Introduced species are species that come into an ecosystem unexpectedly, like LL Cool J. They’ve got no predators, and are basically introduced into an ecosystem chock full of tasty food, so they breed, forcing out indigenous species, and generally making a mess of things, like Easy E. They can be introduced all sorts of ways; on purpose, because they do something useful, are tasty, or happen to look pretty; by accident, because wherever humans go, they’re going to wide up dragging animals with them, or just as habitats change and animals expand their territory. Sometimes introduced species team up with global warming to really do a number on the locals, as we’ll see.
Whether it’s a plant eating the South, rats eating flightless birds, or rabbits just eating absolutely everything, here are the five introduced species making life miserable for everybody.
1. Rabbits in Australia
Rabbits are widely considered to be adorable, cuddly creatures, unless you’re Elmer Fudd or you happen to be Australian. Australians hate rabbits, and for good reason. Rabbits cause massive amounts of damage to Australian grasslands every year and munch up millions in crops every year. They also snack on indigenous plants, causing topsoil erosion that takes hundreds of years to repair.
In fact, rabbits beat out every other species introduced into Australia, including cats, for destroying the most species. Keep in mind this is a country that has all of the most poisonous creatures ever in the history of the world. Don’t cross Thumper: he’s deadly.
So, why was such a destructive beast introduced into Australia? Who could possibly have done such a thing? Well, we know who did such a thing: Thomas Austin, a prominent settler and businessman who would have gone down in history for his charitable works if he hadn’t introduced bunnies to the continent they were going to eat. Why’d he do it? Because he missed blowing away rabbits when he went hunting, so he brought over 12 pairs of breeding rabbits and cut them loose. So, hey, at least he got some pleasure from…killing those adorable…you know, there’s no good moral here.
2. Rats everywhere
You’d think, these days, that rats were just everywhere from the dawn of time. And, well, the little furry disease-spreading little monsters are, in fact, everywhere. But it wasn’t always this way. Once, a rat was nothing more than a rumor, a curiosity, or depending on where you were a tasty snack.
Rats evolved to fit a certain ecological niche in Europe, that of being disgusting scavengers everybody hated and wanted to die. But Europe, being Europe and having a huge desire to explore, find native populations, and then promptly take their land and murder them, decided to start going everywhere in the world, and rats came with them on the boats they use. Boats were full of food, food attracted rats, so the fuzzy plague was pretty much all but inevitable.
Rats have a lot of lousy traits, but being delicate isn’t one of them; they got used to a wide variety of climates and foods really, really fast. So, wherever the Europeans went, rats soon followed, and usually the rats were even less welcome than the guys with muskets burning down all the villages and enslaving the locals. Today, rats are pretty much eating everything in the world except for Australia, and they’ve got a thriving franchise there, too. They’re killing flightless birds in New Zealand, just for example. Soon, calling New Zealanders Kiwis is just going to refer to the fruit if the rats keep up what they’re doing.
Rats: the “gift” that keeps on giving.
3. Black widow spiders in New Zealand
When one comes to New Zealand, you look at the rolling hills, the beautiful beaches, the stunning oceans, and you decide, boy, what this could really use is a horrifyingly venomous spider that’ll kill you if you so much as look at it funny.
Oh, wait, no, nobody thinks that, but too bad, because it happened anyway. Yes, once New Zealand did not have the black widow, but some way, somehow, it got the black widow, and New Zealand’s been just a little upset about that every since.
Nobody is really sure how the black widow, which doesn’t exactly buy plane tickets, got onto an island in the middle of the ocean, but they’re guessing fruit shipments. You know, because nobody hated eating healthy enough in New Zealand, they had to throw in the possibility of a slow, painful death.
4. Killer bees, Brazil
The killer bee came about because Warwick Kerr, a biologist, was trying to develop a bee that could handle the miserable conditions of the tropics. The tropics aren’t great for the fairly docile European honeybee, which, although it can still kill you if you’re allergic, generally is less aggressive and more likely just to bumble about its business, faciliating sweet plant lovin’ and making honey. This means the jungle, which is fundamentally hostile to anything not wearing plate armor, ate them up like M&Ms. The jungle is great, however, for the African honeybee, which is a lot more hostile and deadly because everything in Africa is trying to kill it and eat it, or rip apart its hive for the honey, which basically kills them. Kerr, who probably insisted to everybody he knew what he was doing, decided to play mix-and-match and wound up accidentally releasing a bunch of the African bees into the jungle, where they interbred freely and created the killer bee.
Which, by the way, earned the name by being hostile and aggressive. Killer bees will swarm and chase you for half a mile before giving up. While only one to two people die of killer bee stings a year, that’s mostly because they’re only in a small corner of the country.
Luckily, areas with harsh winters and dry summers won’t be seeing killer bees anytime soon. Which would be great except global warming is moderating winters and making summers much more moist, so they’ll be in Montana by 2015. Enjoy being chased by vicious insects, Big Sky!
5. Kudzu in the American Southeast
Kudzu is, you’d think, just a vine. How dangerous can a vine be? Kudzu was introduced with only the best of intentions, really. It came from Japan and was first featured in the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, for foraging. Later on, the government saw how fast it grew and decided it’d be absolutely great for reducing soil erosion, which happened to be true. Cue about fifteen years of planting kudzu anywhere it would grow, courtesy of the United State government.
A few fun facts about kuzu: if you give it a location that has a temperate winter, like the South, hot and humid summers, like the South, and a lot of rain, like the South, it goes absolutely crazy and starts growing everywhere so quickly you couldn’t keep it back with a flamethrower.
You get one guess what happened, or rather is still happening to the South. Hey, did we mention that global warming is pushing the “kudzu line” further and further north? If it merges with the killer bees, we’re moving to some place with sane wildlife, like the Land of Oz.
Author: Dan Seitz — Copyrighted © roadtickle.com
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