Oh! That's Stinknet? OK. Well, yeah. It's everywhere in Arizona. There were recently some winds and an uptick in weed growth in just about every neighborhood in the Phoenix metro from what I saw. As csb6 mentioned, it's everywhere. I'm not sure people are really paying that much attention though. Weeds are weeds. You get rid of them. They happen.
Personally, I think it's a quite attractive weed. I don't want it in my yard, and I've gotten rid of it a few times now, but I don't mind it. It's just a part of lawn maintenance, and there is a period of time where I enjoy the natural growth before a manicure.
That being said, it has made some abandoned plots look like meadows now, in my opinion. I welcome the change.
> Personally, I think it's a quite attractive weed.
That's probably the reason why it got to the US in the first place. Germany now has a massive problem with these "weeds": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impatiens_glandulifera - looks nice in pictures, but it has a hard to describe smell that's very unpleasant. Fortunately it's not blanketing the entire landscape like stinknet in Arizona, but lately where I live it's everywhere in wet, shady clearings in forests, and also outcompeting native species.
I wonder of there's any work being done to "turn off" any of the undesirable traits of some weed like that so it becomes a plant you want to have around that mostly takes care of itself?
David Gerrold started an interesting series of SF books - War Against the Chtorr - with a similar premise, but the invasive species were a deliberate attack by aliens. "Terraformation", but the other way around.
One of my favorite series in the 90s in high school! I had the same mental connection you did. Gerrold also wrote the "Trouble With Tribbles" episode of the original Star Trek, which is similar to the Chtorr books.
From what I understand, Gerrold had a son with severe learning disabilities and was unable to finish it. Which sucks, but I also understand.
...and reading that wiki link, I see 1 or 2 books are in the works, though no updates since 2017 or so. I'll put this fact in my GRRM bin for now.
Yeah, I guess that's a good point. I think the reality of the matter based on the spread that I've seen though is that land owners will have to adapt.
It's just so tremendously prolific. You're not going to simply pull all of it, or glyphosate spray all of it. It's just not happening. You'd need an earth mover.
Conservation of nature is something I care a lot about.
But isn’t this the natural process playing out? A plant is evolutionarily fit to survive this desert. It is introduced randomly by an animal. It prospers and colonized the otherwise inhabitable area.
In the process, moisture is retained in soil (sand), nitrogen fixing bacteria enter, and the next most fit species also is able to enter.
This repeats a few thousand times and the desert starts to bloom.
At what point is conservation of the environmental process the better option compared to conservation of the environment in a human powered stasis?
That's what I was just thinking, same as people complaining in Scotland about heather and bracken. If you don't do anything proactive to plant native spieces and help them establish then you have to let nature do it however it wants to and it won't always look nice.
You also have to be much more strict about grazing. The problem with certain parts of the world is that you can sell all the land off to whomever and they can do whatever they want with it. 2M acres of grassland all eaten bare by sheep or cows? Yeah, no problem mate.
"“I don't believe that we'll be able to remove stinknet just by pulling it. We're going to need some chemical methods as well.” —Samuel Shaw, editorial intern"
i'm confused by this credit to the comment. "Samuel Shaw is an editorial intern for High Country News based in the Colorado Front Range." is this really a job title where someone can just add their own opinions? the strong advice of needing chemicals is not advice i feel comfortable on following from an intern. this comment really took the whole article down in credibility in my opinion (since they seem so open to expressing opinions).
It’s not the best written or typeset. However I think that’s a quote from Armstrong?
> Armstrong, however, said that Maricopa County will need to resort to herbicides, which may pose their own risks. “I don't believe that we'll be able to remove stinknet just by pulling it. We're going to need some chemical methods as well.”
It is an unusual comment when there are other methods for removing invasive pests other than pulling them out. When they work Biological pest control methods can be extremely effective and work quickly.
While some forms of bio control require extensive research programs to prove safety, others can be as simple as planting native species that complete with the weed.
