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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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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in a fully native habitat, every species there is designed to survive and thrive with the neighboring organisms. predators evolved to hunt the prey they have available, prey evolved to be able to defend against predators. Both are able to compete for others with limited resources.

when you take a species out of its native habitat and stick it somewhere where it thrives but is exotic, the issue is it can do a little too well. predators might not be able to hunt it or recognize it as food, prey and plantlife might not have proper defenses against it, and it can crowd out natives for other resources.

take for example Kudzu in the southern USA. nothing keeps it in check so it runs so rampant that its completely covered entire landscapes, trees, ground, buildings, in vines that rapidly grow back if you try to cut them down. any plantlife smothered by it eventually dies off, causing anything that fed on that plantlife to starve, and it works its way up the chain. In this case it already has had a very dramatic impact on human quality of life as well as the environment.

nature is change but that does not give us a pass to be negligent and cause disasters like this on our own. and one the subject of humans, we have caused ecological devastation wherever we go. We have messed up our environments so much that we are currently in the middle of a Mass Extinction Event, something that previously only tended to occur when stuff like asteroids hit the earth, massive supervolcanoes erupted, or when ice ages happened.

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