No, it’s what happens when you ship shit from China and nasties hitch a ride.
BMSB, chestnut blight, camel crickets, asian ladybugs, dutch elm disease, the emerald ash borer, and this lantern fly are just some of the things we have to thank global trade for.
EDIT: Forgot to shout out to the ghetto palm mentioned in the article, which is another introduced species that the lanternfly is attracted to. (It earned its name for thriving on city pollution, it is also likely the fastest growing tree in North America now)
It’s pretty unlikely that global trade is going to be rolled back.
Instead of tariffs, we should be protecting our industries by forcing pest removal on all shipments from overseas. This would be more effective use of the money and properly align the economics and risks of global trade.
Doesn't the US have any quarantine requirements on imported products? I could find requirements for live animals, but for other goods? The EU [1], like Australia [2] has quarantine requirements on certain imported goods, including plants.
How well the ones in EU are enforced I don't know. For sure they are not well enforced for individuals arriving to airports - you can just walk straight in with your suitecases. Compared to Australia, which I understand has very strict controls also for individuals arriving.
To be fair, woodpeckers for example prey on EAB. So more woodpeckers could only help, though of course they probably wouldn't have been able to completely stop the EAB.
If the US was covered in woodpeckers and other birds, the EAB might have become "just another bug". But in most of the US, woodpeckers are like unicorns.
Sure, that's the direct cause of invasive species. And I agree that there are measures that can and should be taken to measure and slow the flux of new species into established ecosystems.
But biodiversity is a huge protective measure against invasive species gaining a foothold in the first place, and habitat destruction is by far the largest short term threat to biodiversity.
My point is that habitat loss is the biggest factor in making these plagues possible at this scale.
Diverse ecosystems are much more likely to be able to adapt relatively quickly to a new species than blighted habitats.
I think its a huge farce to be focusing on "pest control" without getting to the root of the problem, biodiversity. We must be replenishing and rejuvenating biodiversity if we want to have any hope of realistically absorbing invasive species. And biodiversity has to be the focus over conservation. Our ecologies are not history museums. They're dynamically evolving, living superorganisms, and we should care for them appropriately.
biodiversity is a huge protective measure against invasive species gaining a foothold in the first place
In support of this point- dutch elm & EAB would not be the scourges they have been, if we had not so heavily planted elms, and then after they were destroyed, ash. The monoculture of one type of tree, aka lack of diversity, is part of what makes the huge population explosion of the parasites possible.
Ugh. We're dealing with the Emerald Ash Borer around here and it's really sad, and dangerous. There's acres and acres of dead tress that are going to start falling and taking down power lines in the next few years. It costs thousands to have them taken down if they're in your yard. Damn little things are just monsters. Now I'm not looking forward to when those Lanternflies get here.
I do a lot of mountain bike trail building and maintenance. Here in SE Michigan we were heavily impacted by Emerald Ash Borer, and many of our trails are in wooded areas that contained a lot of ash. Because of how the Ash Borer kills trees what results is a tree that rots at the base and falls over, with the core of the trunk a nicely aged hardwood. This makes cutting out the dead trees as they fall across the trail particularly difficult.
The Emerald Ash Borer was officially detected in the US in 2002. Likely arrived to the US in the beginning of the 90s [0]. Probably with packing material. Relevant regulation of wooden packing material seem to have been passed in the end of the 90s [1][2].
If anything, this story supports the precautionary principle. Nice quote from Wikipedia: "Strong precaution holds that regulation is required whenever there is a possible risk to health, safety, or the environment, even if the supporting evidence is speculative and even if the economic costs of regulation are high" [3].
They moved to Seattle, apparently. Not as bad as elsewhere, but more than I’m used to. We had them in Indiana growing up, but they were something you’d see once in a while, not groups of them crawling up your screens.
Most animals emerge and decline in cycles. One year rabbits are everywhere, next year foxes are everywhere, next year carrion, etc. Bugs/insects especially have odd cycles that are often not yet fully understood by humans.
