This is huge - Lake Mead is filled with these things and they are clogging intake channels and ruining shorelines. The toll they have taken on the lake is insane. Don't let these things grow - wipe them out - for the sake of lakes and ponds everywhere!
Filled with zebra mussels, you mean, not aquarium moss balls.
Invasive species are all over the place here in Michigan, too. We've got purple loosestrife, Eurasian milfoil, zebra and quagga mussels, and others at an ever-growing subset of our lakes. Many of these are isolated glacial kettle lakes, swamp- or spring-fed, with fast-flowing outlet streams that keep invasive species downstream until humans introduce them.
The problem with these aquatic hitch-hikers is that it only takes one fool to purge his boat live well or dump an unwanted aquarium fish 'humanely' into the lake to ruin it for everyone. I can be super careful, purging the freshwater cooling system of my boat motor between lakes, but it's a battle you only have to loose once; I don't know of any lake that's been successful in removing zebra mussels after they've established themselves.
As a child, one of five lakes we visited regularly had zebra mussels coating every rock. Now four of those five have succumbed. I know it wasn't me in recent years - I powerwash the boat exterior and purge the freshwater cooling system every time - but a lot of people here don't believe that humans can have a significant detrimental effect on the environment, so I fear all my efforts are for naught.
I recently heard an interesting podcast about the feral hog problem growing in the southern US. They seemed to feel like the incentives put in place to exterminate the hogs has backfired and may have led to the spread of the hog population.
It's like the old story of the British paying bounties for cobra carcasses in India -- enterprising people started breeding cobras as a source of income:
I just saw a massive sounder in Cali the other day. They are a boar / feral hog hybrid apparently, and there must've been 2 dozen of them. I would not have wanted to come across that group on foot, I felt glad to be in my car.
I sometimes wonder how since we've managed to hunt some things to extinction, couldn't we give folks some incentive to do the same to some of these invasive species?
Granted, the commercial value / usage of some of these invasive species is probably low to 0. And even commercial ventures probably would care to keep the business going ...
And even places that have had open hunting for feral pigs still have problems with them.
I just wonder sometimes... we're good at wiping stuff out sometimes, wish we could harness it for good.
Some parts of the southern US have a bounty on nutria tails. On top of the bounty I think there's some nice incentives because IMO invasive species are a relatively ethical source of fur (if you're killing them anyways, might as well use the fur).
However I think these sorts of programs are tricky because if you make the incentives TOO good you can end up with really bad side effects. For example the (apocryphal?) story about how India created a cobra bounty to reduce the wild population, and people eventually realized it was easier and still profitable to just breed cobras at home. When the government realized this, they stopped the program. With no more incentive to raise the cobras, the breeders let them go, increasing the overall population.
If they'd announced this an appropriate period ahead (5 days maybe) then people running home farms would have cashed them in and hunters would have gone out for one last catch.
Though the hard details of this story are hard to find.
I think the more effective programs for population control involve allowing hunters to tag more of a particular animal along side lengthening the hunting season for them.
People largely enjoy hunting enough that they don't need an economic incentive to do so. Pigs are pretty tasty too.
Are they good to eat? If they aren't good as food, or for fur/skin, what's the motiviation to hunt them? Pure sport maybe, but many hunters will elect to spend their time and ammunition on something more desireable.
Feral pigs are just big pigs with overgrown teeth and more hair, something about freedom makes them even more aggressive than they normally are so never get near a wild souder (group). Yes, they are good to eat if in good areas but they usually have worms so cook well. Many ranches have cage traps set for this very reason.
TX declared open season on feral hogs and offers a bounty per tail as funds permit, there is no reason to "cobra farm" them as prolific as they are. Enterprising souls have even offered "chopper rides" for the shared cost of ammo & fuel so you could hunt down a sounder and kill them with a variety of full-auto fire weapons (M60, M240, Mini-gun, etc) from the safety of the air. Yes, it sounds horrible till you consider the amount of damage they do to everything in their path and with a population of 10mil+ you aren't really making a dent.
This stuff always makes me wonder if at the end of the day we’re better off just not messing with nature at all, like somehow despite our best intentions we do even more harm by attempting to mitigate a previous harm.
There’s just so many factors, I never was one to think extinction was necessarily a bad thing for example, but some view it as a huge loss or even as some kind of evil.
I’m sure there’s plenty of species that have been phased out and new ones that adapted into being all throughout history, but we look at it through this simplistic human view and say “we must absolutely do this to preserve or do this to destroy because of XYZ reasons” and given our track record over the past thousand years when it comes to science I have to assume there’s a high chance that we are very wrong in our assumptions.
Like climate change, the problem isn't just extinction itself, but more so the rate. As you note, animals have gone extinct all throughout history, and well before our ancestors stopped dragging their knuckles around. The problem is this, which I will quote directly from my source:
"...scientists agree that today’s extinction rate is hundreds, or even thousands, of times higher than the natural baseline rate. Judging from the fossil record, the baseline extinction rate is about one species per every one million species per year." [0]
Also, there is also the fact that many species could be directly beneficial to us. Even if we didn't care about "nature" most would care about cures for various diseases and advancements in technology we could get from their study.
Honestly I think your comment is so broad that it's vacuous.
In this specific case, mitigating the spread of zebra mussels through prevention has a clear and explicit benefit, in preserving natural north american ecosystems. The collapse of Lake Michigan's fisheries is a case in point.
I've been visiting all of the Great Lakes except Lake Ontario pretty regularly since I was a kid in the 1980s. The zebra mussels have really improved the clarity of the water, but at significant expense to humans, native mussels, and likely a lot of other species[1]. The effect on the inland lake where we stay has been dramatic, too. The water clarity changed dramatically in just a few years. Their effects make the water very photogenic, but I'm sure it's a net negative.
This is a subset of the "grey goo" scenario and to properly enjoy the fantasy, you should acknowledge that the natural world _is_ the grey goo scenario. Predators and prey are filling every niche they can, from the microscopic to the remaining megafauna.
Zebra muscles are prolific, and anything that can prey upon them is well rewarded. Like the Lake Erie White Fish.
Also they are tuff. They have about 1” of skull. They also have platted shoulders. This means that many handgun calibers do little to them. Well placed shots in the eye or ear will take them about. Otherwise you need a high powered round like a .454 or .3030.
This means most creatures can’t take them on. We’ve also removed some that could like wolves.
They reproduce rapidly. Even with wolves, their numbers grow because most alpha predators don’t want to fuck around with them for fun, only for food. Once the pack is satiated, the piggies move on.
Boar are from Spain. They would let the pigs go while exploring. Come back a year later and you have a stocked larder. Hunt pig to get meat back on the menu.
Boomers from the upper Midwest may remember the invasive alewife infestation of Lake Michigan of the 60s. They died after spawning in such vast numbers that bulldozers were used to clear them from the beaches[0]. The solution: Coho and then Chinook salmon, that took the alewife population down and introduced the big fish to the sport fishing industry around the lake.
In 1990, the zebra mussels showed up and quickly covered the lake bottom, taking so much nutrient, that the alewife and then salmon populations were in duress.
That makes 3 invasive species, one intentionally introduced, all creating ecological imbalance. It also illustrates how little we can foresee the unintended consequences of attempting to 'sculpt' the systems.
This is a great video showing how precipitously balanced ecosystems really are. The re-introduction of the wolf to Yellowstone park ultimately led to a greater diversity of birds and fish, for example[1].
