expensive. B) this does sound incredibly fun.
> without even gathering the meat.
This is not true. In many cases the meat is inedible (e.g. if they've eaten some kinds of fertilizer the fat turns blueish), but when it is edible, local farmhands will typically cook it. I've been to several mexican style barbecues with this meat.
> gleefully shooting at them as a form of entertainment
It's because they're incredibly destructive to agriculture (plants and animals). Where are you getting this from?
You don't need to be any of the things you mentioned to understand the problem with killing for entertainment.
Tend a garden.
You too will soon realize it's all a part of doing what comes naturally. Nature, as it turns out, laughs in the face of anything unwilling to speak the language of death.
Death wish, and its management is all a weird part of being alive, and in fact, it's channeling into productive active activity instead of straight up warfare is crucial to peaceful coexistence. It's one of the few things Freud may have actually kind of gotten right, tbqh. Heidigger calls it angst, and it's central to the concept of care, and by extension, to the act of Being.
It takes time to become comfortable with.
I'd also argue for permanent open season on roaming cats.
I haven't helped with hog control in 5+ years, but I'm interested to see how it's changed with the proliferation of NVDs and thermal optics. It would have made our jobs a lot easier, but the equipment was much more expensive back then - no one I knew at the time had better than gen2 technology.
They're considered dangerous to pets (mostly dogs, which probably started the fight) and I wouldn't get too close to them. But deadly encounters are extremely rare; way less than 1/year in a population of 80m humans and 2m pigs.
Edit: Given your username, I’d expect more faith in humanity, not less.
> By any definition humans are an invasive species. Unfortunately killing our fellow humans has been a competitive sport from time immemorial.
Perhaps the point that we, to, are an invasive species is intended to inspire a bit of compassion within us for the hogs, toads, rabbits and whatever else.
I'm not sure how much I agree -- the invasive hogs really are damaging to the ecosystem. Though, manually going out to shoot them seems like a questionable means of controlling the population. And they should be killed as mercifully as other species -- they didn't ask to be invasive, after all.
The importance of language and the dispassionate and accurate employment of accurate definitions is neither misanthropy or related to environmental concerns.
>Edit: Given your username, I’d expect more faith in humanity, not less.
Personally, that the largest and most productive societies on earth dedicate a large portion of their resources to building weapons of mass destruction isn't something that inspires much faith in humanity. Props to Petrov for acting with more sense then most of the rest of humanity.
Beavers build dams, flooding vast areas and it’s natural.
When humans do it, it’s not.
Makes zero sense.
Ours are not as natural in the sense that we no longer rely on our inborn capacities to produce those changes.
Yes, in a way we are like beavers in our engineering. But we are insanely overpowered beavers. The scope of our changes puts us in a class of our own.
So if we call changing the environment by one's own means only 'natural', and massively changing it by compounded means 'artificial', we are not natural, not as beavers. Ours is artificial.
So contrary to what you said, that distinction makes at least some sense.
Modern human civilization is the apex predator that still often feels and acts like it is prey on the African veldt. So you get insanely overpowered beavering while some of us still compare us on the same level as beavers.
What if humans flood the same field?
An even bigger question - if humans didn’t exist, does the earth have any intrinsic value at all?
That viruses didn’t spread and wipe out populations of animals?
Same goes for viruses (I'll give you a pass on that one, it's more accepted now than "virii"): they don't float across oceans in a week, unless they're carried by birds (which most aren't).
For one thing, preserving the purity of a local ecosystem is not the same thing as preserving the purity of your local human race, but it's not entirely different either.
Also, an the world becomes more and more connected, it's a battle doomed to be lost. And those battles, as much as we might wish otherwise, should not be fought.
Also, the idea that new species "destroy" ecosystems is really flawed. What they do is change ecosystems. With a new species, an area finds a new balance after a while, and life goes on.
To me it's as simple as to preserve the diversity of the species. Even without scientific reason, I just like the fact we have more species on the Earth. If I want see carp, I can go to their origin, they have plenty.
Like, life goes on in Africa with or without giraffes. But it would be a tragedy if my grandchild couldn't see one with their own eyes.
Humans are a pretty apex species. Any ecosystem we move into, we have the tools and ability to dominate it with little effort.
Humans also, somewhat recently in our timeline, began to really understand and appreciate the effects we have on ecosystems. Additionally, there is some collective desire to try to preserve the state of these areas, so future generations can also admire + study them.
When we inadvertently (or deliberately) manipulate an ecosystem, and observe the damage it causes, we try to fix it. Maybe it's hubris to think that we can do so w/o damaging it another way, but we like to try. Especially when it could damage something else that directly impacts something we value, like a local economy:
it's not. If a species were to naturally migrate, it takes decades, or even centuries, to cross continents. This gives the destination ecosystem time to adjust.
But because humans travel so fast, and so far, migration of species piggybacking reach previously unreachable ecosystems without letting the natural balance to actually happen - therefore, destroying an ecosystem in the process (or, in your words, the ecosystem is changed so much as to be unrecognizable, since existing species cannot compete at all).
> preserving the purity of a local ecosystem is not the same thing as preserving the purity of your local human race, but it's not entirely different either.
it's definitely different. Purity of human race is social - the genetic differences are barely noticeable. "purity" of an ecosystem is not about race, nor purity, but about biodiversity, and keeping balance. An invasive species that naturally reach a destination would not be considered an invasive species.
You're right that it takes some time for an ecosystem to adapt. But whether a new species is introduced slowly or quickly, the end result will be the same.
I think it's mostly human society that needs the time to adjust. If a cute species disappears in their lifetime, many people will be upset. The next generation won't know what they missed.
The invasive hippos in Colombia (yes, it's real) can easily be exterminated anytime the Colombians want.
But I don't think there is any chance of removing the House Sparrow from America.
It is entirely different. We are all the same species. Race is a social construct, and unlike foreign species introduction, the introduction of a wider genetic or cultural pool does not cause an ecosystem collapse.
> Also, the idea that new species "destroy" ecosystems is really flawed. What they do is change ecosystems. With a new species, an area finds a new balance after a while, and life goes on
This is just optics. You could say nuking a city just “changes” it into a desert wasteland instead of destroying it.
Here is my point: What exactly do you mean by "an ecosystem collapse"?
There are hundreds of invasive species only here in the US. No part of the country is untouched. Have all the US ecosystems collapsed? Have any?