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Killing invasive species is now a competitive sport
- bergenty 4y agoThese fish just sit there. What would be really effective is some sort of vacuum hose that cycles through a backpack. You could probably pick up hundreds in a hour.
- HereIGoAgain 4y agoCool
- cjbgkagh 4y agoIsn’t that why many invasive species were introduced in the first place?
- zeristor 4y agoApart from humans.
- TrueGeek 4y agoUnfortunately our records don’t go back far enough to say for sure.
- bitxbitxbitcoin 4y agoI think by sheer number, ornamental plants outnumbers species brought in for hunting/food.
- galangalalgol 4y agoCats and honeybees should be on the list if we are being technical. If we killed all the honey bees, many of the invasive plants they pollinate would disappear as well. As for the cats? You first... No man in Ulthar may harm a cat.
- worthless-trash 4y agoIts already a thing. I hunted feral cats in central Queensland along with rabbits and foxes.
- galangalalgol 4y agoI've heard bobcat and mountain lion taste amazing, any info on domestic? I have a deal with my pets, they eat rats, and I don't eat them. They have been doing there part so... Also, they keep my feet warm.
- worthless-trash 4y agoCan't say I've eaten them, but I have turned in some cat at a pet-meat butcher, they said that not all animals like to eat cat meat.
- shzusnwxbwj 4y ago
- strken 4y agoFeral cats are a huge menace, at least in Australia. They go through endangered native wildlife like a hot knife through butter. It can be confronting to people because cats are pets, but they're carnivorous little killing machines, and shooting a breeding pair might save thousands of birds and small mammals.
- mitchbob 4y agoArchived: https://archive.ph/porjz https://archive.ph/porjz
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- J3yjg52 4y agoyou haven’t had fun on this planet until you've gone hunting for invasive hogs in florida or texas. stars, night observation devices, suppressed semiautomatic rifles. regardless of your stance on guns or killing things almost as smart as humans, you should give this fun and useful activity a try sometime. you’ll learn some skills and make solid friends along the way.
- propagandist 4y agoIt sounds like a great way to earn the company of fellow psychopaths. The ecological need is easy to understand, but turning it into a "sport" tells you a lot about the caliber of people we're living with. The people engaging in this activity are worse than poachers; at least poachers kill to earn a living.
- causality0 4y agoWorse how? Because they're enjoying something that needs to be done? These hogs would be more than happy to kill and eat you if they could. They regularly break into back yards and kill pets. If an animal is happy to pop slats off a fence and disembowel my cousin's dog I'm happy to put a bullet in it.
- propagandist 4y agoYou're free do the research into what the Texas model is actually achieving. States with more amenable conditions for pigs don't have the problem that Texas has. There is a responsible way to manage a population. Shooting pigs to get a kick ain't it.
- c_o_n_v_e_x 4y ago>States with more amenable conditions for pigs don't have the problem that Texas has. Which states would those be?
- Forgeties79 4y agoIt’s also deeply concerning how he didn’t make one mention of how dangerous wild boars can be. If you don’t take it down it is 100% going to try and kill you. And they don’t go down that easy.
- dddddddd111 4y ago
- exhilaration 4y agoFogg spears two hundred creatures, in two trips, before returning to his boat... (Fogg has posted his video on YouTube, and it has been watched more than a million times.) It's very disappointing that they don't link directly to this video[1], unlike the New York Times which always links directly to their sources and references. It seems like the New York Times is the only mainstream news site that's not absolutely terrified of letting their readers go to another website. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnAbtkMdCoI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnAbtkMdCoI
- c54 4y agoYou said NYT twice, did you mean New Yorker for one?
- unstatedAnswers 4y agoNo, they’re saying NYT links to sources and other newspapers do not.
- ryan93 4y agoNew Yorker rarely has good pictures or videos.
- echelon 4y agoThat's incredible, and honestly looks quite fun. The fact that they're venomous might keep me from trying, though. This got me thinking - as drone tech continues to improve and drop in price, I wonder if we could deploy a fleet of cheap autonomous fish-killing submersibles. The failure modes or evolutionary pressures might be problematic, but imagine the lionfish we could kill at volume.
- yawnxyz 4y agoThis makes me immediately think about the Cobra effect anecdote (or fable?). Basically, the Indian gov't tried to control the snake population by offering a bounty, and people started breeding snakes and killing them for bounty money. Better writeup here: https://ourworld.unu.edu/en/systems-thinking-and-the-cobra-effect https://ourworld.unu.edu/en/systems-thinking-and-the-cobra-e...
