Honestly most of the birds that try eating them are probably young too, the things taste nasty lol
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Speaking from personal experience? ;)
If I could like this comment a million times I would, breath of fresh air
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I think people should be far, far, far more scrupulous about evidence for a species’ destructive potential. We cannot just take their destructiveness for granted and pretend it is gospel. In most cases, the notoriety of an invasive species inordinately, massively, egregiously exceeds the evidence provided for their destructiveness. I think many, if not most, of the people who view SLFs as a threat have merely taken it for granted, as is the fashion with invasives, rather than actually investigating the truth of the claim.
I personally do not ever kill animals, “invasive” or otherwise, if I can help it. I realize it does not have any appreciable impact whatsoever and I prefer to let my fellow animals, with whom I share my “invasiveness”, just live their lives in peace.
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What sort of authorities would you recommend, or how would you recommend finding who to go too? Where does one get started?
in the USA, go to https://www.aphis.usda.gov/aphis/resources/pests-diseases/hungry-pests/the-threat/spotted-lanternfly/spotted-lanternfly, and scroll down to the section with the header “Where’s the Threat and How to Report”.
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Great advice, thank you!
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Why did a journalist decide the conclusion before doing the research? This article is already set up to be absurd. There is plenty of peer-reviewed, published research from experts on the topic. There is already scientific consensus. Don’t just decide to be contrarian, and then go looking for statements from amateurs who will agree with your contrarian decision. This is completely bonkers.
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If you’d like to read a really entertaining and educational account of trying to eradicate an invasive species once it’s been introduced, please read the Chapter “Order Lepidoptera: Gypsy Moths” in the book Broadsides from the Other Orders by Sue Hubbell. It documents the incredible war that was waged in the United States to try to eliminate the invasive “Gypsy” Moth Lymantria dispar, a war that easily caused as much destruction as the moths, cost millions of dollars, and was ultimately pointless.
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My experiences with Phragmites australis have led me to conclude that controlling the spotted lanternfly or any other invasive species is a Sisyphean waste of time/money/resources.
I think the two biggest problems are:
- Nobody even knows how exotic invasion works. Nobody knows what makes a species invasive, or at what point a species becomes invasive.
- For example, broad-leaved cattail (Typha latifolia), which is native to North America, outcompetes cattails native to Eurasia (T. angustifolia) in Eurasia, while the Eurasian species outcompetes T. latifolia in North America.
- If we cry wolf on every non-native creature that breathes, we’ll get eaten alive in the end. Alarmists have created an environment where legitimate concerns become white noise to the listener, which allows our proud tradition of not addressing problems until after they’ve already become disasters to chug along quite happily.
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I agree that the goal of eradicating established invasives is likely unachievable and a waste of resources. Curious to know how you feel about localized control for a specific purpose. Using Phragmites as an example: I research Eastern Black Rails and Phragmites is a huge concern where it invades some of the few remaining non-tidal marshes with populations of the rail. Here, land managers work tirelessly to keep Phragmites under control to protect the habitat. The goal is not eradication, it is simply continued maintenance of habitat for this now federally Threatened subspecies.
The real problem is that the two hybridize creating Hybrid Cattail which outcompetes both straight species.
Early detection and early action are quite possibly our only effective means of fighting invasive as a whole. I’d much rather see resources spent on eradicating introduced species, before we even have a chance to find out if they are invasive, than spent on fruitless attempts to eradicate established invasives. Echoing your sentiment here:
Even more important is resources spent on limiting the introduction of non-native species to begin with.
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Please do! Your best bet for fungus is to keep fresh cadavers in moist conditions. That’ll keep it from getting eaten by maggots, slugs, etc. Then the trick is figuring out which are actually pathogens. These observations are too hard to search for so feel free to mention me.
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As much as all of us (including myself) are naturalists, many of us-- perhaps even most of us-- are amateurs. Even those of us who are experts might not have the qualifications to speak about lanternflies specifically.