Here in New Zealand, gorse is a horrible, also yellow, woody shrub weed that is near impossible to remove with chemicals or by pulling it out (it just grows back). A solution was found simply to plant native trees under the gorse. The gorse ends up sheltering the native tree and once the native grows up it shades the gorse and the gorse dies off.
A lot of bio control research is done in New Zealand to help pacific islands deal with invasive species. The tropical climates mean that when invasive weeds arrive, they spread like crazy disrupting the fragile ecosystems.
Biological control is important but not a panacea. Not all invasive species have predators/diseases that are effective, specific, and maintain a viable population without human intervention.
Biological control can go horribly wrong. One of the most notorious examples is the cane toad, which is in plague proportions across northern Australia.
In fairness to me I never said it was a panacea, just that mechanical removal and chemicals are not the only option.
Biological control practised today is vastly different to the old days of "let's just see how it goes" and introduce a large mammals, reptiles or amphibians (see the famous Simpsons episode).
Today it is a long scientific process to ensure the control measure is hyper targeted. Sometimes it works great other times it just doesn't work at all and the agent dies off, but gone of the days of a failure being an ecological disaster.
An example of successful biological control of an invasive plant in North America is Purple Loosestrife. This otherwise attractive plant created large monotonous colonies in wetlands. Insects such as Galerucella calmariensis and Hylobius transversovittatus, which feed on the plant and keep it under control back in Eurasia, were found, evaluated, and introduced to the North America, to great effect. One sees the plant now but it's kept from running wild.
"The tale of the gypsy moth is intriguing on several levels, including its mysterious control by a fungus (Hajek 2007). Originally brought to the US to breed with the native silkworms, the gypsy moth, Lymantria dispar L., escaped through a broken window in Medford, MA in 1868-9 and began defoliating deciduous forests and shade trees in many regions of North America. High populations of this pest are uncommon in areas where it has long been established (Europe, northern Africa and temperate Asia), but outbreaks have occurred where gypsy moth has invaded without its natural enemies. Fungal infected gypsy moths were found in Japan and brought back and released in the Boston area in 1910-11, but apparently didn’t take. By 1997, dozens of other natural enemies were also released but none provided effective control.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, scientists noticed gypsy moth cadavers hanging from trees in the northeastern forests and identified the cause as a fungal infection. This discovery renewed interest in using fungi for control. Molecular studies indicated that the infection was caused by the same species of fungus, Entomophaga maimaiga, as the one collected in Japan in the early 1900’s, but that it was not identical to that fungus or to the same species collected and released in 1985-86. When and where did it come from and how was it spread? The answer seems that it was an accidental introduction from Japan and probably occurred after 1971. Perhaps even more interesting is that fact that it has spread across the contiguous distribution of the gypsy moth in the Northeastern US. This spread is due to aerial dispersal of spores from gypsy moth larvae and perhaps to human activity, as gypsy moths are prone to move long distances on the undersides of vehicles. There is interest in using infected gypsy moth, or the fungus itself, to inoculate the leading edges of newly infested areas and prevent outbreaks of this devastating pest. However, details of the introduction and establishment of US populations of E. maimaiga remain a mystery."
It looks like that is a signoff for the end of the article, not the author quoting himself. I think it's just continuation of quoting from the person who was quoted above. Slightly sloppy by not attributing the quote, but in context it seems fine. Combined with confusing signoff for the article.
I have worked on a conservation project that was trialing out some pesticides for use on stinknet.
Some points people are missing is that
1. the Sonoran desert is not a barren ecosystem. It is the most biodiverse desert in the world it does not need to have its soil “fixed” it is doing fine.
2. the actual problem with this plant is how fast it grows. Almost all ecosystems are subject to wildfire at some point and it matters how frequently these wildfires hit. The Sonoran desert is not build for frequent and intense fires and with stinknet growing and dying and building up lots of flammable material the fires are happening much more frequently and are much hotter. This is killing native animals and cactuses that are not adapted to these frequent fires.
