5 ms·

The US seems to have no defense against invasive pests, plant, animal or insect, it just lets them spread.

by rapjr9 3y ago

ipsum2 3y ago
You only hear about the ones that do spread.
traceroute66 3y ago
> The US seems to have no defense against invasive pests, plant, animal or insect, it just lets them spread. A large portion of that is inevitably of the US's own doing through its love of intensive agriculture. Liberal use of hormones and antibiotics in animals, liberal use of pesticides etc. etc. Not saying no other country in the world uses antibiotics or pesticides, but the US does it more intensively and more extensively than almost any other country on the planet. You then end up having to fight fire with fire as things build up resistance.
- autoexec 3y ago
  Global warming isn't helping things either. Lots of pests that used to stay down south are marching north as the years warm.
  - b112 3y ago
    A new mosquito appeared in Quebec late this fall. Tiny, 1/2 the size of our normal mosquitoes. I've never seen its kind before, and I've lived all over Canada. And yes, it wasn't a one-off, I've seen many, and a friend commented on the same. I imagine it is invasive. Bah.
    - supertimor 3y ago
      Probably the Aedes aegypti. Super invasive mosquito species that are currently spreading across North America. They like to feed during the day and will bite a person several times for their blood meal. Their eggs can remain viable outside of water up to 8 months to a year and they require only a very tiny amount of water to hatch.
      - b112 3y ago
        Hmm. Thanks. I'll catch a few next year, and compare to photos.
  - 2devnull 3y ago
    Malaria is now a threat in California. And still people burn fossil fuels.
  - berkes 3y ago
    In Europe it's not so much that years get warmer, but that winters are less cold. I expect many parts of the U.S. are similar. Frost would typically kill a lot of species, except a few that are specialized to withstand it. Withstanding frost is often a trade-off. So if this threat is removed, many native species have a disadvantage. (I'm beekeeper and many of the threats to native honeybees are because (European) honeybees put a lot of energy into preparation for long periods of frost,while their adversaries don't do that. It's a bit like the story of the Ant and the Grasshopper. Only now it turns out the grasshopper was right all along, in not caring)
    - red-iron-pine 3y ago
      this is very much an issue in Canada, where the lack of deeply cold winters allows a bunch of critters, notable mosquitoes, ticks, and the pine beetle, to have explosive population growth in the summers. the pine beetle in particular is problematic because it will swarm and kill tons and tons of pine trees -- which is fodder for massive forest fires.
- liotier 3y ago
  > Liberal use of hormones Damn liberals, ruining everything... I bet those are sex change hormones !
  - n6h6 3y ago
    On the chance you might not be joking, "liberal use of" means essentially "abundant use of" in this context.
    - liotier 3y ago
      I was of course joking. I'm sorry any doubt remained - I'll try to write more outrageously stupid next time !
acomjean 3y ago
There are some government programs to limit the spread. I know there is an Asian longhorn beetle program and some others for invasive plants out west (source my brother worked on them).
bigbillheck 3y ago
It only seems that way if you don't pay attention. For example: https://www.invasivespeciesinfo.gov/take-action https://www.invasivespeciesinfo.gov/take-action , and there's lots of stuff at the state and local levels (if you don't believe me, call your friendly neighborhood extension agent)
- rapjr9 3y ago
  That's great and I do see things like that: https://vtinvasives.org/news-events/events/mapping-event-brattleboro-vt https://vtinvasives.org/news-events/events/mapping-event-bra... Are they actually effective? The above is local to just one town, if the next town over doesn't do anything the weed spreads anyway. There are also areas where no one ever goes like parts of national forests. Have any of these efforts done more than delay an invasive? I'm thinking of kudzu and pine beetles. I wonder if pine beetles are creating more CO2 than cars by killing trees. The problems seem complex and not easily solved, so it would seem the appropriate response would be to train more people who can do studies and find answers. Instead it's left up to local communities to form groups and try brute force approaches.
  - rapjr9 3y ago
    An example of an effort that has made no progress for 7 years, is getting worse, people are spreading the invasive further, and the experts say there is now no getting rid of it: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/28/nyregion/connecticut-river-hydrilla-red-dye.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/28/nyregion/connecticut-rive... Australia has very strict rules about bringing in anything not native, but maybe that only works because they are an island.