The danger is often with cycles that run out of control. In Michigan zebra mussels operate on a multi-year (7 year?) cycle. They'll reach a peak then decline. But each peak so far has been significantly larger than the previous one. They choke out all the mussels that are indigenous to the lakes in those peaks, then decline for a few years and throw entire ecosystems out of whack.
Southern Virginia here. Stinkbugs are EVERYWHERE right now (and have been for the past few years around the end of the summer and into fall).
As I read the headline for this post I saw one slowly meandering up my wall. I also began to think about the possibility of this being done intentionally...
You see, the brown marmorated stinkbugs we have are native to asia. They have no natural predators except for a tiny small wasp that parasticies their eggs (also native to asia).
When I was researching them, I thought "What if China intentionally introduced them to the USA as some sort of ecological attack?" That would be some next-level warfare. Or just a really mean prank.
And then this impending laternfly invasion re-piqued my interest in this theory. It turns out that a similar type of parasitic wasp is the natural predator for laternflys too...
Could this really be a coincidence? Could it be a response to the new tariffs? What if they offer to sell us some bio-engineered wasps (a la Monsanto ) to help control our infestations? But the wasps die after a generation, so we have to constantly buy then...
Of course it could still all be coincidence, but it's fun to think about.
Not that I take it seriously, but, following the path of this wild speculation/paranoid thinking: what if the end goal is not to harm the US, but to give the US the problem in order to see what kinds of solutions (if any) US problem solvers invent?
Sounds like we just need to import some Chinese wasps to eat all of the stinkbugs, then needlesnakes to eat the wasps, then needlesnake-eating gorillas of course... and in the winter the gorillas will simply freeze to death! Easy.
Accidentally shipping species around is such an inevitable result of global trade that it doesn’t seem very useful to try to hang it on malice.
Also, as the article points out, you can’t just import the pest’s predator because you may find out that predator much prefers your other species to the one you want to eradicate.
I wonder if any of the genetic control strategies used with the Aedes aegypti mosquito [1] could be used in this case. The obvious difference would be that males would also be harmful to the environment in this case. The strategy could also be improved if actual non-viable offspring was produced, increasing opportunity cost of reproduction and spent energy.
I would love to see this kind of thing done with the [0] pine beetle. It isn't an invasive species, but is killing off huge numbers of ponderosa and lodgepole pines in the rocky mountains due to the combination of forest fire surpression and unusually hot and dry summers.
The exploding number of pine beatles is commonly attributed to climate change giving the pine beattle a second generation of bugs every year[1]. A genetic control strategy that thinned the population I think would be really helpful at reducing their effect.
It saddens me to see how the pine beetles are killing off the pines, but won't they ultimately improve the pine populations by thinning out the weakest trees? And over the course of the next hundred years, give some more climate-resilient strains room to spread, or migrate?
I think part of the issue is that one of the consequences of killing tons of trees is creating a lot of dry, dead, flamable wood. So the weakest trees get killed off by the beatles, but then all the nearby trees are killed in the resulting forest fire, which hurts the evolution argument a little.
On the other hand, part of the reason that this kind of thing is so bad is that we fight forest fires so aggressively. In the historic past, as trees are killed off en-masse by the beatles, a forest fire would ravage the area, decimating the beatles population. Because these fires aren't allowed to go unchecked anymore, the beetle population can continue to grow.
> Curious... I always read 'America' when people from USA talks about them.
Not just americans talking about the USA. Most of the world. From Britain to Japan, america is used to denote the US and americans to denote citizens from the US.
> What about the people from the rest of the continent?
North Americans ( for US + Canada ). South Americans for people in south america. There are even Central Americans for everyone in between.
In a geographical sense, mexico is also included when people talk about North Americans ( like NAFTA for example ). But from a cultural or general use, north americans primarily mean americans and canadians.
'America' is only used in the English name of one country: USA. When talking about countries, using English, America is shorthand for the USA. Americas on the other hand, would mean all of the N/S American continents.
There are several different schemes for dividing the continents. There can be as few as four or as many as seven, depending on who you ask.
English-speaking cultures generally agree that there are two continents that lie entirely in the western hemisphere, North America and South America (collectively "the Americas"). In that scheme, "America" without modifier clearly refers to the USA.