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I’d suggest that’s a recipe for letting invasive species get to the point of no longer being controllable. By the time they are abundant enough, and enough time has passed, to measure impacts on the ecosystem, it’s usually too late to eradicate or prevent establishment. Action then is just closing the stable door after the horse has bolted. As @swampster said, we should focus on early detection and early action, prioritising prevention of species which we have reason to suspect may cause problems if they become invasive.
About the Spotted Lanternfly (for which it does seem too late for eradication), I am curious: could it in fact be helpful in controlling the spread and populations of invasive plants such as Tree-of-heaven? In other words, could it have a negative economic effect, but a positive ecological effect?
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Both non-native and protected species are overhyped because they’re catalysts for funding.
Honestly, I just straight up don’t care about the black rail. I view it as closer to the desert pupfish in ecological importance than, say, the northern red oak.
Worrying about obscure species in decline is like running into a burning building to save a stamp collection. In the best case scenario, you wind up with a gaggle of ecologically impotent charismatic species.
I’m more concerned with managing keystone species and systemic processes at the ecosystem level and higher than I am with freaking out when something fills a niche we create or hollow out. Human society has to change first. The time when a preservationist ideal could have had any chance of success at all has long passed. The roof is on fire. If a building has good bones, it can be restored. Who cares if the siding’s a different color after it’s done?
I actually consider that good news for carbon/nutrient cycling in general. Bill Mitsch would probably be proud.
That would require 1/3 of the U.S. population and an Orwellian army of robots. -sips coffee to the sound of the tortured screams of Jared Diamond-
Repeat after me: “Technology will always save us. Technology will always save us…”
I mean, I meant the 1/3 of the population thing as a metaphor, but good luck with the traditional approach of complaining about the public’s scientific illiteracy while begging legislatures for money.
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This thread should be retitled “The case against fighting ecological and evolutionary processes.”
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I do think there are some species that are resource sinks and probably past the point of saving (e.g., possibly the Red Wolf). I believe species like the Black Rail are not yet past that point and serve as a flagship species for larger concerns (e.g., coastal degradation due to overdevelopment and sea level rise). Many other species rely on similar habitat as the Black Rail, so it is not a one-species project.
I don’t really agree with the whole concept of keystone species. No species exists in a vacuum. Managing solely for keystone species leads to a world of generalists with no specialists. There is a much greater number of specialist species (for at least some aspect of their life cycle) than there are generalists.
I’d argue that this is exactly what you’d get when you have a strategy focused only on species humans have labeled “keystone”. Sea otters, white oak, and gray wolves. The American Chestnut had a vast ecological importance, likely beyond that of any single oak species, and while its loss is sorely missed, I don’t think its loss had a greater or longer-lasting impact on biodiversity as a whole compared to any other non-keystone species.
Invasives don’t so much fill a niche as they take it over.
I understand that ceasing all introduced species is impossible. I was not proposing a zero-tolerance or all-or-nothing policy. I do think we can achieve better-than-current practices with a little hard work and resources. Dismissing something as impossible is a poor excuse to not try to make achievable improvements.
I agree preservation is not the answer. This can work on a small scale (e.g., National Parks have a preservationist mission), but does not work on a global scale. I consider myself a conservationist, realizing that it is fruitless to expect to maintain a stasis but that biodiversity is a thing worth protecting and can be done while working with human stakeholders instead of always against them.
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@benjisjones if you want to write about something positive, read through https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/monitoring-gardens-and-spreading-the-message/26094 and help spread the message that conservation starts at home. That includes ecologically responsible choices in the plants we buy and controlling populations of pest species like the lanternfly.
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I would rephrase that to: “In many cases that receive widespread media attention.” Whether it should be “many” or “most”, I’m not sure, but I think you’re thinking of the cases we hear about, which is not remotely a representative sample of invasive species.
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It might be that the journalist already had a lot of material compiled on the anti-lanternfly side, and wanted to check to see if they were missing anything important on the pro-lanternfly side.
I agree that the way it was presented here is worrying, but there are some legitimate reasons why someone might approach it this way…
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