A weed is swallowing the Sonoran Desert
hcn.org
hcn.org
Personally, I think it's a quite attractive weed. I don't want it in my yard, and I've gotten rid of it a few times now, but I don't mind it. It's just a part of lawn maintenance, and there is a period of time where I enjoy the natural growth before a manicure.
That being said, it has made some abandoned plots look like meadows now, in my opinion. I welcome the change.
This is the issue however. When an invasive plant starts to take over, it can destroy entire ecosystems.
It's just so tremendously prolific. You're not going to simply pull all of it, or glyphosate spray all of it. It's just not happening. You'd need an earth mover.
Unfortunately the series went off the rails and is unfinished after a few decades: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_Against_the_Chtorr
From what I understand, Gerrold had a son with severe learning disabilities and was unable to finish it. Which sucks, but I also understand.
...and reading that wiki link, I see 1 or 2 books are in the works, though no updates since 2017 or so. I'll put this fact in my GRRM bin for now.
That's probably the reason why it got to the US in the first place. Germany now has a massive problem with these "weeds": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impatiens_glandulifera - looks nice in pictures, but it has a hard to describe smell that's very unpleasant. Fortunately it's not blanketing the entire landscape like stinknet in Arizona, but lately where I live it's everywhere in wet, shady clearings in forests, and also outcompeting native species.
But isn’t this the natural process playing out? A plant is evolutionarily fit to survive this desert. It is introduced randomly by an animal. It prospers and colonized the otherwise inhabitable area.
In the process, moisture is retained in soil (sand), nitrogen fixing bacteria enter, and the next most fit species also is able to enter.
This repeats a few thousand times and the desert starts to bloom.
At what point is conservation of the environmental process the better option compared to conservation of the environment in a human powered stasis?
You also have to be much more strict about grazing. The problem with certain parts of the world is that you can sell all the land off to whomever and they can do whatever they want with it. 2M acres of grassland all eaten bare by sheep or cows? Yeah, no problem mate.
i'm confused by this credit to the comment. "Samuel Shaw is an editorial intern for High Country News based in the Colorado Front Range." is this really a job title where someone can just add their own opinions? the strong advice of needing chemicals is not advice i feel comfortable on following from an intern. this comment really took the whole article down in credibility in my opinion (since they seem so open to expressing opinions).
> Armstrong, however, said that Maricopa County will need to resort to herbicides, which may pose their own risks. “I don't believe that we'll be able to remove stinknet just by pulling it. We're going to need some chemical methods as well.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_pest_control
While some forms of bio control require extensive research programs to prove safety, others can be as simple as planting native species that complete with the weed.
Here in New Zealand, gorse is a horrible, also yellow, woody shrub weed that is near impossible to remove with chemicals or by pulling it out (it just grows back). A solution was found simply to plant native trees under the gorse. The gorse ends up sheltering the native tree and once the native grows up it shades the gorse and the gorse dies off.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorse_in_New_Zealand
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_control_of_gorse_in...
A lot of bio control research is done in New Zealand to help pacific islands deal with invasive species. The tropical climates mean that when invasive weeds arrive, they spread like crazy disrupting the fragile ecosystems.
Biological control can go horribly wrong. One of the most notorious examples is the cane toad, which is in plague proportions across northern Australia.
Biological control practised today is vastly different to the old days of "let's just see how it goes" and introduce a large mammals, reptiles or amphibians (see the famous Simpsons episode).
Today it is a long scientific process to ensure the control measure is hyper targeted. Sometimes it works great other times it just doesn't work at all and the agent dies off, but gone of the days of a failure being an ecological disaster.