Romance-language cultures generally agree that there is only one continent, America. In that scheme, calling the country "America" looks like chauvinism. But it's really just a linguistic difference.
Why should spraying and biological control be our only options? HN has had a bunch of stories lately on using CRISPR and gene drive to render entire populations infertile. Let's do that here and make this species extinct.
Probably because we're not generally in the habit of rendering entire species extinct simply because they've been transported by humans out of their natural habitat?
Is it necessary in its native habitat either? If it's a pure pest, we should have no qualms about getting rid of it. That we haven't historically done that (except for smallpox) isn't a good argument for not doing it, especially since the technology for making it easy is just now becoming available.
You do have an argument about ecosystem cascades and food chain disruption inveighing against arbitrary extinction of pests, but we should evaluate these things on a case by case basis and not just assume that any species we eradicate is "load bearing". Many species aren't.
If care is taken to ensure that none of the genetically altered species members make it back to their native region (Asia), then we wouldn't extinguish the entire species, just the ones over here, where they're not part of our natural ecosystem.
Another option is to look for genetic markers in the invaders. When a population expsndd from a small base, whatever allelee common in that base become common in the expanded population even when these alleles are uncommon in the species as a whole.
That's an almost tautological argument, since the premise under which we'd be exterminating them is that we weren't able to prevent that kind of migration from happening.
While any migration of an invasive species generally situates the species in its new region permanently until something kills it off (and as such you must continually guard against invasive species entering), we would only have to prevent re-migrations of the "tainted" species back to their native regions for the amount of time that it would take them to die out due to the sterilization. Much easier.
Care was taken to make sure these invasive species didn't get imported in the first place, but clearly that didn't work... What makes you think preventing the altered species from being transported back will be any more successful?
Because we somehow managed to _not_ import them for several decades/centuries before one finally slipped through, and we only have to avoid exporting them until they die out, which sounds like it would only take a few years.
Gene Drive technology is needed for more than mosquitos/malaria.
It inserts a dominant gene that impairs reproduction in future generations and collapses populations.
Funding for this type of research for all kinds of invasives would be helpful, IMO. Certainly seems better and more specific than trying to import predators also, who may end up preferring the local species over the invasive pest species.
This is the second comment on this thread suggesting that invasive species be driven to extinction through technology. We consider eradicating mosquitos because they are the cause of almost unimaginable human suffering. That is not a bar cleared by a hapless tropical bug that just happened to get shipped from Vietnam to a Pennsylvania vineyard.
So what if there were a third or fourth or tenth comment on this thread suggesting driving this species to extinction? Why is the comment count relevant? Is there something wrong with proposing this measure? It sounds like you think this idea is not only bad (which is fine) but that you think it should be unspeakable. Can you clarify? Thanks!
Your comment seems to be to be touching on the ethics of "eradicating" insect pests ("that is not a bar cleared"), rather than the ethics of advancing genetic engineering in general (or specifically of reproduction capabilities).
Having written that first comment: I was merely wondering aloud – without doing a tour du Google myself – whether such genetic intervention would be possible at all.
I cannot see many problems with sterilizing pest animals, as long as we don't define pests so strictly as to include any nuisance. For example, in cities in The Netherlands, feral pigeons are sterilized when population numbers increase too much. The article about the lanternfly also clearly specifies that small populations of lanternflies do not pose a problem. Any intervention would not need to "eradicate" lanternflies from the earth.
Perhaps you are referring to the suggestion of 'improving' the to strategy to produce non-viable offspring.
I'm referring to this specifically in the context of use to eradicate invasive non-native populations.
The individual bugs may be hapless, but they are obviously just at the beginning of wreaking serious havoc on their new ecosystem and local agriculture.
It was technology that transplanted these populations in the first place. Eons passed without them migrating across the major oceans, then they suddenly hitch a ride on a human conveyance and arrive in a location without their natural predators, and start wreaking havoc on the native populations.
It just seems to me that this targeted technological intervention will solve the problem with the fewest side-effects. Gene-Drive is limited to not only a specific species, but a specific population.
Pesticides kill a broad spectrum of creatures, including many desirable species that are not invasive, such as honeybees.