Ugh, let's unpack this. Trying to maintain a stable ecology is nativist. Those seeds are just looking for a better home with more biological opportunity. All the lifeforms currently in the Sonoran desert blew in, too. And destroyed all the First Species, I might add.
The replacement of native species by globe chamomile (don't use st*nknet--it's a slur) is just a conspiracy theory by failing plant hegemons to maintain their own ecological privilege. Future globe chamomile sub-species might be the next Willow or Redwood. Plant diversity is our strength.
And let's be clear. There's no proven relationship between wildfires and globe chamomile. All evidence comes from systemically nativist orgs like the National Park Service and Ivy-League ecology departments. And even if globe chamomile did cause wildfires, that's just their biological role and it enriches the soil and we should applaud it. They capture sunlight where other plants don't. What else is going to build nutrient density? Creosote? It's so NIMBY that it creates dead zones around itself by stealing all the water for itself. It's not globe chamomile's fault that creosote and pinyon can't seed enough to compete. Learn to grow. It's 2023.
Next, you'll be claiming the arrival of eucalyptus in the 19th century in California was an ecological mistake. I've been all around the Bay Area and NorCal and never got hit by an exploding tree. It's a myth and a stereotype. And even if they did, it would purely be because of climactic factors.
Y'all need to adapt. We live in a Global Ecology. Ecologies are biological constructs that change over time. What used to be considered "invasive species" (although we strongly prefer the term "novel trophic worker" to avoid using speciestic and nativist terminology) are now the backbones of rich and diverse biomes in not only California but all over North America. In fact, novel trophic workers and their progeny are on track to be the majority of plant species in North America. What's wrong with novel trophic workers becoming the dominant natives? Are ecological niches treated poorly, or something?
First I did not say we should keep ecosystems stable, I don't believe that.
There is a difference between non-native and invasive species.
Non-native species: These are species that have been moved from their native habitats to a new environment, usually as a result of human activities. Non-native species can be any type of organism, including plants, animals, fungi, and bacteria.
Invasive species: These are non-native species that not only survive in their new environments but also reproduce rapidly and spread widely, causing harm to the local ecosystem, economy, or human health. They can out-compete native species for resources, alter habitats, and disrupt ecosystem functions.
invasive species invade an ecosystem and mess up the ecological balance. Many species go extinct and a new ecological hierarchy is formed and the landscape changes. Isn't this what has been happening for eons? How did marsupials get to Australia from America, how did horses take over the Eurasian steppe, there are many example like that. Who are we to "manage and conserve" biodiversity? I don't think we have the power or the right to do that. just my 2¢.
I suspect we may well see something similar here: stinknet is going gangbusters right now because it's been wet and it doesn't have local enemies yet. The first is guaranteed to change, and the second is very likely to.
are there any organic chemistry uses for the constituents of this weed? Looks like the essential oil is ~30% camphor. Could it become an industrial precursor for sunscreen?
>We removed 1.5 million plants at 21 events in seven state parks this year.
I have been involved in Ardisia and Tallow removal efforts here in the US south. When the infestation is this bad, you're not going to solve it with mechanical methods, no matter how hard you try and how many people you have doing it. Chemicals can definitely help, but they often have unexpected detrimental side effects to other native plants and animals (though sometimes they have unexpected beneficial effects on other native plants - I've seen rare prairie natives pop up in Louisiana after Triclopyr killed off overcrowded baccaris under power lines).
I wonder, could we develop a "gene drive" for plants?
No, that's a bit like being happy that locusts are bringing so much life to your field. A single plant growing explosively over a large area with scarce resources should be worrying.
All the other native species (insects, birds, etc.), which are dependent upon the native plants for food & shelter, also tend to die off.
Overall, it's about as good as a (Star Trek reference) Cardassian occupation. And invasive species are not intelligent, to set up a decent "New Order" in any sort of reasonable or tolerable time frame.
