Invasive Species and Local Community
When I was in primary school, red-eared slider was a popular pet in my hometown (an east city in China). It was cheap, safety, beautiful, and docile, and we didn’t need to spend too much time on it. Sometimes if a family did not want to keep it, they would free captive it in local river. However, the behavior severely endanger local species.
Red-eared slider is labeled as “killer” by some scientists. Because it is an invasive species to my hometown local community.
Alien species are animals and plants which introduced by human into places where they are not originally found. An alien species may endanger the local ecology by following ways:
1. Eating wide range of food with high hunting ability, disrupting local food network; 2. Strong competitiveness, threatening other species in the same level; 3. Carrying pathogens which do less effect on their own but can largely impact local species pathogens; 4. Pollute local genetic pool by interspecies cross. Red ear turtle has all of these features.
If we call them injurious animals, it is not fair for these invasive species. they are just in the wrong place, and it is human ourselves who cause the mistake. The problem is due to human’s irresponsible activities. So the key to prevent the invasion of alien species is limiting people’s behavior with laws and regulations.
I believe that mostly people bring alien animals to a place without bad intention. Maybe they just take an alien animal home because they love it. But if the alien animal go into local ecosystem, that may cause the local species to lose their living space, even extinct.
Now I’ll give another examples of invasive species. Africanized honey bee is considered to be a highly aggressive species. Unlike red ear turtle, africanized honey bee is the result of an experiment. The experiment was to improve the reproductive capacity of a European bee I species. In 1957, 26 queen bees were accidentally released. These queen bees were mated with the local bees, and then produced hybrid bees, and these hybrid bees were more adaptable to the local environment local bees. In 2007, these hybrid bees were found only in the New Orleans region. But in 2009, their hives were found in Utah. In the south of the United States, they are constantly spreading.
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red-eared_slider
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasive_species
http://io9.gizmodo.com/5833022/10-of-the-worlds-worst-invasive-species
http://cisr.ucr.edu/africanized_honey_bee.html
Picture:
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/be/b9/15/beb9156f556eceb1b2905c5dbfad5c25.jpg