Biological control, importing other living organisms to depress the population of a pest, can have even more massive spillover effects, some of which were mentioned in TFA, where a wasp that normally predated on the invasive was brought in and promptly preferred to predate on the local species.
So, what's your solution? Just let invasives take over and further trash ecosystems (beyond the existing human damage)?
Extinction is (much) more severe than extirpation. It's not guaranteed or even likely that using genetic engineering to eradicate a species in the US would also eradicate it in China. Suicide genes shouldn't last long in a population. If accidentally introducing one or two self-destructing lanternflies to China (via shipping) was going to kill them all, we'd probably be rid of mosquitoes already.
This reminds me of a documentary I watched last decade called "Strange days on planet Earth", narrated by Edward Norton. One of the episodes was about this unwanted migration. They suspended a rubber ring in the water in one of the ports and a few months later found that about 90% of the animals living on that ring were hitchhikers from a long way away.
We should get used to these massive movement of species. Local habitats are changing rapidly, faster than the inhabitants can adapt. They'll have to move. On the current course the average global temperature will be much >7f warmer by 2100, that's a estimate that is really on the low end, and factors no positive feedback, which we are already seeing. Plants, animals and bugs are going to be moving and trying to find new habitat. So are humans, also changing places where we may have not been before, and their local flora/fauna.
Please. Average global temperature raising is a thing, but peddling it in every single discussion about the environment does nothing but help the sceptics. This particular invasion has nothing to do with the temperature, and everything to do with US goods trade with China: https://cdn.static-economist.com/sites/default/files/images/..., and other Asian countries. In combination with insufficient pest control of imported goods.
Sure, it is relevant to the broader topic of invasive species. But starting a comment with a call to action like above ("We should get used to these massive movement of species"), isn't exactly additive to the content of the article. Rather it sounds like the commenter wants to sell something. I believe that in the political environment we have that can be counterproductive.
By the way, looking up the specifics of the Lanternfly - apparently it is skilful in laying eggs so that those survive even cold winters, meaning climate change at most have a moderate effect.
Nope, it says "50,000 non-native species". Invasive species are those non-native species that are thought to be harmful to the local ecosystem. Some non-native species can actually be beneficial. The Wikipedia article doesn't offer any number on how many of those 50,000 are invasive, but other sources suggest less than 10%.
I encountered these for the first time visiting family in PA this summer.
They are very large, oblivious to people, and were absolutely everywhere. Several of them landed on my since I probably looked like a small tree in my dark shirt and pants. I don’t know if some predator will come along and balance out the equation, but in the meantime, it certainly did appear to be an invasion.
We weren't ready for the Chestnut Blight a century ago, Dutch Elm Disease, Japanese Beetles, Kudzu, etc. The Everglades are full of exotic snakes including Anaconda. Destructive, invasive species suck. There will be many more.
Just curious, what's the state of the art of global ecology modeling? How well, if at all, could we model, for example, what'd happen if the Laternfly landed in Italy? Or what'd happen, for example, if we CRISPR gene-drived these bugs out of existence as so many are suggesting?
I get that this is very computationally and scientifically hard, in so many ways. But how good are we at this, at this point? How much harder should we be trying?
Given how critical this is for us to sustain life and adapt to the changing environment, it seems like a no-brainer that we should be pouring vast resources into ecology modeling. Maybe instead of building rockets to "make life interesting" (Musk) or to "build solar panels in space because people can have a right to consume exponentially more energy every year" (Bezos).
This is actually a really interesting question. I imagine the complexity of the model to really accurately predict this would be practically unattainable currently.
You are introducing a new element to an environment without knowing how it would react to it. You could attempt to predict based on predators or food sources from its original environment and compare them to closest matches (if any) to the new environment.
This would make so many wild assumptions though that minor errors could result in cascading effects in a direction the model never predicted.
Doing some googling and found that there is the I = PAT equation which is just for human influence and is based on an extremely simplistic model. I think the nuances and details needed for an accurate ecosystem model would be several orders of magnitude more complex.
A model that could connect events like reintroducing wolves to Yellowstone with stopping erosion and other similar effects would be pretty incredible.