- Turing_Machine 4y agoSeattle once had a similar (though likely far less dangerous) program, I believe. They paid a bounty on rats, and, yep, kids soon started breeding rats in their back yards.
- GauntletWizard 4y agoI think the key here is keeping it at hobby levels of funding: a few thousand dollars worth of prizes at sporting events is a motivator for amateurs, a few hundred thousand would bring out professionals.
- bell-cot 4y agoAnd if the d*mn things are sometimes "bag 200 in a single dive" common in the wild, the cost/benefit ratio for breeding them may not work out regardless.
- t6jvcereio 4y agoYeah, people are gonna start breeding lionfish and sneaking them into their competitions /s
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- pvaldes 4y agoMhhhh... probably not. Is "impossible" (for common people) to reproduce it in captivity and they are very expensive to keep and bread in aquariums. Pelagic larvae would not survive. No bounty would pay for their feeding and energy bills. This is why we can't breed lobsters in captivity. But deliberate capture in nature and releasing in another ocean can be still a problem. And new groups lobbying against its total eradication would surely be created. Killing invasive species for sport is in the origin of most invasions of alien species of fish in Europe. Probably the same in America also.
- StanislavPetrov 4y agoBy any definition humans are an invasive species. Unfortunately killing our fellow humans has been a competitive sport from time immemorial.
- enchiridion 4y agoMisanthropy disguised as concern for the environment does not contribute to the discussion. Edit: Given your username, I’d expect more faith in humanity, not less.
- bee_rider 4y agoI don't think we need to read this as misanthropy, necessarily. > By any definition humans are an invasive species. Unfortunately killing our fellow humans has been a competitive sport from time immemorial. Perhaps the point that we, to, are an invasive species is intended to inspire a bit of compassion within us for the hogs, toads, rabbits and whatever else. I'm not sure how much I agree -- the invasive hogs really are damaging to the ecosystem. Though, manually going out to shoot them seems like a questionable means of controlling the population. And they should be killed as mercifully as other species -- they didn't ask to be invasive, after all.
- StanislavPetrov 4y ago>Misanthropy disguised as concern for the environment does not contribute to the discussion. The importance of language and the dispassionate and accurate employment of accurate definitions is neither misanthropy or related to environmental concerns. >Edit: Given your username, I’d expect more faith in humanity, not less. Personally, that the largest and most productive societies on earth dedicate a large portion of their resources to building weapons of mass destruction isn't something that inspires much faith in humanity. Props to Petrov for acting with more sense then most of the rest of humanity.
- refurb 4y agoHumans are as natural as any animal on this planet. Beavers build dams, flooding vast areas and it’s natural. When humans do it, it’s not. Makes zero sense.
- w-ll 4y agoCan we do similar like we did wit regard to mosquitos where we capture a bunch, crisper the dna so offspring is infertile, and introduce a big batch back in to spread the gene?
- TheSpiceIsLife 4y agoYes https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01186-6 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01186-6
- bradfitz 4y agoI think the parent comment was familiar with that and was asking whether we could also do the same for these fish.
- TheSpiceIsLife 4y agoObvious now, not real sure how I misunderstood.
- rib3ye 4y agoThis sounds like the origin story for Child of Men.
- w-ll 4y agoSuch a great movie. But i've thought and talked about this at the level of a genie with 3 wish's, and you know genies love to do un predictable things with your wish. Im still saying, if i could make a wish snap my fingers, i'd make it so lion fish and/or mosquitos passed a generational mutation that makes them not able reproduce.
- bart_spoon 4y agoI've always wondered how this is supposed to work. It seems like it would cause a drop in the population for the 2nd generation, but then the population would bounce back afterwards because the gene edited mosquitos would have died off. Is the plan to continuously release them into the wild to persist the number of offspring being born that can't produce offspring?
- minikomi 4y agoThere's a popular tv show in japan where they pick a small lake / water inlet and celebrities work on cleaning it up. A big part of that is identifying foreign species: https://www.tv-tokyo.co.jp/ikenomizu/ https://www.tv-tokyo.co.jp/ikenomizu/ Edit: link to commercial https://youtu.be/Uh_WKODddx4 https://youtu.be/Uh_WKODddx4
- trash3 4y ago
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- BurningFrog 4y agoThe whole concept of "invasive species" makes me a bit uncomfortable. For one thing, preserving the purity of a local ecosystem is not the same thing as preserving the purity of your local human race, but it's not entirely different either. Also, an the world becomes more and more connected, it's a battle doomed to be lost. And those battles, as much as we might wish otherwise, should not be fought. Also, the idea that new species "destroy" ecosystems is really flawed. What they do is change ecosystems. With a new species, an area finds a new balance after a while, and life goes on.
