what’s the issue with the introduction of foreign species to habitats in which they thrive? Change is a part of life and we humans ourselves are a foreign species everywhere outside of Africa.
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It’s like saying “we should be ok punching ourselves in the face, because if we don’t do it, someone else is just going to punch us in the face.”
invasive species can interfere with our way of life by disrupting eco-systems, and it’s self-inflicted. We want to care about it because we don’t want to punch ourselves in the face more than we really really have to.
You can see the damage humans have done to the environment – we may not be the best example.
Anyways, change is a part of life, that doesn’t mean that we want whatever kind of change may come. You can choose changes which are bad and try to avoid them. Changes like crops and livestock dying, pest infestations, and plants damaging homes tend to be problematic.
Humans are particularly concerned with the impact we have on the planet. We are not only the most invasive species in existence, but we are also the only species on Earth that is capable of thinking and doing something about our impact.
Some humans want to protect the environment and ecosystems to make sure that the unique plant and animal life that lives there can continue to live there and to a degree so that we can continue to enjoy it.
Other humans simply don’t care and the Earth is here “for us to consume”
Because it endangers the species that are already there. Leading to a lack of diversity of our wildlife. The issue isn’t them thriving, it’s all the other species that are now not thriving.
“Thrive” might be a bit of an understatement. Humans are actually an ideal example of an invasive species, because (at risk of sounding like an edgelord by paraphrasing Agent Smith) we don’t find an equilibrium with nature.* We just overwhelm whatever else is there and wreck the ecosystem. Other invasive species are similar in some ways.
*It well may be that we just haven’t found an equilibrium yet, as our rate of global population increase is declining, but we already do a lot of damage and our normal way of life is probably not sustainable as-is.
Part of the problem with an invasive species is that there is little that threatens it in its new environment. No diseases that affect it and no predators that eat it may let a species “thrive”, but with no pressure to keep it in check, it will take over the environment and push out the native species. Even if its something as simple as a different species of grass that the local herbivores can’t or don’t eat, it will survive when others die. Eventually, it will become the dominant species of grass, leaving less for the local herbivores to eat. If the herbivores go, the carnivores go, and you have a collapse of the local ecosystem. Basically, thriving is only good up to a point before you “thrive” at the expense of everything else.
If it disrupts the gravy train we will stomp on it as if it were a roach. Example, killing a “pest” fish because it disrupts the fishing industry.
Look up “Kudzu” and the deep south. What was supposed to be a cute plant for a zoo display is choking cities.
Imagine it this way.
Your are a nomadic person collecting grapes from a field. You spend your entire life collecting these flowers, at the end of the day you have a whole box of grapes and your full. You do this every day, and seeming as you have 1000 grape plants in your area so you simply can’t run out.
One day a farmer (the invasive species) who owns a field hundreds of miles away has been accidentally fallen asleep during the transport process and has now been brought to where you are. Where he is from, he has a very different ecosystem where theirs people like him who eat grapes but the government periodically stops a few farmers (hunting). As the farmer is especially obese, he also eats 10x as much as you do in the same time – as the unopposed species (as he has just moved there), he has the advantage of having no one stop him. He therefore harvests your whole field before the year ends, and you end up starving.
When you don’t belong to an ecosystem, you have nothing to stop you from taking the resources – the predators aren’t looking out for you and by the time anything changes the food starts to run out. This then becomes a massive domino effect.
We get extremely bothered then as the bigger animals prevalently seem to suffer the most, as they have the biggest diets and the thing below them is also struggling (and dies out) so it dies out.
Because they kill off native species and ruin the native ecosystem… much like humans have done
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