Maybe instead of spending endless hours vacuously consuming entertainment of various kinds...or providing handouts for those unwilling to produce anything.
Musk and Bezos are doing worthwhile things. There are plenty of better potential funding sources for new projects.
But they have a disproportionate impact on mindshare -- on defining what the limited supply of professional scientists and engineers perceive as the most interesting and important problems to solve. This is a zero-sum game: every minute a bright college student spends talking about rockets is a minute that she's not talking about ecology.
> But they have a disproportionate impact on mindshare -- on defining what the limited supply of professional scientists and engineers perceive as the most interesting and important problems to solve.
The supply of talented (as opposed to just "professional") scientists and engineers is quite large and growing all the time. Space exploration, IMNSHO, is just as important as ecology, in the first place. However, there will still be plenty attracted to that discipline.
Believe it or not, the best and brightest are among the most motivated to seek their own interests.
Perfect candidate for genetic control via CRISPR if viable.
Could you imagine what our ancestors would say if they knew we had the technology to successfully kill a pestilence? It would seem like complete madness. They would think us insane for not using it.
Replace your first sentence with "nuclear bomb" and the second paragraph (with a looser definition of "pestilence") would be almost as valid. Because our hypothetical ancestors have not been fully informed of the down-side.
Now, I don't know that there is a downside to genetic modification, but history is littered with unintended consequences.
In my brain, the sterile mosquito did not spread and kill the entire world's mosquito population, so I'm unsure why that would happen with the Lanternfly population.
And I'm unconvinced the "kill 'em all!" approach to dousing everything in insecticide is that much better.
But, it's obviously a very dangerous and powerful tool that should be thoroughly considered. After watching the emerald ash borer devastate my home state I am a but bullish on killing off invasive species.
I was thinking the same thing. It might be prudent to run a simulation to model its impact on an environment. And then Check impact on different environment types (i.e. desert, tundra, etc)
Invasive species are the worst - Parthenium is everywhere in India, and has ruined wildlife sanctuaries and land for grazing. There seems to be no way to eradicate it.
Capitalism gets away with another crime. Pretty funny that importing cheap rocks from China could/will cost us tens of billions of dollars, yet there is still no questioning of whether we should continue to import cheap rocks from China. Can't live without those Chinese rocks!
Seems pretty logical to me to put a negative externality tax on these types of imports to cover our losses, but the idea isn't even floated. What am I missing?
85 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 121 ms ] threadBMSB, chestnut blight, camel crickets, asian ladybugs, dutch elm disease, the emerald ash borer, and this lantern fly are just some of the things we have to thank global trade for.
EDIT: Forgot to shout out to the ghetto palm mentioned in the article, which is another introduced species that the lanternfly is attracted to. (It earned its name for thriving on city pollution, it is also likely the fastest growing tree in North America now)
Instead of tariffs, we should be protecting our industries by forcing pest removal on all shipments from overseas. This would be more effective use of the money and properly align the economics and risks of global trade.
The net outcome would be similar.
How well the ones in EU are enforced I don't know. For sure they are not well enforced for individuals arriving to airports - you can just walk straight in with your suitecases. Compared to Australia, which I understand has very strict controls also for individuals arriving.
[1]https://ec.europa.eu/food/plant/plant_health_biosecurity/non... [2]https://www.business.gov.au/products-and-services/importing-...
citrus greening (aka Huanglongbing) has severely damaged citrus groves in Southeast Asia, Latin America, Florida and Texas.
But biodiversity is a huge protective measure against invasive species gaining a foothold in the first place, and habitat destruction is by far the largest short term threat to biodiversity.
My point is that habitat loss is the biggest factor in making these plagues possible at this scale.
Diverse ecosystems are much more likely to be able to adapt relatively quickly to a new species than blighted habitats.
I think its a huge farce to be focusing on "pest control" without getting to the root of the problem, biodiversity. We must be replenishing and rejuvenating biodiversity if we want to have any hope of realistically absorbing invasive species. And biodiversity has to be the focus over conservation. Our ecologies are not history museums. They're dynamically evolving, living superorganisms, and we should care for them appropriately.
