Kudzu, the vine that never ate the south (2015)

I grew up in Oxford, MS. circa 1980. Kudzu didn’t blanket the roadside landscape at that time. It does now. Every time I go back, it is the blanket over everything. I love the flowery language of the article (takes me back a bit), but it really has overtaken the landscape. If you grew up there, you know.

Here's some Kudzu that persisted for about 15 years until they recently widened the road. It killed a bunch of trees:

https://www.google.com/maps/@34.0630131,-84.6891383,3a,75y,3...

This stuff is all over Georgia.

Kudzu does well at forest edges, so you tend to see it by roads - it's not successful in the interior where seedlings don't get enough light.

We had a lot of it in Maryland.

I moved to New York, about 30 years ago, and stopped seeing it.

Until a couple of years ago. A house in our neighborhood had a backyard covered in it. Not sure if it was deliberately planted.

I reported it to the DEC, and it seems to be gone, now.

Pines, telephone poles, tractors, abandoned cars. There was a hill in Pinson, AL covered with the stuff.

That was about a decade ago, wasn't it?

It was crazy. If you walked outside, you'd have two or three of them crawling on you by the time you walked back in. They'd find their way into your house, your car - you'd breathe them in if you weren't careful.

I still don't understand what happened. They were a brand new / invasive species, but their initial surge was biblical in proportions - a "swarms of locust"-like plague. In the years that followed, the population dropped to the point you would only see them if you looked.

Somehow an equilibrium was reached. I'm not exactly sure why the first year was so severe.

The only similar event I can recall were the swarms of Japanese beetles (false June Bugs) in the 90's. Those were so bad that if you shook any standing tree, a thousand of them would drop on your head. But that only happened every seven years or so.

Perhaps they're all periodic, like cicadas?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periodical_cicadas

I don't think it's a photo.

I believe this is referring to the sound of these words out of the mouth of a southerner. For example, have a southerner attempt to talk about kudzu to a group in Japan and they’ll have no idea what he is saying (I know this from first hand experience). Same with these other words—the vowels change and slide and are inscrutable (hard to understand) to those whom the words are native.

Try telling people that Kookaburras are an introduced species gone feral and responsible for killing off large numbers of unique native birds, reptiles and insects.

[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-20/kookaburra-cull-quest...

. . . and you wonder why we close our borders to easties .. :-)

Native species are part of the ecosystem. All coevolved in the same place for ten thousands of years at least, maybe millions, eventually creating a structure where each piece is connected with the other and fine tuned to produce the maximum value and extract the most products from our machine.

"Non native species" is not the same term as "invasive". Lets imagine that the letter H in your black keyboard falls off. If you replace it by a blue key from other keyboard you end basically with a functional keyboard. Sometimes non native species fill a empty spot and restore a lost system functionality without affecting the other species. Sometimes they even boost the whole machine. A good example would be a native tree from the forests of Kazakhstan that is everywhere, the domestic apple tree.

Invasive species would be like replacing all the keys in your keyboard with the letter H. They turn the machine basically useless. Instead to work with the ecosystem, they destroy it, eliminate most species, and replace it by a much cheaper version. A worse system that is more simple, less stable, and has barely the minimum functionality for us to survive

I find it is generally used to describe things that are getting out of hand. Often invasive species thrive because there's no natural predation or check and balance for some reason.

Most of the species in my garden are non-native (another term that is often used for less virulent invasives), but they don't colonize the native landscape. The term "invasive" is sometimes used for plants that could otherwise be fine, but will get out of hand in some cases. Bamboo, for instance.

Source: none, but I used to take care of shrubbery for one of my first jobs and I learned a lot about invasives. I hated Brazilian pepper trees the most ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schinus_terebinthifolia ), mainly because they're quite difficult to remove.

To be considered an invasive species requires that the species is introduced to an area, become overpopulated and harm the ecosystem.

Which honestly describes humans pretty much everywhere…

Yes. Certainly the First Nations have generally agreed on this.

You know it’s not really a well defined concept. A friend recently pointed out that whitetail deer can be considered invasive in most of North America. While the Eastern woodlands are certainly their original habit, we have eliminated the wolves that would predate upon them. In the absence of predators their populations have exploded - sometimes causing serious ecological issues in the exact same way we see with invasive species which lack predators to keep them in check.