It's not wrong, but yes... weeds are the frontier plants for an ecosystem that doesn't yet exist. Two issues at hand: 1st is that they out-compete native plants and 2nd is that people don't like change. Maybe they like the desert.
Every organism alive today out-competed some “native” organism to get there, that isn’t an issue. The 2nd point is the only relevant point, and it’s weak as can be.
They are occupying the space left behind by human activity. Chemicals will only create more resistant strains just like it did with Amaranth. The reason these plants are successful is the horrendous landscaping traditions especially in new developments. The use of chemicals only reinforces these plants. Basically what's happening is these strains are put under so much pressure in the urban environment that they becomes "super-weeds" and then invade the rest of the landscape. It might be too late to do anything about it now.
I don’t think stinknet requires cleared land. Vegetation in the Arizona desert doesn’t form an unbroken canopy. Water is the limiting factor, and stinknet is apparently more efficient than any native plant at immediately converting water into explosive growth and immensely prodigious seed production.
It may well be that the natural course for stinknet is to dominate all other desert vegetation to such an extent that it forms a monoculture that fails to maintain ground nutrients and creates evolutionary pressure toward symbiosis with native plants. But it could take a hundred thousand years for Arizona stinknet to become a good citizen.
Worth noting a “weed” is just any plant-based life form the man doesn’t like, for whatever reason. Commoners are told a distinction between native and invasive life, but this is a facade. It is not uncommon for native species, such as the Western Juniper, to be classified as “weeds” and subject to expensive removal efforts, despite being a fully natural part of the environment.
"The New Wild (2016) by Fred Pearce is a fascinating different perspective on introduced species and their role in ecosystems. Fred Pearce is an environmental writer who writes for New Scientist.
Pearce puts forward the idea that landscapes that are truly untouched by man are very rare and possibly don’t even exist. He puts forward many, many examples of species that are regarded as native that have been brought in. He also points out that naturally with a changing climate species have been moving forever.
The book recounts how a new volcanic island was rapidly colonised by species from elsewhere. He also writes about Ascension Island in the South Atlantic that had hardly any vegetation but that visitors turned into a rich ecosystem. But it is far from an untouched one."
Species have been moving around a lot, dynamically, for a long time. The idea that some species are 'invasive' and others are native is just picking a snapshot in time.
> that some species are 'invasive' and others are native is just picking a snapshot in time.
What's your point?
Invasive plants are still invasive. It's not always a problem but if they're getting labelled invasive it's usually because they're having a negative impact on the existing ecosystem or would if left unchecked.
Negative is relative to our human needs of the status quo I guess but again I don't really see that as an issue what other frame of reference would we be discussing?
Name a plant that wasn’t at some point “invasive”. You can’t. We call plants invasive when we see their spread, and native otherwise. But whether a human observed a particular organism spreading matters precisely not at all.
Yes, we call plants invasive when we see them spreading uncontrollably, that's the word we have decided to use to describe this occurrence.
Native plants is a term used to describe plants that were present before humans got involved.
It's a human centric way to view the world but I guess it's better than us trying to dick around making everything human agnostic considering we're all human and share a bunch of human context with each other.
Why is that worth noting here? This specific plant is invasive, damaging, and non-native. Quibbling on the definition of a "weed" seems completely non-sequitur.
It is worth noting because it brings more self awareness. The 'weedness' of the plant is a property of human culture, and it is worth exploring what that is. It doesn't mean the 'weedness' doesn't exist: there are many reason we don't like a plant and want to destroy certain plants and some are quite valid, like fire hazards for example.
For example, you quote non-nativeness as a self-evident negative property of the plant. But this is highly debatable. It is not clear at all what nativeness means in the plant world (really) or if it really is undesirable. There are some common ideas around being 'not beneficial to biodiversity' for example, but it turns out plants are relatively quick to adapt and gain relationships.
Dismissing these perspectives as non-sequitur and not worth exploring isn't really contributing to an insightful discussion. I'm not saying weeds are good or something like that, I just want to convince you this actually is worth noting and exploring.
