When you see lion fish or anacondas as invasive.. how does that work? If they live there how did they get there and what does it do to have invasive species that people are just killing animals to prevent it?
In: Planetary Science
An invasive species is one that has been brought from a completely different part of the world to a new place. In that new place, the invasive species *usually* (but not always) has adaptations that make it MUCH better at surviving and reproducing than other species that live the same way it does (e.g. other bushes if it’s a bush, other trees if it’s a tree, other predators, etc.) As a result, this harmful invasive species outcompetes local animals and damages the biosphere by making it less diverse and more sensitive to environmental catastrophe.
Usually, invasive species today are the result of humans carrying species around with us, sometimes intentionally, sometimes by accident.
Lionfish are a good example of an invasive species. In their native waters, they have predators that can handle the lionfish’s poison, and they have competitors who can eat food faster than they can, so their voracious appetite is balanced out by effects that reduce their numbers. In the Atlantic, where lionfish have been accidentally introduced, they have few to no predators because of their poisonous spines, and they can eat food much faster than other species, thus driving the native species out, potentially depleting both their food sources *and* the native life that used to feed on them.
Clover, on the other hand, is an arguably beneficial invasive species. It’s native to Europe, but has spread all over North America. It isn’t any better at being a ground cover flower than any other ground cover plants, so it doesn’t really have any effect on that. But it *does* provide some nice benefits, like giving bees another flower that grows at a different time of year, thus helping them eat more.
Unfortunately, most of the time, a successful invasive species is going to be more like lionfish than like clover. You need a very careful balance of factors for a new species to fit so nicely into an existing ecological region. If the species falls short, it won’t be able to survive and will die out. But if it’s too good, it will become a nuisance and a danger. The Goldilocks zone is small here, and few species manage to fit into it.
Latest Answers