Biodiversity

The Aliens Are Coming

We appear to be incapable of dealing with invasive species while there’s still time.

by George Monbiot: journalist, author, academic and environmental and political activist, United Kingdom

On a dark night last week, a group of animal rights activists in Donegal made their own special contribution to the International Year of Biodiversity. They cut their way into a fur farm and released 5,000 mink. This, within their circles, was considered a clever thing to do. A spokesperson for the Alliance for Animal Rights said “I commend whoever risked their freedom to do this”(1). The Coalition to Abolish the Fur Trade announced that “we fully support what has happened.”(2)

Had these people tipped a tanker load of bleach into the headwaters of the River Finn, they would have done less damage. The effects would be horrible for a while, but the ecosystem could then begin to recover. The mink, by contrast, will remain at large for years, perhaps millennia. Like many introduced species, American mink can slash their way through the ecosystem, as they have no native predators, and their prey species haven’t evolved to avoid them. Is there anything the animal lovers in Donegal could have done which would have harmed more animals?

But there’s a second question raised by this act of preternatural imbecility: what were the mink doing there anyway? In other respects the Irish Republic appears to be a civilised country, in this case it looks barbaric. While the United Kingdom banned fur-farming in 2000(3), Irish governments have resisted prohibition, to protect a tiny but wildly destructive industry. The republic’s five remaining fur farms are the sole source of continuing releases of mink, either through raids or accidents. They are also places of astonishing cruelty, in which intelligent carnivores are confined to cages the size of a few shoeboxes. The Irish government is considering phasing out fur farming in 2012. Until then, its citizens will continue to pay more to eradicate mink than they make from breeding them.

But Ireland is a small player. Two-thirds of the world’s mink farming and 70% of its fox farming takes place in other EU countries(4). Denmark alone produces 40% of the global supply of mink pelts(5). Feral American mink on the Continent are even more damaging than they are here, as they drive out the endangered European mink. The EU’s 6000 fur farms are an affront to the values it proclaims.

This month governments meet at Nagoya, in Japan, to review the Convention on Biological Diversity. It has, so far, been a dismal failure. Perhaps the starkest botch has been their inability or unwillingness to control the spread of invasive species. The stories I am about to tell read like the plot of a gothic novel.

Consider, for example, the walking catfish, which is now colonising China, Thailand and the United States, after escaping from fish farms and ornamental ponds(6). It can move across land at night, reaching water that no other fish species has colonised. It slips into fish farms and quietly works through the stock. It can burrow into the mud when times are hard and lie without food for months, before exploding back into the ecosystem when conditions improve. It eats almost anything that moves.

Its terrestrial equivalent is the cane toad, widely introduced in the tropics to control crop pests. It’s omnivorous and just about indestructible: one specimen was seen happily consuming a lit cigarette butt(7). Nothing which tries to eat it survives: it’s as dangerous to predators as it is to prey. Unlike other amphibians, it can breed in salty water: it’s as if it had waddled out of the pages of Karel Capek’s novel War With the Newts.

The world’s most important seabird colony – Gough Island in the South Atlantic – is now being threatened by an unlikely predator: the common house mouse(8). After escaping from whaling boats 150 years ago, it quickly evolved to triple in size, and switched from herbivory to eating flesh. The seabirds there have no defences against predation, so the mouse simply walks into their nests and starts eating the chicks alive. Among their prey are albatross fledglings, which weigh some 300 times as much as they do. A biologist who has witnessed this carnage observed that “it is like a tabby cat attacking a hippopotamus”(9).

On Christmas Island the yellow crazy ant does something similar: it eats alive any animal it finds in its path. It is also wiping out the rainforest, by farming the scale insects which feed on tree-sap(10). Similar horror stories are unfolding almost everywhere. The species we introduce, unlike the pollution we produce, don’t stop when we do. A single careless act (think of the introduction of the rabbit or the Lantana plant to Australia) can transform the ecology of a continent.

