Comment by asdff
17 hours ago
Direct ecological management is unfortunately a bit of a game of using a bucket to fix a leaky ship. The equilibrium that established the ecosystem dynamics in the first place is disrupted. A new equilibrium might form over time, but we enforce the old one because that is what we documented when we first came to a place, even though it is no longer thermodynamically favorable.
Ironically, the ecology of an island itself came from events like a random animal swimming to it over the historical record and finding sufficient spare resources or an ecological niche they could satisfy sufficiently to reproduce. Distance from mainland and species diversity is very strongly correlated reflecting increasingly scarce odds of these "heroic journeys" at greater distances. Species themselves are capable of exhausting an islands resources and putting themselves into local extinction even with no human intervention (such as the case of the last of the mammoths on wrangel island).
A lot of work and money has gone in to preventing zebra mussels from spreading to new lakes in Minnesota. Think free sites for people to have their boats cleaned when they’re going from lake to lake, PR campaigns, etc.
My parent’s small pond, which has never seen a boat or any other real human activity, got them before the big lake it’s connected to did. Clearly there was some other way they could spread, presumably by bird.
Anyways, one by one every lake in the area no has zebra mussels. Even if they would only spread via human, it was clearly only a matter of time. As much as they suck (they’re sharp and attach themselves to basically anything in the lake) I’m not sure the expense has been worth simply delaying the inevitable.
Probably a swallow. They could carry them.
African or European?
1 reply →
> I’m not sure the expense has been worth simply delaying the inevitable.
Now that I'm jaded I ask myself how many government and private sector jobs were "created" (in sarcasm quotes because broken windows fallacy) washing all those boats for free over the years and whether they even expected to prevent the spread or if the spread is the justification for expansion.
Those are actually great jobs for the government to be creating. Having a workforce of people dedicated to maintaining the environment is invaluable. These people are so poorly paid and driven by passion for their work the government is getting a great deal on all the hard work they do.
It's really odd stuff, humans are obsessed with declaring one moment in time as the "right one" and then trying to keep it like that forever. Evolution? We need to document gods work! People driving their SUV to protests for "conservation", the irony is thick.
We can acknowledge historical change while still acting to prevent unnecessary modern destruction. To my set of values, these ecosystems are worth protection from the accelerated decay almost always caused by human development, and losing them to indifference is a permanent tragedy.