https://biocontrol.entomology.cornell.edu/success.php
"The tale of the gypsy moth is intriguing on several levels, including its mysterious control by a fungus (Hajek 2007). Originally brought to the US to breed with the native silkworms, the gypsy moth, Lymantria dispar L., escaped through a broken window in Medford, MA in 1868-9 and began defoliating deciduous forests and shade trees in many regions of North America. High populations of this pest are uncommon in areas where it has long been established (Europe, northern Africa and temperate Asia), but outbreaks have occurred where gypsy moth has invaded without its natural enemies. Fungal infected gypsy moths were found in Japan and brought back and released in the Boston area in 1910-11, but apparently didn’t take. By 1997, dozens of other natural enemies were also released but none provided effective control.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, scientists noticed gypsy moth cadavers hanging from trees in the northeastern forests and identified the cause as a fungal infection. This discovery renewed interest in using fungi for control. Molecular studies indicated that the infection was caused by the same species of fungus, Entomophaga maimaiga, as the one collected in Japan in the early 1900’s, but that it was not identical to that fungus or to the same species collected and released in 1985-86. When and where did it come from and how was it spread? The answer seems that it was an accidental introduction from Japan and probably occurred after 1971. Perhaps even more interesting is that fact that it has spread across the contiguous distribution of the gypsy moth in the Northeastern US. This spread is due to aerial dispersal of spores from gypsy moth larvae and perhaps to human activity, as gypsy moths are prone to move long distances on the undersides of vehicles. There is interest in using infected gypsy moth, or the fungus itself, to inoculate the leading edges of newly infested areas and prevent outbreaks of this devastating pest. However, details of the introduction and establishment of US populations of E. maimaiga remain a mystery."
If pointing out that you're either mistaken or deliberately disingenuous is "trolling", then you need to take a bit of a look at yourself.
Some points people are missing is that
1. the Sonoran desert is not a barren ecosystem. It is the most biodiverse desert in the world it does not need to have its soil “fixed” it is doing fine.
2. the actual problem with this plant is how fast it grows. Almost all ecosystems are subject to wildfire at some point and it matters how frequently these wildfires hit. The Sonoran desert is not build for frequent and intense fires and with stinknet growing and dying and building up lots of flammable material the fires are happening much more frequently and are much hotter. This is killing native animals and cactuses that are not adapted to these frequent fires.
The desert is not dead.
The replacement of native species by globe chamomile (don't use st*nknet--it's a slur) is just a conspiracy theory by failing plant hegemons to maintain their own ecological privilege. Future globe chamomile sub-species might be the next Willow or Redwood. Plant diversity is our strength.
And let's be clear. There's no proven relationship between wildfires and globe chamomile. All evidence comes from systemically nativist orgs like the National Park Service and Ivy-League ecology departments. And even if globe chamomile did cause wildfires, that's just their biological role and it enriches the soil and we should applaud it. They capture sunlight where other plants don't. What else is going to build nutrient density? Creosote? It's so NIMBY that it creates dead zones around itself by stealing all the water for itself. It's not globe chamomile's fault that creosote and pinyon can't seed enough to compete. Learn to grow. It's 2023.
Next, you'll be claiming the arrival of eucalyptus in the 19th century in California was an ecological mistake. I've been all around the Bay Area and NorCal and never got hit by an exploding tree. It's a myth and a stereotype. And even if they did, it would purely be because of climactic factors.
Y'all need to adapt. We live in a Global Ecology. Ecologies are biological constructs that change over time. What used to be considered "invasive species" (although we strongly prefer the term "novel trophic worker" to avoid using speciestic and nativist terminology) are now the backbones of rich and diverse biomes in not only California but all over North America. In fact, novel trophic workers and their progeny are on track to be the majority of plant species in North America. What's wrong with novel trophic workers becoming the dominant natives? Are ecological niches treated poorly, or something?
There is a difference between non-native and invasive species.
Non-native species: These are species that have been moved from their native habitats to a new environment, usually as a result of human activities. Non-native species can be any type of organism, including plants, animals, fungi, and bacteria.
Invasive species: These are non-native species that not only survive in their new environments but also reproduce rapidly and spread widely, causing harm to the local ecosystem, economy, or human health. They can out-compete native species for resources, alter habitats, and disrupt ecosystem functions.
Here is a study on Stinknet in the Sonoran Desert. If you read through it I think most would say is qualifies as invasive in this environment https://sdcwma.org/docs/stinknet_desert_plants.pdf
Conservation isn't about keeping the environment in a bubble but rather being stewards promoting the overall health of the ecosystem.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35934578
I suspect we may well see something similar here: stinknet is going gangbusters right now because it's been wet and it doesn't have local enemies yet. The first is guaranteed to change, and the second is very likely to.