darkerside 3y ago
Survivorship bias. They may do a great job against 80% of species, and you'd probably never notice.
rabbits_2002 3y ago
Most of the time there is pretty much nothing you can do. They don’t make selective pesticides.
- tzs 3y ago
  You can actually make selective pesticides, but the people that pay for pesticide development can make a lot more money with non-selective pesticides. Much of the behavior and life cycle of insects is controlled by a variety of hormones. For example suppose you've got an insect that needs to lay its eggs when the weather starts to cool at the end of summer because they eggs will die if it is too hot, but before the weather gets too cold. And suppose that after mating the males die. There will likely be some hormone that gets triggered by weather changes that will cause the "find a mate and lay eggs" subroutine hard wired into the insect's brain to run. (Much of insect behavior is essentially hard wired routines that get invoked by a complex hormone drive state machine). If you identify what hormone that is, you might be able to make a pesticide based on it that if you spray it earlier in the summer, when it is still too hot for the eggs, will trigger the "mate and lay eggs" routine. The insects will mate and lay eggs, and the summer heat will kill the eggs. And the males have mated so they die. So when the weather starts to change and the hormone is active again in the females there are no males to mate with them. Unlike pesticides that work by disrupting something necessary to life in general, which then tend to kill things other than the target either by being sprayed on them, or by things higher in the food chain eating things that were sprayed (or eating things that ate those things, and so on), they hormone pesticides tend to be a lot safer for other species. That's because the target insect does naturally produce the hormone, so it is already in the food chain. Most other things in the same ecosystems as the target insect will have already evolved to not be too bothered by it. What holds these kind of pesticides back is that to develop them you have to have researchers who delve very deeply into the biology of the target insect. There are a lot of different insect species, and even if you just care about pest insects there are still a lot, and you've got to do each species separately. There isn't enough funding to produce enough PhD entomologists to get the number of specialists you'd need to do the research. A similar thing happens with with biological control of pest insects. If you've got an invasive insect that native predators and parasites won't control, one way you might deal with it is bring in its predators or parasites. Often bringing in non-native predators or parasites is a very bad idea, because they often also go after native species. With insects though it can often be done safely. As with much other insect behavior, what insects predators insects pray upon is often very specific. They might only go after one specific species. Same with parasites. If you've got an insect that is kept under control because some parasitic wasp lays eggs in them, that wasp might lay eggs in only that specific species. If that species becomes invasive somewhere else and you bring in the wasps, they won't hurt anything else. But to make that work, as with hormonal pesticides, you need to know a whole lot about the predators and parasites of your pest. But there aren't many openings for the PhD entomologists it would take for that. An example of this was a few decades ago there was some invasive species from I think Florida that was devastating California citrus crops. To try to control it they brought in a parasitic wasp (if I'm correctly remembering this) from Florida that only attacked that species, and is what kept it under control in Florida. It completely failed in California. It was only years later that anyone figured out why. It turned out that the pest species was actually two very closely related species. So closely related that no one had realized there were two species. And the parasite wasp species was also actually two very closely related species, which was also not known at the time. The two parasite wasp species each only attacked one of the pest species. It turned out the invaders were all from one of the two pest species, and the wasps they captured and brought to California all were from the species that wanted the other pest species. No one knew about these subspecies before because there were only two entomologists in the whole US who specialized in parasitic wasps. There are many thousands of parasitic wasp species in the US, and neither of those researchers had ever looked closely at these particular ones.
peteradio 3y ago
It's pretty much impossible to manage as long as we keep unloading global freight.

