National Post (National Edition)
CONSIDER THE LOBSTER
SHOULD WE BE WORRIED ABOUT INVADER SPECIES?
In June 2015, three boats set off from Brighton, England. A mile or so out to sea, their passengers dropped nearly 1,000 live crabs and lobsters into the sea. By performing the Buddhist ritual of fangsheng, or “life release,” they earned good karma, and would be absolved for past misdeeds.
The trouble was that, while some of the crustaceans had been bought at Shoreham harbour, and came from British waters, the rest were from a specialist dealer in Greenwich, and did not: American lobsters and Pacific crabs. These were noticed by a local fisherman, who alerted the Marine Management Organization, which launched a recovery operation costing $40,000. In 2017, the organizers of the fangsheng were convicted of releasing exotic species in contravention of the Wildlife and Countryside Act of 1981, and ordered to pay more than $60,000 in fines and compensation.
American lobsters are bigger, and more aggressive and fecund than native ones, which they out-compete for habitats, and they carry “red tail disease.” So they present, writes Dan Eatherley in Invasive Aliens, “the prospect of a tough, new, disease-ridden and oversexed outsider coming in and displacing a feebler native.” Eatherley is half-mocking panicky headlines, and he is wary of the political connotations of “alien,” noting that the Nazis introduced a law “banishing exotic plants from pure German landscapes.” His approach to his complex subject is open-minded, nuanced and free-ranging to the point of wildness.
Throughout history, the British Isles have been “colonized by a succession of animals, plants, fungi and other organisms that apparently
belong elsewhere.” As Sir Richard Baker observed in A Chronicle of the Kings of England (1643):
Turkeys, carps, hops, pickerel, and beer, came into England all in one year.
Cattle, sheep and goats were introduced from the Middle East in the Neolithic period. The Romans brought any number of fruits and vegetables, along with guinea fowl and the donkey. The Normans, who were wild about game, introduced fallow deer, to supplement the skittish roe and the native red, as well as pheasants and rabbits, “possibly brought by homeward-bound crusaders.”
To begin with, the delicate rabbits were kept on islands off the south coast, for their mild climate and lack of predators, and were expensive, costing the same as five chickens. But as they multiplied in the wild, they grew hardier and cheaper, and were eventually regarded as vermin. Their introduction to Australia by the First Fleet in 1778 was disastrous: by the 1960s, a billion of them had colonized most of the continent, ravaging crops, out-eating sheep, causing massive deforestation and desertification, and supplanting marsupials. The same happened in New Zealand from the 1860s.
Eatherley’s narrative abounds in such unintended consequences. In the 1950s, Mao Zedong declared war on sparrows, as an agricultural pest, but their eradication led to plagues of locusts and famine, and they had to be reintroduced from the Soviet Union. In 1890, Eugene Schieffelin, chairman of the American Acclimatization Society, released 60 starlings into Central Park in New York, as part of a scheme to populate North America with all the birds mentioned in Shakespeare. They are now the continent’s most abundant bird, numbering about 200 million, blamed for eating $750 million worth of agricultural produce annually, for transmitting gastroenteritis to farm animals and for bringing down aircraft by clogging their engines.
Acclimatization societies were all the rage in 19th-century Europe, and prompted a fashion for “paradises” on great country estates, most notably the one established at Woburn by the 11th Duke of Bedford. American elk and reindeer did not thrive there, but Japanese sika did, as did the Reeves’s muntjac and Pere David’s deer, and the exquisite mandarin duck.
The duke also introduced what Eatherley calls “a bark-stripper, a cable-chewer, a fire-starter, a plague-spreader, a thief, a vandal; a bushy-tailed, oversexed killer with a weakness for Nutella”: the grey squirrel. Thanks to the greys, the red squirrel population has fallen from more than 3.5 million to 140,000, and for practically wiping out Squirrel Nutkin, greys are shot, bludgeoned, drowned and poisoned on an industrial scale.
There is a Government scheme, backed by the Prince of Wales, to addict them to Nutella spiked with contraceptive, and they are eaten, in a slow-cooked ragu, at a London restaurant called Native, and in Cumbria in “Critter Fritter.” Their flavour is said to be nutty.
The duke’s favourite plant was giant hogweed, which was grown in the gardens of Buckingham Palace. But in the 1970s, after children began turning up in hospitals with burning blisters, it was demonized as a kind of triffid. To plant it is now an offence punishable by imprisonment or a fine of up to $80,000. More hated is Japanese knotweed, first cultivated by the Royal Horticultural Society in the early 19th century. Its heart-shaped leaves and creamy blossom enraptured Victorian gardeners, it was used by engineers to stabilize railway embankments, and by the 1960s it could be found from Cornwall to the Outer Hebrides. But it is disastrous in cities, where its root systems, extending to up to 60 feet, can block drains and undermine foundations. A survey last year found that it had knocked $40 billion off the UK property market.
Only about 10 per cent of arrivals in Britain thrive in the wild, but nearly a third of terrestrial species are classed as introduced, naturalized or feral. It is “often hard to sort out the native from foreign,” and in any case “the balance of nature” is a “somewhat nebulous concept, more or less impossible to quantify.” But “new organisms are arriving all the time, the pace of arrivals is rising and, yes, a handful of them do appear to cause problems.”
Recent invaders include the Asian hornet, which preys on honeybees; the monstrous New Zealand flatworm, which consumes earthworms in a most disgusting fashion, ruining the soil and starving the birds and animals that depend on them; and the Florida rocksnail, a predatory whelk that threatens native limpets, barnacles and bivalves.
Since the fight against most invasive species is unwinnable, Eatherley asks: why bother? “What if they’re not actually a problem at all?” Those who put that argument are dismissed as “invasive species deniers,” while those who recommend the reintroduction of extinct species, or “rewilding,” are accused of “eco-nostalgia.” Often, Eatherley concludes, “the true ‘invasive species’ is us.”