I have been involved in Ardisia and Tallow removal efforts here in the US south. When the infestation is this bad, you're not going to solve it with mechanical methods, no matter how hard you try and how many people you have doing it. Chemicals can definitely help, but they often have unexpected detrimental side effects to other native plants and animals (though sometimes they have unexpected beneficial effects on other native plants - I've seen rare prairie natives pop up in Louisiana after Triclopyr killed off overcrowded baccaris under power lines).
I wonder, could we develop a "gene drive" for plants?
Overall, it's about as good as a (Star Trek reference) Cardassian occupation. And invasive species are not intelligent, to set up a decent "New Order" in any sort of reasonable or tolerable time frame.
It may well be that the natural course for stinknet is to dominate all other desert vegetation to such an extent that it forms a monoculture that fails to maintain ground nutrients and creates evolutionary pressure toward symbiosis with native plants. But it could take a hundred thousand years for Arizona stinknet to become a good citizen.
Yes, at the end of the day the Earth doesn’t care and life will go on. But trying to maintain some semblance of a minimally invaded ecosystem is valuable to these folks and I greatly respect their efforts.
You could go lie down and listen to music or something (though I warn you, I can't prove that it will have any effect on a geological timescale).
And it’s actually anti-Darwinian to even refer to “speeding up evolution.” There is no destination here. Things do not necessarily get better, more interesting, more beautiful, and so on. They just change, and they are already changing in ways that don’t seem desirable.
Of course “desirability” itself is subjective as well, in theory. In practice I suspect almost every human would prefer a world that is more biodiverse over one that is less biodiverse, all things being equal. Still a human value, but of course those are all we have when we need to make decisions.
Without that you’re just spitballing.
The plants that the bats rely on in Arizona is already on the protected species list and, coincidentally, in the area discussed in TFA.
I really try to refrain from making comments like this, but this has to be one of the most simplistic, self-deluded arguments I've seen listed on this site:
"Please provide proof of the impact of this plant on the earth 1 Million years from now. What nobody has shown that? Aha I must be right!"
If your rubric for decision making is that no action matters unless you can beforehand determine its impact 1 million years from now, then it's really not valuable for you to comment on anything or participate in any discussion at all.
Whether it’s valuable for you to comment on anything or participate in any discussion at all is something I’ll do you the curtesy of leaving you to decide.
I know nothing about this particular weed and its effects, but I don’t need to in order to know your claims are incorrect.
If you want instead to make the claim “this particular species isn’t invasive and/or doesn’t yield undesirable effects on its environment” then go ahead and do that, but it’s a very different one.
Frankly not sure what you get out of modeling it that way and labeling "preserved mutations per century" as "speeding up," but feel free to do so.
One issue with the map-territory violation here is that it's very easy to assume the gradient descent is optimizing for something we care about and find desirable. You are smuggling in the idea that later in the gradient descent is "better" than earlier in the gradient descent. There is nothing in reality that necessitates this. It is totally possible for human contributions to this process (model it as gradient descent if you want, model it as "speeding up" if you want) to optimize things that are in fact very very bad for everything that humans care about.
The redwoods would have to severely contest that idea.
WTF does that even mean?
Too bad you can’t grow redwoods in the desert I guess?
You're the one bringing the idea of bio-geologic timescales to an issue that is having an impact right now.
Even less because I’m homeless.
There could be an asteroid impact and someone would be jocularly arguing that asteroids are neither good nor bad, and that being sad about it is woke nonsense, and that the asteroid is winning in the marketplace of ideas, or is full of iridium or some other valued metal, and is therefore a net boon to human populations in several million years (if any) who could, after all, make cool swords out of its ore.
The absolute dissociation from anything like a tender, ecologically connected mindset is laughable until you remember that the people speaking are all mostly making six figures and are, for better or worse, our generation's elite.
This plant is choking out whole ecosystems. Yes, there are (mathematical!) measures of genetic diversity; they are trending down; this is bad because it destabilizes the food web.
Remember food? You like food, right? This is bad for the food.
Mathematical models of natural behaviors are, without exception, time-local. The net benefit on any timescales that actually matter have yet to be seen.
> Remember food? You like food, right? This is bad for the food.