The US seems to have no defense against invasive pests, plant, animal or insect, it just lets them spread.

by rapjr9 3y ago

The US seems to have no defense against invasive pests, plant, animal or insect, it just lets them spread.

ipsum2 3y ago

You only hear about the ones that do spread.

traceroute66 3y ago

> The US seems to have no defense against invasive pests, plant, animal or insect, it just lets them spread. A large portion of that is inevitably of the US's own doing through its love of intensive agriculture. Liberal use of hormones and antibiotics in animals, liberal use of pesticides etc. etc. Not saying no other country in the world uses antibiotics or pesticides, but the US does it more intensively and more extensively than almost any other country on the planet. You then end up having to fight fire with fire as things build up resistance.

autoexec 3y ago
Global warming isn't helping things either. Lots of pests that used to stay down south are marching north as the years warm.
- b112 3y ago
  A new mosquito appeared in Quebec late this fall. Tiny, 1/2 the size of our normal mosquitoes. I've never seen its kind before, and I've lived all over Canada. And yes, it wasn't a one-off, I've seen many, and a friend commented on the same. I imagine it is invasive. Bah.
  - supertimor 3y ago
    Probably the Aedes aegypti. Super invasive mosquito species that are currently spreading across North America. They like to feed during the day and will bite a person several times for their blood meal. Their eggs can remain viable outside of water up to 8 months to a year and they require only a very tiny amount of water to hatch.
    - b112 3y ago
      Hmm. Thanks. I'll catch a few next year, and compare to photos.
- 2devnull 3y ago
  Malaria is now a threat in California. And still people burn fossil fuels.
- berkes 3y ago
  In Europe it's not so much that years get warmer, but that winters are less cold. I expect many parts of the U.S. are similar. Frost would typically kill a lot of species, except a few that are specialized to withstand it. Withstanding frost is often a trade-off. So if this threat is removed, many native species have a disadvantage. (I'm beekeeper and many of the threats to native honeybees are because (European) honeybees put a lot of energy into preparation for long periods of frost,while their adversaries don't do that. It's a bit like the story of the Ant and the Grasshopper. Only now it turns out the grasshopper was right all along, in not caring)
  - red-iron-pine 3y ago
    this is very much an issue in Canada, where the lack of deeply cold winters allows a bunch of critters, notable mosquitoes, ticks, and the pine beetle, to have explosive population growth in the summers. the pine beetle in particular is problematic because it will swarm and kill tons and tons of pine trees -- which is fodder for massive forest fires.
liotier 3y ago
> Liberal use of hormones Damn liberals, ruining everything... I bet those are sex change hormones !
- n6h6 3y ago
  On the chance you might not be joking, "liberal use of" means essentially "abundant use of" in this context.
  - liotier 3y ago
    I was of course joking. I'm sorry any doubt remained - I'll try to write more outrageously stupid next time !

acomjean 3y ago

There are some government programs to limit the spread. I know there is an Asian longhorn beetle program and some others for invasive plants out west (source my brother worked on them).

bigbillheck 3y ago

It only seems that way if you don't pay attention. For example: https://www.invasivespeciesinfo.gov/take-action https://www.invasivespeciesinfo.gov/take-action , and there's lots of stuff at the state and local levels (if you don't believe me, call your friendly neighborhood extension agent)

rapjr9 3y ago
That's great and I do see things like that: https://vtinvasives.org/news-events/events/mapping-event-brattleboro-vt https://vtinvasives.org/news-events/events/mapping-event-bra... Are they actually effective? The above is local to just one town, if the next town over doesn't do anything the weed spreads anyway. There are also areas where no one ever goes like parts of national forests. Have any of these efforts done more than delay an invasive? I'm thinking of kudzu and pine beetles. I wonder if pine beetles are creating more CO2 than cars by killing trees. The problems seem complex and not easily solved, so it would seem the appropriate response would be to train more people who can do studies and find answers. Instead it's left up to local communities to form groups and try brute force approaches.
- rapjr9 3y ago
  An example of an effort that has made no progress for 7 years, is getting worse, people are spreading the invasive further, and the experts say there is now no getting rid of it: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/28/nyregion/connecticut-river-hydrilla-red-dye.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/28/nyregion/connecticut-rive... Australia has very strict rules about bringing in anything not native, but maybe that only works because they are an island.

