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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Humans have landed financial interests that developed with certain equilibria, and those interests will be ruined if the equilibria are changed.
For specific examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasive_species#Adverse_effects
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.
I’m gunna burn down every tree in existence because it helps me hunt easier. No biggy, change is part of nature after all. 🤷🏽♂️ S/
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.
Gradual change is a part of life.
Humans are changing too much, too fast, for natural adaptation.
There is no natural way that fish from central Asia could get to the Mississippi River, but there they are, far from all their natural predators, upsetting the balance that took tens of thousands of years to settle in.
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