Maybe I’ll starve. Maybe all of humanity will starve. Only one thing is certain: something else will come along to fill our niche.
Wise human. I made the same decision.
HN Comments section is endlessly frustrating, but is also, as my meditation coach always used to say, the perfect teacher. Sometimes an argument is won, but the interlocutor fails to notice. In these cases, no matter how frustrating, the argument is still won. While tempting, nothing is gained by explaining to them the interlocutor that they've lost; the not-noticing is itself the unfakeable signal of the fact.
This orange hellsite is a masterclass in discourse and rhetoric, and knowing when to rest your case turns out to be a huge tranche of these arts.
They say it’s damaging because it promotes wildfires which kill off the other plants.
Of course it’s a moral judgment because Nature has no moral framework. You may be fine in letting “native” species go extinct but others obviously don’t share your opinion and go out of the way to prevent it.
Live and let live, I say.
Since you obviously don’t understand how these plants have adapted themselves and the role of wildfires to western living I’d suggest, maybe, doing a little research on the subject.
I’m also 100% certain the goal isn’t to actually combust the trees in prescribed burns.
> I’m also 100% certain the goal isn’t to actually combust the trees in prescribed burns.
I’m glad you stated it so plainly, as I can be equally certain you’re dead wrong.
There are about 4000ft of difference here. The article shows Carefree AZ as an example of infestation, which is at 2400ft. Junipers grow at 6000ft.
I can't believe you're really trying to make the argument that this plant is great because it will burn saguaros or barrel cactuses and we burn juniper on purpose so that must be good for saguaros and barrel cactuses. Don't get defensive. I'm not upset at you. Just think about this argument. It's not a logical argument.
You're saying that if X is good for Y and B causes X' for Z, then B is good. But you have not established that X' is good for Z, and you haven't established that B causes X for Y.
So if this plant doesn't cause fires for Junipers, and if fires aren't good for desert plants, then how the hell are you arguing this plant is good because it causes fires for desert plants?
Don't take my word for it. Ask ChatGPT if this makes any damned sense. Maybe the matrix can convince you that this is an illogical argument.
If some native are “bad”, perhaps some introduced are “good”. Or, better yet, perhaps we can stop trying to play God all the damn time and just let things play out via the mechanisms of Natural Selection, which as far as I’m concerned have done a pretty darned good job of developing biodiversity so far.
The thing is though, this is not likely what will happen. It will temporarily crowd out existing vegetation, which will create the conditions for new species to arise. By bringing more carbon into the soil, it will increasing fertility and with that, new forms of life can take place and in turn crowd out the pioneering 'weed', increasing rather than diminishing biodiversity.
Certainly some species will be lost. This is called succession. But others will take their place. I'm not sure if Arizona will have the climatic conditions to move far beyond a desert, but that is what is happening and what we would be preventing.
This weed may suck and maybe we want to keep it out of the desert for various reasons... but it shouldn't be dressed up as some kind of nature-preserving virtue. It's just bio-engineering to keep the ecosystem how we want it.
Otherwise you’re just legitimately agreeing, but snarkily (and weakly).
If you can’t see the difference between allowing a plant to naturally spread and mass murder, I pray for those around you.
Alright that was pretty funny.
For the rest of it, if all you’re going to do is be mad about making the same (unsupported) “the only correct action is that which minimizes dEnvironment/dt” (aka “native=good, introduced=bad”) claim as everyone else, why bother commenting at all?
For example, you quote non-nativeness as a self-evident negative property of the plant. But this is highly debatable. It is not clear at all what nativeness means in the plant world (really) or if it really is undesirable. There are some common ideas around being 'not beneficial to biodiversity' for example, but it turns out plants are relatively quick to adapt and gain relationships.
Dismissing these perspectives as non-sequitur and not worth exploring isn't really contributing to an insightful discussion. I'm not saying weeds are good or something like that, I just want to convince you this actually is worth noting and exploring.
It's kind of disgusting.
And life has always spread into new areas and become invasive. We did so migrating out of Africa. So does an ant colony floating on a log to an island that didn't have ants before. Life colonized the oceans, then it colonized the lands, and it colonizes new islands that popup, and populations shift around as the climate changes and new migration routes become available. The Sahara was a savanna thousands of years ago.