In support of this point- dutch elm & EAB would not be the scourges they have been, if we had not so heavily planted elms, and then after they were destroyed, ash. The monoculture of one type of tree, aka lack of diversity, is part of what makes the huge population explosion of the parasites possible.
If anything, this story supports the precautionary principle. Nice quote from Wikipedia: "Strong precaution holds that regulation is required whenever there is a possible risk to health, safety, or the environment, even if the supporting evidence is speculative and even if the economic costs of regulation are high" [3].
[0] https://www.nrs.fs.fed.us/pubs/jrnl/2006/nc_2006_Poland_003.... [1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/7/319.40-5 [2] https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-1998-12-17/pdf/98-33444.pdf... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle
Did animals adapt to eat them?
The danger is often with cycles that run out of control. In Michigan zebra mussels operate on a multi-year (7 year?) cycle. They'll reach a peak then decline. But each peak so far has been significantly larger than the previous one. They choke out all the mussels that are indigenous to the lakes in those peaks, then decline for a few years and throw entire ecosystems out of whack.
As I read the headline for this post I saw one slowly meandering up my wall. I also began to think about the possibility of this being done intentionally...
You see, the brown marmorated stinkbugs we have are native to asia. They have no natural predators except for a tiny small wasp that parasticies their eggs (also native to asia).
When I was researching them, I thought "What if China intentionally introduced them to the USA as some sort of ecological attack?" That would be some next-level warfare. Or just a really mean prank.
And then this impending laternfly invasion re-piqued my interest in this theory. It turns out that a similar type of parasitic wasp is the natural predator for laternflys too...
Could this really be a coincidence? Could it be a response to the new tariffs? What if they offer to sell us some bio-engineered wasps (a la Monsanto ) to help control our infestations? But the wasps die after a generation, so we have to constantly buy then...
Of course it could still all be coincidence, but it's fun to think about.
Also, as the article points out, you can’t just import the pest’s predator because you may find out that predator much prefers your other species to the one you want to eradicate.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4001467/
[2] https://www.popsci.com/mosquitoes-designed-self-destruct
The exploding number of pine beatles is commonly attributed to climate change giving the pine beattle a second generation of bugs every year[1]. A genetic control strategy that thinned the population I think would be really helpful at reducing their effect.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_pine_beetle [1] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2012/03/climate-change-sends...
On the other hand, part of the reason that this kind of thing is so bad is that we fight forest fires so aggressively. In the historic past, as trees are killed off en-masse by the beatles, a forest fire would ravage the area, decimating the beatles population. Because these fires aren't allowed to go unchecked anymore, the beetle population can continue to grow.
Not just americans talking about the USA. Most of the world. From Britain to Japan, america is used to denote the US and americans to denote citizens from the US.
> What about the people from the rest of the continent?
North Americans ( for US + Canada ). South Americans for people in south america. There are even Central Americans for everyone in between.
In a geographical sense, mexico is also included when people talk about North Americans ( like NAFTA for example ). But from a cultural or general use, north americans primarily mean americans and canadians.
It's simply because "The United States of America" is a mouthful so everyone either uses the last word "America" or shorten it to "USA".
"US" can sometimes be confusing because then you are not sure if people are saying "us" the object pronoun or "us" the country", so "USA" it is.
English-speaking cultures generally agree that there are two continents that lie entirely in the western hemisphere, North America and South America (collectively "the Americas"). In that scheme, "America" without modifier clearly refers to the USA.
Romance-language cultures generally agree that there is only one continent, America. In that scheme, calling the country "America" looks like chauvinism. But it's really just a linguistic difference.
You do have an argument about ecosystem cascades and food chain disruption inveighing against arbitrary extinction of pests, but we should evaluate these things on a case by case basis and not just assume that any species we eradicate is "load bearing". Many species aren't.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Founder_effect
Edit: relaxed claims.
It inserts a dominant gene that impairs reproduction in future generations and collapses populations.
Funding for this type of research for all kinds of invasives would be helpful, IMO. Certainly seems better and more specific than trying to import predators also, who may end up preferring the local species over the invasive pest species.
https://www.nature.com/news/gene-drive-mosquitoes-engineered...