darkerside 3y ago

Survivorship bias. They may do a great job against 80% of species, and you'd probably never notice.

rabbits_2002 3y ago

Most of the time there is pretty much nothing you can do. They don’t make selective pesticides.

tzs 3y ago
You can actually make selective pesticides, but the people that pay for pesticide development can make a lot more money with non-selective pesticides. Much of the behavior and life cycle of insects is controlled by a variety of hormones. For example suppose you've got an insect that needs to lay its eggs when the weather starts to cool at the end of summer because they eggs will die if it is too hot, but before the weather gets too cold. And suppose that after mating the males die. There will likely be some hormone that gets triggered by weather changes that will cause the "find a mate and lay eggs" subroutine hard wired into the insect's brain to run. (Much of insect behavior is essentially hard wired routines that get invoked by a complex hormone drive state machine). If you identify what hormone that is, you might be able to make a pesticide based on it that if you spray it earlier in the summer, when it is still too hot for the eggs, will trigger the "mate and lay eggs" routine. The insects will mate and lay eggs, and the summer heat will kill the eggs. And the males have mated so they die. So when the weather starts to change and the hormone is active again in the females there are no males to mate with them. Unlike pesticides that work by disrupting something necessary to life in general, which then tend to kill things other than the target either by being sprayed on them, or by things higher in the food chain eating things that were sprayed (or eating things that ate those things, and so on), they hormone pesticides tend to be a lot safer for other species. That's because the target insect does naturally produce the hormone, so it is already in the food chain. Most other things in the same ecosystems as the target insect will have already evolved to not be too bothered by it. What holds these kind of pesticides back is that to develop them you have to have researchers who delve very deeply into the biology of the target insect. There are a lot of different insect species, and even if you just care about pest insects there are still a lot, and you've got to do each species separately. There isn't enough funding to produce enough PhD entomologists to get the number of specialists you'd need to do the research. A similar thing happens with with biological control of pest insects. If you've got an invasive insect that native predators and parasites won't control, one way you might deal with it is bring in its predators or parasites. Often bringing in non-native predators or parasites is a very bad idea, because they often also go after native species. With insects though it can often be done safely. As with much other insect behavior, what insects predators insects pray upon is often very specific. They might only go after one specific species. Same with parasites. If you've got an insect that is kept under control because some parasitic wasp lays eggs in them, that wasp might lay eggs in only that specific species. If that species becomes invasive somewhere else and you bring in the wasps, they won't hurt anything else. But to make that work, as with hormonal pesticides, you need to know a whole lot about the predators and parasites of your pest. But there aren't many openings for the PhD entomologists it would take for that. An example of this was a few decades ago there was some invasive species from I think Florida that was devastating California citrus crops. To try to control it they brought in a parasitic wasp (if I'm correctly remembering this) from Florida that only attacked that species, and is what kept it under control in Florida. It completely failed in California. It was only years later that anyone figured out why. It turned out that the pest species was actually two very closely related species. So closely related that no one had realized there were two species. And the parasite wasp species was also actually two very closely related species, which was also not known at the time. The two parasite wasp species each only attacked one of the pest species. It turned out the invaders were all from one of the two pest species, and the wasps they captured and brought to California all were from the species that wanted the other pest species. No one knew about these subspecies before because there were only two entomologists in the whole US who specialized in parasitic wasps. There are many thousands of parasitic wasp species in the US, and neither of those researchers had ever looked closely at these particular ones.

peteradio 3y ago

It's pretty much impossible to manage as long as we keep unloading global freight.