Next you'll be telling me we can just keep drilling for oil because humans are animals too.
That’s two very loaded terms to apply to an organism which has done nothing more than find a niche in which it excels. Do you have any justification at all to support the slander, aside from the juvenile mantra “native=good; introduced=bad”?
(keep in mind you’re a member of the most disruptive introduced species of all time)
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/22716462
To quote a bit of my own review of the book
"The New Wild (2016) by Fred Pearce is a fascinating different perspective on introduced species and their role in ecosystems. Fred Pearce is an environmental writer who writes for New Scientist.
Pearce puts forward the idea that landscapes that are truly untouched by man are very rare and possibly don’t even exist. He puts forward many, many examples of species that are regarded as native that have been brought in. He also points out that naturally with a changing climate species have been moving forever.
The book recounts how a new volcanic island was rapidly colonised by species from elsewhere. He also writes about Ascension Island in the South Atlantic that had hardly any vegetation but that visitors turned into a rich ecosystem. But it is far from an untouched one."
Species have been moving around a lot, dynamically, for a long time. The idea that some species are 'invasive' and others are native is just picking a snapshot in time.
What's your point?
Invasive plants are still invasive. It's not always a problem but if they're getting labelled invasive it's usually because they're having a negative impact on the existing ecosystem or would if left unchecked.
Negative is relative to our human needs of the status quo I guess but again I don't really see that as an issue what other frame of reference would we be discussing?
Name a plant that wasn’t at some point “invasive”. You can’t. We call plants invasive when we see their spread, and native otherwise. But whether a human observed a particular organism spreading matters precisely not at all.
Native plants is a term used to describe plants that were present before humans got involved.
It's a human centric way to view the world but I guess it's better than us trying to dick around making everything human agnostic considering we're all human and share a bunch of human context with each other.
Truth is, plants move around the world all the time even without the help of humans, and are relatively quick to adapt. Invasive species exploit a niche in the ecosystem that hasn't been filled yet, and are extremely useful in building up the system. Eventually the system will find a new balance, except when humans keep disturbing it.
Sometimes I think that 'invasive weeds threaten native plants' is the ecological equivalent of 'foreigners taking our jobs'. Preservation turning into botanical racism.
- improvement of barren soil with organic matter
- soil coverage and microclimate regulation
- stabilization and erosion prevention
- facilitation of other plant species' establishment
One could even speculate that this infestation resembles a form of ecological succession.
Yes it's startling how fast this chamomile spreads, and we ought to preserve the native brittlebrush. But it's worth considering the effects of 50 years of ground cover, 50 years of pollinators and their predators, 50 years of accumulated organic detritus, 50 years of improved rainwater retention, 50 years of migratory birds bringing seeds in their droppings to a rejuvenated soil substrate. Could any of these things improve local ecology?
I'd imagine that 50 years and thousands of square miles with a radically different emissivity coefficient could even altar weather patterns and change annual rainfall totals. Some of these effects would be straightforward to model. Might we see water table restoration leading to year-round springs instead of annual floods? Could we accelerate any of these effects?
But these little yellow ball things are pretty obnoxious. They're easy to identify and pull early though. They're pretty so people are defending them, but I'd rather have native flowers for the native butterflies, bees and humming birds.
Of the approximately 5,000 different species of bees in the United States, around 1,300 live in Arizona, meaning Arizona contains the most diversity of bees in the country, and perhaps the world.
People in these comments think sahara when they think desert. Truth is Arizona is more diverse than most states with their same 5 trees everyone else has and their stupid grass everyone else has.
As for this plant doing anything good, I appreciate your optimism, but I don't think it lives through the summer so it's just a wham bam spread then catch on fire disaster. If we had more rain maybe it would be not so bad. But when it dries out so much and then this is laying around waiting to burn, it's bad news.
It seems that you couldn't do a better job burning the desert down if you wanted to. This literally puts tinder all over the place. You can't rival that even with blowtorches and napalm. You could firebomb the desert and in the absence of this stuff, those fires would burn out in between sections of growth. But with this stuff, one cigarette or lightning strike can take out hundreds of acres.
StinxNet