- thrdbndndn 4y agoMind to give some rationales? To me it's as simple as to preserve the diversity of the species. Even without scientific reason, I just like the fact we have more species on the Earth. If I want see carp, I can go to their origin, they have plenty. Like, life goes on in Africa with or without giraffes. But it would be a tragedy if my grandchild couldn't see one with their own eyes.
- jasonjayr 4y agoI think it's more complicated than that. Humans are a pretty apex species. Any ecosystem we move into, we have the tools and ability to dominate it with little effort. Humans also, somewhat recently in our timeline, began to really understand and appreciate the effects we have on ecosystems. Additionally, there is some collective desire to try to preserve the state of these areas, so future generations can also admire + study them. When we inadvertently (or deliberately) manipulate an ecosystem, and observe the damage it causes, we try to fix it. Maybe it's hubris to think that we can do so w/o damaging it another way, but we like to try. Especially when it could damage something else that directly impacts something we value, like a local economy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3oLeSPINOk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3oLeSPINOk
- chii 4y ago> the idea that new species "destroy" ecosystems is really flawed. it's not. If a species were to naturally migrate, it takes decades, or even centuries, to cross continents. This gives the destination ecosystem time to adjust. But because humans travel so fast, and so far, migration of species piggybacking reach previously unreachable ecosystems without letting the natural balance to actually happen - therefore, destroying an ecosystem in the process (or, in your words, the ecosystem is changed so much as to be unrecognizable, since existing species cannot compete at all). > preserving the purity of a local ecosystem is not the same thing as preserving the purity of your local human race, but it's not entirely different either. it's definitely different. Purity of human race is social - the genetic differences are barely noticeable. "purity" of an ecosystem is not about race, nor purity, but about biodiversity, and keeping balance. An invasive species that naturally reach a destination would not be considered an invasive species.
- Cupertino95014 4y agoThe question is: do all these sport "hunters" make any difference at all in the lionfish population? My guess is No. We could pay a bounty for killing mosquitos, but it wouldn't be nearly as effective as draining all the standing water, or introducing birth control of some sort. If I'm right that they're having no effect, then either a CRISPR solution, or introducing a natural predator is the answer (assuming that the predator doesn't introduce its own problems).
- RappingBoomer 4y agothere is a youtube channel (or several) dedicated to killing iguanas in south florida...it's basically a sporting channel, justified by the fact that these lizards are invasive in florida...here is one such channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheIguanaHunter/videos https://www.youtube.com/c/TheIguanaHunter/videos
- santimoller66 4y ago[dead]
- hardwaregeek 4y agoI wonder if you could make a restaurant out of the various invasive species out there. Could be quite fun and tasty.
- robotresearcher 4y agoThe article mentions eating lionfish, but it doesn't do this idea justice. They are seriously good eating. This unwelcome, invasive species is among the best fish I ever had simply grilled. You have to be careful to cut off the venomous spines, preferably before they get on the boat, which makes the handling costs high. But they are delicious. We managed to threaten even the vast North Atlantic cod population because they are good food: an enormous native population that seemed near-infinite a hundred years ago. Technology drove the cod handling cost low. Commercial fishing is powerful force.
- pvaldes 4y agoScorpaenidae are a staple ingredient in Bouillabaisse. Most of they, if not all, are delicious if managed with care. They are de-poisoned and mostly safe after boiling. You can still impale one finger into a spine or make a cut in your hand if manage the stuff without care, but the poison is inactivated by heat.
- providedotemacs 4y agoSince at least 2000, the Northern Pikeminnow Sport-Reward Program has offered cash rewards for catching this invasive species in the Columbia River. > The Pikeminnow Sport Reward Fishery Program ... pays anglers for each Northern Pikeminnow that they catch that is nine inches or larger. Rewards range from $6 to $10 per fish, and special tagged fish are worth $500. In 2022 the top earner has earner over $50k, and the twentieth highest earner has over $12k. In 2015 and 2016 the top earner broke $100k (over 14,000 fish caught by a single angler appears to be the record). [1] https://www.pikeminnow.org/background/save-a-salmon-and-make-money-doing-it https://www.pikeminnow.org/background/save-a-salmon-and-make...
- tobiaz 4y agoNew Zealand here. We're in the process of eliminating all Possums, Rats (3 types) and Mustelids (Stoat, Weasel and Ferrets) with a goal of 2050! Come help!
- nivertech 4y agoThere is a damn good comedy about it: Killing It (2022) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmOvgKSKokY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmOvgKSKokY https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14129378/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14129378/