Hey so I get the idea of an invasive species being a species that’s none local to a place and is causing damage to it but can someone please if a species is introduced to an area where it’s not native to but instead of causing harm to the environment or ecosystem is instead actually very beneficial to it is it still considered an invasive species?/Answered but feel free to still respond if you want
In: Planetary Science
It depends on how you define the term “invasive species”. Many laws define it as being an organism that causes or is likely to cause ecological or economic harm. If that is the definition then a foreign yet beneficial organism would not be an invasive species.
Other definitions just say any non-native species is an invasive species, and in that case you could have an invasive species that nobody really is worried about.
It’s popular to differentiate along the lines of native, adapted, and invasive.
Native plants originated in the area in which they live.
Adapted plants may not be from the area, but they survive and do not out-compete the native plants, so the native plants can remain and continue to uphold their role in the ecosystem.
Invasive plants out-compete the native plants and slowly take their place, cutting them out of the ecosystem and leading to collapse.
I’ve thought about the same thing. As others have said “it depends on what you mean by invasive”. Imo, any introduced specimen must be at the very least displacing a native counterpart which until recently did not have that competition.
Maybe some counter examples of you’re interested (North American). Dandelions are often said to be beneficial because they provided some of the first food sources for important pollinators. Honey bees, important pollinators, are mostly introduced. And Earth worms which are important to still development and bird food are introduced.
Invasive Species usually only refer to animals and plants that are harmful and unable to be naturally controlled.
For others that generally did not cause major issues it would usually be referred to as simply non-native/exotic/introduced/naturalized. Virtually no introduced species in history have had a net positive impact on the ecosystem except when they are introduced to deal with an invasive species. This is because even if the plant or animal isn’t wildly out of control, there are limited resources in an ecosystem, food, space, light, water, nutrients, etc, and by default the presence of a new species means its taking away resources from another somewhere else.
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