It's not worth noting. There is quite a few people in this thread arguing for the sake of arguing about what a weed is in a thread about a very serious weed taking over very large swaths of habitat.
It's not disgusting. It's a question of how we view nature. The idea that we can just preserve ecosystems as they were isn't very tenable. The idea that invasive species don't deserve to be invasive is questionable. We're making all these value judgements about what nature and shouldn't be. But nature has always changed, just depends on the time scale.
And life has always spread into new areas and become invasive. We did so migrating out of Africa. So does an ant colony floating on a log to an island that didn't have ants before. Life colonized the oceans, then it colonized the lands, and it colonizes new islands that popup, and populations shift around as the climate changes and new migration routes become available. The Sahara was a savanna thousands of years ago.
That’s two very loaded terms to apply to an organism which has done nothing more than find a niche in which it excels. Do you have any justification at all to support the slander, aside from the juvenile mantra “native=good; introduced=bad”?
(keep in mind you’re a member of the most disruptive introduced species of all time)
The idea of invasive centers on the notion that ecosystems are largely static. But the reality is the environment is dynamic and always changing, with or without humans. Life has always migrated all over the place. There is no ideal state of nature. There's no lasting equilibrium. Yes, humans speed change by giving species a ride to other places. But a new dynamic will be achieved.
What makes you say it’s damaging? Some arbitrary moral framework whereby “native” species are better than “invasive” ones, most likely. I’m of the opinion that human-accelerated SGD (aka “Evolution”) is a natural phenomenon just like any other.
There are few fires in desert, so any increase in the amount of plants like increases the chance of fire. But still people usually pref living in green places even if they are more likely to have fire.
There could be an asteroid impact and someone would be jocularly arguing that asteroids are neither good nor bad, and that being sad about it is woke nonsense, and that the asteroid is winning in the marketplace of ideas, or is full of iridium or some other valued metal, and is therefore a net boon to human populations in several million years (if any) who could, after all, make cool swords out of its ore.
The absolute dissociation from anything like a tender, ecologically connected mindset is laughable until you remember that the people speaking are all mostly making six figures and are, for better or worse, our generation's elite.
This plant is choking out whole ecosystems. Yes, there are (mathematical!) measures of genetic diversity; they are trending down; this is bad because it destabilizes the food web.
Remember food? You like food, right? This is bad for the food.
> Yes, there are (mathematical!) measures of genetic diversity; they are trending down
Mathematical models of natural behaviors are, without exception, time-local. The net benefit on any timescales that actually matter have yet to be seen.
> Remember food? You like food, right? This is bad for the food.
Maybe I’ll starve. Maybe all of humanity will starve. Only one thing is certain: something else will come along to fill our niche.
> <comment removed - other person not at all worth engaging>
Wise human. I made the same decision.
HN Comments section is endlessly frustrating, but is also, as my meditation coach always used to say, the perfect teacher. Sometimes an argument is won, but the interlocutor fails to notice. In these cases, no matter how frustrating, the argument is still won. While tempting, nothing is gained by explaining to them the interlocutor that they've lost; the not-noticing is itself the unfakeable signal of the fact.
This orange hellsite is a masterclass in discourse and rhetoric, and knowing when to rest your case turns out to be a huge tranche of these arts.
Distinguished members of the meta karma crew, when discussing the battle between whom will, erm, find a way, jakear says "nature" and 1attice says "human species" but it must be known, one may win in local time but the other in distant time. It cannot be known who will be right therefore this debate must be called a draw, in spite of the delightful use of a semicolon which was a reward to find, one I needed after having read this sub thread to its very end.
Environmental pressure leads to adaptation and speciation. I don’t know what more evidence you want of my claim that a new pressure isn’t necessarily bad for general “quantity” of speciation.
