except. To the caterpillar who wants that locally indigenous plant, which was cleared for the new development. Or the plant that needs a particular insect to pollinate it - or a bat, or a mouse. All those biodiversity links the invasive either doesn’t fill, or obstructs. We have invasives which are fire hazards and water guzzlers in Cape Town’s mediterranean climate.
But it is refreshing on iNat to see my invasives cherished at home, (and my - we have to hunt for some of those, which are invasive in foreign!)
I nodded my head off to your entire post. As a new and amateur nature photographer (but a lifelong outdoor enthusiast), these are my daily struggles. I have discovered that my quandaries are as much about defining my own ethical identity as leaving nature intact.
I couldn’t agree more about population vs individual organism. The scarcity of an animal is irrelevant to the intrinsic value of an organism’s life- particularly to that organism.
I am always cognizant- arguably too cognizant- that we have historically underestimated the sentience and intelligence of animals. Rene desCartes experimented surgically and brutally on animals without anesthetic because he believed they couldn’t feel pain or fear. Audubon thought birds couldn’t smell, which seems absolutely banana-pants to me. And the list goes on. I would rather be foolishly guarded about exploiting any living thing than ignore the potential harm I may be doing to a living thing.
My latest quandary is regarding a flash diffuser to improve insect photography. I have come to the conclusion that I disturb flying insects more with my shadow than with light. I have decided to get a diffuser and use it judiciously- but this was a decision months in the making. My personal line to draw is nocturnal creatures. I will not take pictures of nocturnal frogs, for example, by blinding them with strobes of light.
And of course, all of my ruminations are in a sea of hypocrisy. I love eating meat, which isn’t always ethically sourced. I mow my lawn. I do countless things daily which impact the animals around me. For me, my line is that when I am celebrating nature, deliberately attending to and being with the organisms around me- I choose to do as little harm as possible to those I am celebrating.
I think/feel it is not appropriate to do such. It is a truly major upset for the creature involved, and I think that whether it affects population or not, it should not be done.
I have a different background than many here. I was a scientific collector for many years so I killed things. Nowadays I just take photos and feel no need to take organisms out of the wild or disturb them more than needed to get a photo.
As for disturbance while iNatting, we are big blundering mammals so we do disturb nature just by walking into it. But, yeah, you can minimize that by being attentive. Step around that spider web and step over that ant mound. Photo the flower but don’t pick it. Get a shot of the bird then leave it alone. Leave only your tracks.
This is something I think about every time I get off the paved trail and wander the fields where I live. In response to a reply above which stated humans are not a part of nature, I totally disagree with that philosophy. There is only one nature on earth, and we are integral to and with it. Try and formulate a systems diagram of nature without humans. We are already witnessing the effects of humans considering themselves as not being integral with nature.
But what I wanted to say was that this morning as the sun was just rising I had this same concern (as I often have) that just my presence in walking the field was impacting nature. I was following a track which I had left in the tall grass earlier this week and was amazed at how evident my passage then was still this morning. Then, flying along the creek I saw a Green Heron approaching at a fairly high altitude for a Green Heron. When it saw me, still a distance away, it turned sharply and flew around me at a safe distance. This made me recall an article I heard recently on BBC about humans being the most feared animal. Tomorrow will the Heron avoid this route because of my presence today? The BBC article is in this podcast: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001znlt
Plants are in a constant state of competition for space, light, nutrients, even attention by pollinators. Every space occupied by an introduced species isn’t available for native ones. The problem with invasives isn’t so much that they are here, but that wherever an introduced plant is, the natives can’t be. If introduced species merely added to biodiversity, that might be a good thing after a period of adjustment, but that’s not how things are working out.
Of course, most introduced species thrive in the disturbed habitats we humans have created and ending that disturbance would greatly reduce their numbers. However, some introduced species invade undisturbed habitats. For example, in the Pacific Northwest of North America, Slender False Brome (Brachypodium sylvaticum) is most obvious where it forms large populations along roads, but when doing surveys in close-canopy forest I gradually realized that the grasses growing sparsely in the forest were no longer the natives but rather the Brachypodium. In another example, the number of non-natives that invade North American grasslands and shrub steppe, displacing natives is very high. Sometimes management changes can reduce the number of invasives, but some, like Cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum), and Medusahead (Taeniatherum caput-medusae) in shrub steppe, cannot be removed and do maintain their dominance by preventing establishment of native seedlings. In too many cases, it’s not realistic to think that there are refuges where the natives can live without the invasives, unless we humans actively manage the native habitats.
I just don’t think that it’s fine that all meadows be converted into biologically impoverished versions of English meadows and all shrub steppe be converted into their Eurasian equivalents. Habitats and habitat diversity do matter* but the species themselves also matter, contributing as they do to biodiversity and associated resilience to changes.
