First off, some sad news. The Fish and Wildlife Service has concluded that the eastern cougar subspecies is extinct and should be removed from the Endangered Species List. This isn't particularly surprising. Cougars were largely hunted down as pests, nuisances, and threats to livestock and people in the east long ago. That, combined with the massive destruction of habitat, ever-increasing surburbanization and sprawl, and the fragmentation of what little suitable habitat once existed into ever more isolated biological islands and large predators stand no chance of survival. To tie this in with parks a little bit, While often highly developed and connected to infrastructure, parks can provide protections for core biomes, and when all the public and private stakeholders are on board, can provide the anchor for regional management plans that enable species to have a foothold for recovery from which they can radiate into adjacent suitable areas.
It's also National Invasive Species Awareness Week. This is a worldwide problem that can have widespread economic as well as environmental effects, including in urban areas. Parks are not exempt. They are not sealed biodomes and species, including people and those that we carry with us whether intentionally or not, freely cross their boundaries. Nature doesn't care about arbitrary lines on a map. Of parks I've been to, several have notable invasive species problems. The Everglades have perhaps the most famous invader, the Burmese Python. Certainly it has led to battles with one of the apex predators native to the park, but it has also done damage to endangered species that are already under pressure from water diversion, pollution, and encroachment by a growing Miami metro area.
I didn't see any snakes when I was in the Everglades, but I did see the effects of invasive species in Hawaii. Kahili Ginger is a hardy, widespread, and nasty invader. It crowds out all the native understory flora and is almost impossible to kill except through a plant by plant cut and treat (with herbicides) approach. This meant that in some parts of the rain forest at Hawaii Volcanoes the understory was choked with ginger plants, with hardly any others visible except for the occasional tree. When they are flowering they can be quite pretty, but I'd prefer to see what is supposed to be there. There's beauty in that. There can be a long philosophical debate about how "natural" it is to go around "restoring" a landscape and whether such a landscape is any less artificial than one filled with invasives, attractive or not, deliberately placed or not, but that's not what I'm doing here (I have addressed it elsewhere, as have many others far more knowledgeable than I am). Native species are under enough attack, we don't need to go about making it worse by acting to save noxious pests that damage their range.
Even more damaging to Hawaiian species have been invaders whose effects are generally only visible in the voids they create. Specifically the combination of avian malaria and feral pigs has caused massive destruction of the native bird population, many species of which are on the brink of extinction. Invasives put even more pressure on species already threatened with massive habitat loss.
It's also necessary to watch out for unintended consequences. Rats (another invasive) were a problem in the Virgin Islands (though the main objection at the time was destruction of sugar cane) so plantation managers imported the mongoose from India to control them. This failed because rats are nocturnal and sleep in trees while the mongoose is a daylight hunter. The rats were unaffected and other sensitive species paid the price. So beware solutions that require further solutions, if only it were as easy as Principle Skinner's needle snakes and gorillas solution.
So happy NISAW everyone. And if you see something on that list, I hope it tastes good.
No comments:
Post a Comment