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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Another factor to add to the other answers: Time.
Each local ecosystem evolved over thousands of generations. Every species is in a balancing act with other parts of their system, constantly evolving to cooperate or compete with other species. But when you introduce an invasive species, their new prey don’t have time to adapt to overcome this new threat, and the other species relying on the same resource cannot compete as effectively. All it takes is a couple of generations to start a domino effect and destroy the whole system. Sometimes, even the invasive species can be wiped out because they killed off their prey and have no more food. The sudden introduction of an extremely well adapted species is usually the problem. If you introduce a new type of rabbit-like species to a forest with similar species and predators that can eat it and keep its population in check, they *may* replace the species that previously occupied that spot in the system, or reach a new balance after a few generations, though it’s very hard to be sure about such things.
More ELI>5 info: Predator-prey relationships are sometimes modeled as chaotic systems. When such a system is in a steady state, small changes can shift the whole system to a new, slightly different, steady state (which probably happens often naturally). But sometimes the right changes can make the whole system spiral into chaos and completely break down. And that’s just with 2 or 3 species systems. Imagine scaling it up to a few thousand interacting groups. Same reason why predicting the impact of climate change on local weather patterns or the ecosystem is so complicated.
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