Having written that first comment: I was merely wondering aloud – without doing a tour du Google myself – whether such genetic intervention would be possible at all.
I cannot see many problems with sterilizing pest animals, as long as we don't define pests so strictly as to include any nuisance. For example, in cities in The Netherlands, feral pigeons are sterilized when population numbers increase too much. The article about the lanternfly also clearly specifies that small populations of lanternflies do not pose a problem. Any intervention would not need to "eradicate" lanternflies from the earth.
Perhaps you are referring to the suggestion of 'improving' the to strategy to produce non-viable offspring.
What is your own opinion on these matters?
The individual bugs may be hapless, but they are obviously just at the beginning of wreaking serious havoc on their new ecosystem and local agriculture.
It was technology that transplanted these populations in the first place. Eons passed without them migrating across the major oceans, then they suddenly hitch a ride on a human conveyance and arrive in a location without their natural predators, and start wreaking havoc on the native populations.
It just seems to me that this targeted technological intervention will solve the problem with the fewest side-effects. Gene-Drive is limited to not only a specific species, but a specific population.
Pesticides kill a broad spectrum of creatures, including many desirable species that are not invasive, such as honeybees.
Biological control, importing other living organisms to depress the population of a pest, can have even more massive spillover effects, some of which were mentioned in TFA, where a wasp that normally predated on the invasive was brought in and promptly preferred to predate on the local species.
So, what's your solution? Just let invasives take over and further trash ecosystems (beyond the existing human damage)?
By the way, looking up the specifics of the Lanternfly - apparently it is skilful in laying eggs so that those survive even cold winters, meaning climate change at most have a moderate effect.
They are very large, oblivious to people, and were absolutely everywhere. Several of them landed on my since I probably looked like a small tree in my dark shirt and pants. I don’t know if some predator will come along and balance out the equation, but in the meantime, it certainly did appear to be an invasion.
hmmm. that sounds like it might be an exploitable weakness.
I get that this is very computationally and scientifically hard, in so many ways. But how good are we at this, at this point? How much harder should we be trying?
Given how critical this is for us to sustain life and adapt to the changing environment, it seems like a no-brainer that we should be pouring vast resources into ecology modeling. Maybe instead of building rockets to "make life interesting" (Musk) or to "build solar panels in space because people can have a right to consume exponentially more energy every year" (Bezos).
You are introducing a new element to an environment without knowing how it would react to it. You could attempt to predict based on predators or food sources from its original environment and compare them to closest matches (if any) to the new environment.
This would make so many wild assumptions though that minor errors could result in cascading effects in a direction the model never predicted.
Doing some googling and found that there is the I = PAT equation which is just for human influence and is based on an extremely simplistic model. I think the nuances and details needed for an accurate ecosystem model would be several orders of magnitude more complex.
A model that could connect events like reintroducing wolves to Yellowstone with stopping erosion and other similar effects would be pretty incredible.
Musk and Bezos are doing worthwhile things. There are plenty of better potential funding sources for new projects.
The supply of talented (as opposed to just "professional") scientists and engineers is quite large and growing all the time. Space exploration, IMNSHO, is just as important as ecology, in the first place. However, there will still be plenty attracted to that discipline.
Believe it or not, the best and brightest are among the most motivated to seek their own interests.
Good example of how celebrities are easier to target than faceless enterprises and realities that do far more harm.
And while we’re building our feel-good kumbaya wishlist, it would be cool if drug cartels solved our lanternfly issue as well.
Could you imagine what our ancestors would say if they knew we had the technology to successfully kill a pestilence? It would seem like complete madness. They would think us insane for not using it.
Now, I don't know that there is a downside to genetic modification, but history is littered with unintended consequences.
And I'm unconvinced the "kill 'em all!" approach to dousing everything in insecticide is that much better.
But, it's obviously a very dangerous and powerful tool that should be thoroughly considered. After watching the emerald ash borer devastate my home state I am a but bullish on killing off invasive species.
Seems pretty logical to me to put a negative externality tax on these types of imports to cover our losses, but the idea isn't even floated. What am I missing?