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The Peoria Carp Hunters began as ordinary aerial bowfishermen — people who shoot arrows at fish jumping out of the water. But when they saw that their efforts were not reducing the numbers of Asian flying carp, an invasive species in the United States, the heroes took more extreme measures. Watch and wonder at the weapons and armor that they have devised to battle our piscine foes.
When he noticed a foreign species of Asian shore crab in his favorite beach, Bun Lai of Miya's restaurant in New Haven, Connecticut, did what any sustainability-minded seafood chef would do: he made the invasive species into sushi!
The dish “kanibaba”—made with Asian shore and Dungeness crabs and spinach, rolled up tightly in potato skin, infused with Asian shore crab stock, and topped with toasted havarti cheese and lemon dill sauce—is now one of the most popular items at Lai’s restaurant, Miya’s, in downtown New Haven. “We run out of them at this point,” he says. “We go out and get thousands of them, and we sell thousands of them every week or so.” Kanibaba has become the signature dish of his “Invasive Species Menu,” a chapter in Miya’s 60-page menu that reads like a manifesto on sustainability, spirituality, and the creative process.
Zak Stone of GOOD magazine has the story: Link
For 50 years, farmers, scientists, and homeowners have looked for a way to get rid of kudzu. The invasive plant native to Japan grows at such an astounding rate that people in the southern U.S. joke about closing their windows at night to keep it out of the house. Another invasive species should teach us to be careful what we wish for. Megacopta cribraria, an insect that hitched a ride to Atlanta on a plane from Asia in 2009, eats kudzu. The kudzu bug could eat away a third of the kudzu covering several states within a decade.
“I’m all for it,” says Keith Brouillard, owner of Raleigh, N.C.’s Carolina Forestry, a consulting group that helps manage timber land for private owners. “Kudzu is a nuisance and almost impossible to get rid of.” The vine is virtually impervious to herbicides, chain saws and even fire. Its roots can weigh 300 pounds and run 12 feet deep.
But the bug is also chewing up soybean stalks, reducing some yields recently by as much as a quarter, according to entomologists at the University of Georgia.
“Disappearing kudzu is a cultural problem,” says John Shelton Reed, a sociologist and essayist on Southern life. “But disappearing soybeans is an economic problem.”
Researchers are looking for ways to protect soybean crops from Megacopta cribraria while still searching for a species that will kill kudzu and leave crops alone. Link -via TYWKIWDBI
(Image credit: University of Georgia at Griffin)
How
many fish does it take for guppies to invasively breed its way into dominating
an ecosystem?
Biologists at the University of St. Andrews and the University of the West Indies did the experiment and came up with the startling number: just 1 female guppy.
Dr. Deacon explained, “Usually only one or a few fish are released. We know that the vast majority of species introduced to a new habitat in this way are unable to survive, let alone establish a population, which left us with a huge question mark.”
To try to solve the mystery, the researchers conducted a simple experiment, in which single wild female guppies were placed into outdoor tanks. After two years, they discovered that almost all of the tanks contained populations of guppies, each founded by just one female.
Dr. Deacon explained how the finding might explain the guppy’s success as an invasive species, “Sperm storage is an excellent adaptation for living in constantly changing habitats, and it might also explain the guppies’ global success. Female guppies can store sperm in their reproductive tracts for many months after mating, and this enables single fish to establish populations, even when no males are present.
Previously: Scientists Create All-Female Species of Lizard | 30 Strangest Animal Mating Habits
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Lionfish are pretty, but they belong in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. They lack natural predators in the Caribbean, so lionfish have become quite the invasive species since they escaped from aquariums ten years ago to breed in the waters off the US and Central America. In Honduras, divers are not only hunting them, they are also training sharks to eat the lionfish!
“At the beginning, the divers just killed lionfish and fed sharks with them to get the sharks to develop a taste,” said photographer Antonio Busiello, who observed the process in action.
“In the second step, to have the sharks develop an interest in hunting them, divers started to leave wounded lionfish so that the sharks could taste them. After a while, [the sharks] did start to hunt them and go after them.”
Living up to their voracious reputations, many sharks can eat venomous prey, such as lionfish, and suffer no apparent ill effects, according to the Florida Museum of Natural History.
Humans are also encouraged to eat lionfish, which are tasty once the venomous spines are removed. Read all about it in this gallery from National Geographic. Link -Thanks, Marilyn!
(Image credit: Antonio Busiello)
Since kudzu was imported from Japan, it has grown the cover the southern United States. Now another Asian import is flourishing by eating kudzu. The globular stink bug (Megacopta cribraria), native to China and India, has spread across Georgia and has now been found in Alabama. They also come inside during cold weather, and emit a bad odor when threatened.
