NOTE: i am in no way saying carrying invasive species around isn’t bad/harmful! it very much is a big issue. i am just a bit lost on how humans (being animals) are doing “incorrect” unnatural things since we are natural(compared to other living things who don’t necessarily harm their environment)
okay, so i don’t really understand the whole invasive species thing. when humans carry plants/animals to different regions and they start rapidly growing there, why do we need to get rid of them? humans are animals as well (great apes), and a way that seeds/eggs spread is by grabbing onto other animals as they travel. so why is it different when people do it? i’m just confused
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There are some great real-life examples to explain this:
When the British first came to New Zealand, they brought rabbits with them as a cheap food source. However, the rabbits bred faster than the humans could hunt them, and were no other predators big enough to kill a rabbit, so their population exploded.
The huge rabbit population ate the local plant life and food crops faster than they could regrow. The British decided to bring in stoats (a relative of the weasel) to hunt the rabbits and solve this problem.
However, New Zealand had a lot of native flightless birds that evolved without any major predators, and thus had no real defenses. The stoats realized that these birds were way easier prey than the rabbits, and preferentially hunted them instead. Several species went extinct as a result, and the rabbits remained a problem.
Bottom line is that if you introduce a species that 1.) can eat whatever already lives there and 2.) nothing already living there can eat it, it will cause havoc and breed out of control.
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