According to a report by the British government, invasive species cost this country several billion pounds a year(11). The global damage they cause, it says, amounts to almost five percent of the world economy(12). A single introduced species – a speargrass called Imperata – keeps two million square kilometres in the tropics out of agricultural production(13), equivalent to the arable area of the United States(14), while ensuring that the native ecosystem can’t regenerate.

In most cases there’s a brief period in which an invasive species can be stopped. So you would expect governments to mobilise as soon as the threat appears. But in many parts of the world the policy appears to consist of staring dumbly at the problem while something can be done, then panicking when it’s too late. When museum weed (Caulerpa taxifolia) escaped into the Meditarranean from the Oceanographic Museum in Monaco, the authorities responded by bickering over whose fault it was. In 1984, when the invasion was first documented, the weed occupied one square metre of seabed. It could have been eradicated in half an hour. Now it has spread across 13,000 hectares and appears to be uncontrollable(15).

Australia, the continent which has been hit hardest by introductions, still seems incapable of regulating the trade in dangerous species. As the Guardian’s new Biodiversity100 campaign shows, 90 potentially invasive plant species are being sold in nurseries there, while 210 species of aquarium fish can be imported without a licence(16). The UK has some good policies at home. It spent £10,000 in 2006, for example, on a strategy (successful so far) for excluding the South American water primrose, whose control now costs France several million euros a year(17). But in its overseas territories – of which Gough island is one – it reacts slowly, if at all(18).

The mink, the walking catfish, the cane toad, the mutant house mouse, these are potent symbols of humanity’s strangely lopsided power. We can sow chaos with a keystroke in an investment bank, with one signal to a Predator drone, a seed dislodged from the sole of a boot, a fish tank emptied into a canal. But when asked to repair the mess we’ve made, we proclaim our impotence. Our challenge this century is to meet our capacity for harm with an equal power for good. We are not, so far, doing very well.

References:

  1. https://www.schnews.org.uk/archive/news7416.php
  2. https://www.indymedia.ie/article/97816
  3. The Fur Farming (Prohibition) Act 2000. https://www.statutelaw.gov.uk/content.aspx?activeTextDocId=1470588
  4. European Fur Breeders’ Association (EFBA), no date again. The Socio-Economic Impact of International Fur Farming. https://www.furcommission.com/resource/Resources/IftfEfba.pdf
  5. https://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aRGZQyOJ8bGQ&refer=europe
  6. https://www.issg.org/database/species/ecology.asp?si=62&fr=1&sts=sss&lang=EN
  7. https://www.issg.org/database/species/ecology.asp?si=113&fr=1&sts=sss&lang=EN
  8. https://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/may/20/wildlife.endangeredspecies
  9. https://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/may/20/wildlife.endangeredspecies
  10. https://www.issg.org/database/species/ecology.asp?si=110&fr=1&sts=sss&lang=EN
  11. DEFRA, 2008. The Invasive Non-Native Species Framework Strategy for Great Britain. Page 3.
  12. DEFRA, 2008. The Invasive Non-Native Species Framework Strategy for Great Britain. Page iii.
  13. https://www.issg.org/database/species/ecology.asp?si=16&fr=1&sts=sss&lang=EN
  14. The CIA World Factbook says that 18% of the total area of the US is arable land. That’s 1.76m km2. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/us.html
  15. https://www.issg.org/database/species/ecology.asp?si=115&fr=1&sts=sss&lang=EN
  16. https://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/oct/04/biodiversity-100-actions-australia
  17. DEFRA, 2008. The Invasive Non-Native Species Framework Strategy for Great Britain. Page 6.
  18. eg https://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/may/20/wildlife.endangeredspecies

3 Comments

  1. If i knew what i could do about invasive species in my area and why i should do it then maybe i would begin to spend part of my week doing something about it.

    I agree arguing about who’s fault or who’s land is daft.

    What i am saying is i need clear instructions FOR MY AREA on what needs doing and why. That’s all.