University of Georgia entomology Professor Wayne A. Gardner said he’s found them 30 stories high, coating the window sills of Atlanta condo high rises, and he has seen them swarming in roadside kudzu patches.
“You smell them when you get out of the truck,” he said.
More seriously, the bug likes to munch on plants other than kudzu, including soybeans. It also could be a threat to other legume crops such as peanuts, Gardner said.
In November, Auburn University researchers collected two individual specimens in east Alabama border counties, Cleburne and Cherokee. They now expect them to spread quickly across our kudzu-rich state.
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OK, the snakes are not supposed to be there, and the mice are not suffering from or enjoying the drugs because it’s Tylenol and they’re dead anyway. The brown tree snake is native to Australia, but hitched a ride to Guam after World War II and became so invasive that some native wildlife species were driven to extinction. The government has tried many methods to control the snake population, but nothing has worked well so far. Now they are planting dead mice with 80 milligrams of acetaminophen stuffed inside in the jungle areas of Guam. Brown tree snakes will scavenge dead animals, unlike most snakes, and even a child’s dose of acetaminophen will kill one.
In the U.S. government-funded project, tablets of concentrated acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol, are placed in dead thumb-size mice, which are then used as bait for brown tree snakes.
In humans, acetaminophen helps soothe aches, pains, and fevers. But when ingested by brown tree snakes, the drug disrupts the oxygen-carrying ability of the snakes’ hemoglobin blood proteins.
“They go into a coma, and then death,” said Peter Savarie, a researcher with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Wildlife Services, which has been developing the technique since 1995 through grants from the U.S. Departments of Defense and Interior.
Some of the mice are equipped with radio transmitters, so the success of the program can be tracked. Link -Thanks, Marilyn Terrell!
(Image credit: George Grall/National Geographic)
As Alex told us last year, carnivorous ants were deployed to help thin out the environmental mistake that is the cane toad in Australia. They brought the toads over from Hawaii in 1935 in an ill-advised effort to wipe out another pesky species, sugar cane-destroying beetles.
The toxicity of these amphibians has since wreaked havoc on indigenous wildlife, and now there’s an answer as to how to get the meat-eating ants on their case: cat food.
Putting cat food close to ponds inhabited by baby cane toads attracts carnivorous ants that are also immune to the toads’ poisonous skin. The ants then attack the baby toads and eat them.
“In one spot we tested, 98 percent of the baby toads were attacked within the first two minutes,” researcher Rick Shine told Reuters. “It was a bit like a massacre.” Shine said the study was aimed at boosting the numbers of ants around the breeding areas of cane toads, and not upsetting the ecological balance by introducing the insects to an area that they wouldn’t normally be in.
Link to Reuters Link to Guardian (Photo credit: B.N. Sullivan)
If you have a serious phobia of frogs, rats, bees or snakes, you probably shouldn’t read WebEcoist’s article on the most invasive species in the world. On the other hand, if you don’t have any phobias, it’s fascinating to know just how devastating a pair of bunnies ended up being to Australia and how Florida and other areas of the South are being taken over by released and escaped Burmese pythons.
The culprit is the well-known emerald ash borer, an invasive Asian beetle that first arrived in Michigan seven years ago. The infestation has spread to Ohio, Canada, and now Minnesota, threatening to do a log power more damage than the famous Dutch Elm Disease. Federal and state authorities have responded to the emerald ash borer by limiting transportation of timber and wood products, but have been unable to quarantine the disease.
Now volunteers in are spreading out across Minnesota and several other states, collecting seeds which may be needed to restore the white, green, and black ash species if the current epidemic destroys the currently standing trees. Some of the seeds will be stored in the National Plant Germplasm System, a depository maintained by the Agriculture Department and at the National Center for Genetic Resources Preservation. Others will be retained by Native American tribal authorities.
A map showing states and Canadian provinces at risk, with links to sources of local assistance, is available at the Emerald Ash Borer website.
Further details on seed preservation are available in a story written by Bill McAuliffe for the Star Tribune.
Invasive Asian carp are populating the Great Lakes and forcing native species out of their traditional habitats. Scientists are taking steps to contain the invaders without affecting other species. They’ve developed an underwater “wall of sound” that takes advantage of the physical differences between Asian carp and native fish.
In a tributary near Havana, about 200 miles from Chicago, ecologist Greg Sass is testing a barrier that injects beeping sounds into an effervescent wall, which captures and magnifies the noise. The chirping bothers only the carp because it hears higher frequencies than native species do; a series of tiny bones connecting the carp’s swim bladder to its auditory system amplifies sound. In hatchery trials, the acoustic “fence” stopped 95 percent of the invasive fish.
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