This sort of panic and intolerance regarding non-native species can be considered official policy. Last month, for example, the discovery of aquatic visitors from Asia in Ontario lakes prompted a familiar cry: “Freshwater jellyfish invade Lake Erie” screamed the London Free Press, which called the incursion “another unwelcome addition to a long list of invasive species in the Great Lakes region.” In Montreal recently, a flock of sheep was unleashed on a local park because they eat “invasive species like buckthorn and … uproot them so they don’t grow back.” He writes regularly on gardening for the Daily Telegraph.As peaceful and welcoming as Canadians like to think of themselves, we spend an awful lot of time claiming to be under attack from foreign threats. Mini-bio: Ken Thompson was for twenty years a lecturer in the Department of Animal and Plant Sciences at the University of Sheffield. He discusses, too, whether our fears could be getting in the way of conserving biodiversity, and responding to the threat of climate change. But do we need to fear invaders? And indeed, can we control them, and do we choose the right targets? Ken Thompson puts forward a fascinating array of narratives to explore what he sees as the crucial question – why only a minority of introduced species succeed, and why so few of them go on to cause trouble. We have all heard the horror stories of invasives, from Japanese knotweed that puts fear into the heart of gardeners to brown tree snakes that have taken over the island of Guam.
This is a classic example of the contradictions of ‘native’ and ‘invasive’ species, a hot issue right now, as the flip-side of biodiversity. They evolved in North America, retain their greatest diversity in South America, and the only remaining wild dromedaries are in Australia. Synopsis: Where do camels belong? In the Arab world may seem the obvious answer, but they are relative newcomers there.
Where Do Camels Belong?: The story and science of invasive species by Ken Thompson
0 kommentar(er)