    I don’t want to detract from invasive species in other parts of the world but i live in Bolton so give me that problem only.

    Good article George, makes me want to do something local.

    Boyd

  2. I’ve read other stuff by George that I’ve appreciated more than this. Being an Australian myself I’ve witnessed first-hand “the continent which has been hit hardest by introductions”. This description is sensationalist to say the least. Everything arrived from somewhere. Originally the Earth’s crust cooled and life invaded the land from out of the oceans. Everywhere on Earth is shaped by introductions. Even things which have evolved in situ would have displaced something else and driven some other species to extinction. Take a look at the fossil record; all those earlier species didn’t just opt-out and go lie down in the mud: other species arrived or emerged that flourished and bred when those earlier ones didn’t.

    This article reads like a very predictable and passe rant about stupid people and horrible uncontrollable predators that are too unreasonably efficient for our sentimentalities.

    The bit about “90 potentially invasive plant species are being sold in nurseries (in Australia)” is just stupid alarmism. What species isn’t potentially invasive in the right context? We’ve got lots of problems over here with native species invading areas outside their natural range. Some Eucalypts only have a natural range of a few square kilometers. Should these be contained? What about goats and horses or cats and dogs? Should these be banned from sale too?

    I also think we need to be careful about confusing ‘actual’ environmental costs with human spending on herbicides and other control measures in relation to invasive species and agriculture. By far the most spending on ‘weed’ and ‘pest’ control in Australia is in relation to agriculture so it seems a long stretch to claim that every time somebody sprays some 2-4D or round-up they’re spending big dollars defending ‘the environment’.

    I’ve a great little bookmark produced by NSW agriculture, with some interesting “weed facts” on it. One of these is that “17% of Australia’s flora now consists of weed species”. This is how much of Australia’s flora our government is committed to destroying, almost one fifth! How much of the present biota of planet Earth is a weed species? Is this the percentage of our total biosphere we intend to waste time trying to eradicate? We’ll be burning a lot of fossil fuel and spraying a lot of toxic chemicals around to do this. Is this a good idea right now?

    If you base your definition of a weed on economically damaging agricultural pests, everything except GM corn might be a weed one day. Elephants are a long-standing agricultural problem in parts of Africa.

    What does it mean when George says “A single introduced species…keeps two million square kilometres in the tropics out of agricultural production…while ensuring that the native ecosystem can’t regenerate.”? In the context of ‘costs to the world economy’, is he lamenting the lost agricultural land or the theoretical native ecosystem? As I say, we oughtn’t to confuse agricultural spending on pest control with environmentalism.

    An interesting case here in Australia is public money spent eradicating willows. Many different species of these have become naturalised throughout Australia. Most (not all) have been notably effective at establishing in agriculturally disturbed riparian areas (some also invade disturbed high-country -where isn’t ‘disturbed’?). Native flora have been unable to re-establish in these sites due to ongoing degrading pressures (stock, stream incision, soil instability). Willows are documented to be holding soils and preventing further erosion, reducing nutrient pollution, providing habitat for native fauna and generally sequestering carbon (growing) where nothing else has been able to get established. Having already deforested these sites once in our history, government agencies are now paying to have them deforested again, using bulldozers, chainsaws and herbicides in waterways, in the name of environmentalism.

    There’s big money for multi-nationals and bureaucracies in battling invasives, it annoys me that there is also often big environmental self-righteousness.

    The reality is that the behaviour of invasive species is a natural response to disturbance. What makes us think nature is powerless to address these kinds of imbalances and we need to break out some early ‘control measures’ to help her out? As if we were in charge!

    “Stand back little lady”.

    These kinds of industrial ecological manipulations have been all the rage in agriculture since WWII but we won’t be able to keep it up for much longer. Why would we want to expand our efforts at control accross the rest of the biosphere too?

    Reality is a little muddier than the above article presents. I know George can do better than this, look a little deeper.

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