I live in an area where timber companies take out ads proudly trumpeting their continual work to maintain extensive closed-canopy forests dominated by a single native tree, at the expense of meadows and shrub-dominated habitats and even of more diverse forests. They don’t word it that way, of course; “We plant three trees for every one we cut down!”
But to get back on the original topic, yes, the disturbance we create when we’re out in forests and grasslands, etc., is important and there are trade-offs. Is removing this individual native plant to use in an educational program for kids more important than conserving it here? Is walking over this native grassland to check whether that shrub is the invasive species worth the trampling damage to new growth? I ran into those questions just last week and am somewhat ambivalent about my choices.
They way I look at it is, anyone rolling over the log or unrolling the leaf is doing so because they are interested in what’s there. There are zero people who protect what’s there, who aren’t interested in what’s there. Adults who are interested in what’s there encourage children who are interested in what’s there. Adults protect what’s there because the children are interested in what’s there. The children become adults who are interested in what’s there and protect what’s there for any children who are interested.
my iambic pentameter is off a bit… sorry if it’s hard to follow.
I’d argue, the term “Anthropocene” just describes the extraordinary influence we had on our surroundings. It doesn’t really make any judgement on whether humans are part of nature or not.
Cyanobacteria have had an enormous impact on their environment and the biodiversity at the end of the Archean/ beginning of the Proterozoic (I think it was then?) too by raising oxygen levels, and they were and are still part of nature, aren’t they? Granted, though, the changes they caused happened more gradually and the epoch wasn’t named after them (kinda unfair, if you ask me :P).
I just don’t like the idea, that at some level of technological advancement or manipulation of surroundings, something (especially a species of living thing) stops being “nature” or part of it. Any species changes its surroundings to a certain degree and any line we’d draw between such a change being natural or not would be subjective and arbitrary. (If you were an ant, would you see an anthill as “part of nature”?)
Humans are an unusual species, but the same biological principals that apply to other species still apply to us. We, such as everything else alive, are ultimately a product of evolution, which in turn just boils down to probability, success, and quantity of reproduction. The strategies to achieve those vary from species to species. Part of our strategy is manipulating our environment to a large degree which we are able to do due to the way humans happened to evolve.
That is true, but by itself isn’t a problem, IMO. It would be, if a native species is inherently more ecologically valuable than an invasive one, but I don’t necessarily agree with that either.
Looking at any isolated moment, yes, you have a point, but it will change relatively quickly (speaking in evolutionary time scales). Any introduced plant will create new ecological niches as well as take existing ones away. It takes time, but biodiversity will bounce back as new inter-species connections are formed and speciation events happen due to increased specialisation, but of course the species composition will look different than before.
As I said, I don’t think that invasives are a problem by themselves, and I want to emphasize the last part. I agree that in the current situation they add to the stress we put on our environment. There is too much change going on too quickly. My belief is that what makes invasives problematic at the moment is the number of them and the frequency with which new ones are introduced alongside habitat loss, climate change, etc.
If it weren’t for all these other things, I wouldn’t be surprised if a low to moderate amount of species invasion would have a positive effect on biodiversity in the longer term.
Well yes, I do actually agree with you… in the long, very long, term. But it will certainly take many, many hundreds of years, perhaps many thousands, to recreate ecosystems of the same complexity and therefore resilience. And for any truly invasive plant, how many native species are going to be pushed out in the meantime? Not just plant species, but all those intricately connected other organisms are going to be lost along with them. But this is something that’s been debated more than once in the forum, so I’ll resist the temptation to go further off topic .
Have you ever seen the damage that a bear does to nature and other creatures, just walking through the forest foraging for food?
Have you ever paid attention to the damage to nature and creatures caused by heavy rains and storms?
Have you ever seen the damage caused to nature and other creatures by a wild turkey scratching around for food?
Have you ever seen the damage caused by armadillos, wild hogs, raccoons, coyotes or bobcats digging for food?
All this is way more destructive than unrolling a leaf…Geez…come on folks, step back into reality.
I wanted to write just that here. As it has been stated that the topic has been solved, opined in a separate topic What does the word ‘Nature’ include.
I think that is the point that the poster was looking to make. That the damage caused by a human walking through a habitat and making some small changes (such as unrolling a leaf) is well within the normal range of “damage” caused by processes that everyone would agree are “natural”.
I think it’s pretty clear from this discussion that nobody here actually believes that unrolling a leaf (or similar) actually causes significant damage to a population and/or an ecosystem. And Jason in his original post made it very clear that this was not his concern…
It is precisely the non-natural decision element of the action that disturbs him and many others who have taken part in this discussion, me included.
It is not about the extent of the damage, but about ethical decisions and doubts anyone interacting with nature has to deal with, whether they’re aware of it or not.
Where we draw the line separating “OK” from “not OK” is largely a matter of personal conscience, unless that voluntary “damage” really does start having a significant impact, then the ethics step over into the collective domain.
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