MS. REBECCA SHEIR
The D.C. region is more than just a global gathering place for people. There are creatures here from all over the world, too.
MR. ROB SACHS
But that kind of globalization isn't necessarily a good thing. WAMU environmental reporter, Sabri Ben-Achour, has more on our area's international natural world.
MR. SABRI BEN-ACHOUR
Biologist Jonathan McKnight's office is piled high with files and reports and a monstrous looking dead rodent staring down from a shelf.
MR. JONATHAN MCKNIGHT
This guy here is the Nutria. This is a 20 pound on average swamp rat that was introduced from South America because everybody thought, wouldn't it be great to have a whole new animal that we could make fur coats out of?
McKnight is in charge of fighting invasive species with Maryland's department of natural resources. He says the Nutria, with its long orange teeth feet, is an existential threat to our region's marshes.
These guys didn't just graze upon that ecosystem in those marsh grasses, they actually ate it whole. They would leave a mud flap behind where there was a healthy productive marsh.
That's what evasive species does. Without any predators or parasites to stop it, it just runs amuck. It drives other life forms out. McKnight says it just messes up the natural balance.
It doesn't play by the rules that have allowed all the other species to find a happy home.
And sometimes in weird ways. The Asian bush honeysuckle has lower branches than native bushes so birds who nest there are more susceptible to predators. North African wood wasps carry fungus that kills forests and that's just two of the ones that are here or close by. I mean, there's the snake head...
The rusty crayfish.
The chestnut (word?) .
The fire ant.
Our invasive species come from all over the globe. And in fact, it's the acceleration of the global economy and moving things at high speeds all over the world that's really accelerated the introduction of new species. We have a tremendous amount of species from Asia. Similar latitudes in other places so they've got a climate that they can roughly adapt to.
But as McKnight points out, not every foreign creature is invasive.
Many of the things that we have in our gardens, most of the things that our entire agricultural system is based upon are, in fact, in almost all cases, not native organisms.
So apples, they're originally from Tajikistan. Or cows, they're originally from Europe and India.
Cows are really -- they're scenic and delicious. They're not moving into an ecosystem and damaging it.
But invasive are different.
In most cases, an invasive species that is able to get into the environment and do well there is a lost cause.
As we talk, McKnight holds up a small jar with wavy striped shells in it.
The Zebra mussel.
30 years ago, these little guys hitchhiked from Russia in the ballast wall of ships and landed in the Great Lakes. Now, they're in the Susquehanna River in Maryland. They multiply and stick to everything.
I've seen things like boat cooling water intakes just choked with these things. They'll attach themselves to any hard surface and in fact, in some cases, a live animal, like a crayfish or something like that.
The Zebra mussels even host diseases that can be transmitted to birds. The U.S. fish and wildlife service estimates the mussels will cost the country $5 billion over ten years.
It's actually a tremendous economic threat.
And in a sense, some invasives are undoing evolution. They threaten to wipe out speciation and diversity that took hundreds of millions of years to create.
I think that the trend is towards fewer species dominating larger and larger areas of landscape. And some ecologists have even talked about entering a new global era called the Homogocene, where there's a homoginazation of natural communities and ecosystems and species from all over the world.
In some cases, sometimes the genie can be put back in the bottle. For instance, McKnight says Maryland could irradiate the Nutria, that's that rat that threatens to devour the economic basis of the Chesapeake Bay in the next five years.
We're using satellite imagery, GPS locators, radio telemetry in combination with trapping of animals.
It hasn’t been cheap. It's taken a decade so far and nearly $2 million a year to do it. The best strategy, he says, is preventing invasives, such as the Nutria, from ever getting here in the first place. I'm Sabri Ben-Achour.
And if you go to our website, metroconnection.org, you can find pictures of some of the critters mentioned in Sabri's story, along with links to see what's invading your neighborhood.
You can also see some of the things you can do to prevent these little guys or at least keep them under control.
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