It is damaging. The Sonoran Desert is home to plants and animals not found anywhere else on earth. The desert is alive. It is not just some sand in between freeways and stucco houses. These plants spread rapidly and cause more frequent and hotter fires than any that the native plants have evolved with. Just because sometimes fire is good for some life forms does not mean all fire is good for all life forms. I can't believe I even have to explain this to someone. Damn. Some of you just want to argue to argue. Go ask chatgpt to argue with you, or ask google maps for directions and then drive somewhere else. leave the rest of us alone. damn.
> ask google maps for directions and then drive somewhere else
Alright that was pretty funny.
For the rest of it, if all you’re going to do is be mad about making the same (unsupported) “the only correct action is that which minimizes dEnvironment/dt” (aka “native=good, introduced=bad”) claim as everyone else, why bother commenting at all?
It's not just that they are native, it's that they are unique to that location. You are not going to get many people - other than the idealogical zealots like you - to agree that things that can eliminate a species from the planet are a good thing. You probably side with the Rhino Poachers too, because the invisible hand of the free market values boner powder.
I guess many people would prefer not to live in a world with a dozen species crowding out all of nature's diversity, beyond specific issues caused by this one plant.
True, but as a society we certainly don't act like we care at all about biodiversity.
The thing is though, this is not likely what will happen. It will temporarily crowd out existing vegetation, which will create the conditions for new species to arise. By bringing more carbon into the soil, it will increasing fertility and with that, new forms of life can take place and in turn crowd out the pioneering 'weed', increasing rather than diminishing biodiversity.
Certainly some species will be lost. This is called succession. But others will take their place. I'm not sure if Arizona will have the climatic conditions to move far beyond a desert, but that is what is happening and what we would be preventing.
When grass evolved it took over the world, killing innumerable species, and decimating ecosystems.
This weed may suck and maybe we want to keep it out of the desert for various reasons... but it shouldn't be dressed up as some kind of nature-preserving virtue. It's just bio-engineering to keep the ecosystem how we want it.
If something has happened in the past, that means it’s good and we should do nothing to prevent it from happening again. Indeed, if we ourselves are the main reason it’s happening this time, that’s fine too, since it’s happened before.
Hey if you want to wholeheartedly embrace a worldview so nihilistic it doesn't have an answer for why we should try and stop people from doing mass murder, go nuts.
You were saying that mass extinction was no big deal, not “allowing a plant to spread,” and the reasoning you apparently embrace would in fact lead to that exact absurd result, so it is not a non sequitur.
They say it’s damaging because it promotes wildfires which kill off the other plants.
Of course it’s a moral judgment because Nature has no moral framework. You may be fine in letting “native” species go extinct but others obviously don’t share your opinion and go out of the way to prevent it.
I already mentioned the Western Juniper, a “native” plant which the USFWS actively finances burning. A moral framework where some native species need heaven and earth moved for them to not be burned while other native species need taxpayer dollars to finance their combustion isn’t very appealing to me.
> Juniperus occidentalis, known as the western juniper, is a shrub or tree native to the Western United States…
Since you obviously don’t understand how these plants have adapted themselves and the role of wildfires to western living I’d suggest, maybe, doing a little research on the subject.
I’m also 100% certain the goal isn’t to actually combust the trees in prescribed burns.
What is it you think I don’t understand, taking into account I have volunteered months of my time on USFWS refuges engaged in the active burning of the Western Juniper, and have conversed at length with biologists involved in the management of said refuges? And have read literal textbooks on said Species. And read hundred+ page reports on the plans for managing said species.
> I’m also 100% certain the goal isn’t to actually combust the trees in prescribed burns.
I’m glad you stated it so plainly, as I can be equally certain you’re dead wrong.
This weed is growing in the low valley, not where junipers are growing.
There are about 4000ft of difference here. The article shows Carefree AZ as an example of infestation, which is at 2400ft. Junipers grow at 6000ft.
I can't believe you're really trying to make the argument that this plant is great because it will burn saguaros or barrel cactuses and we burn juniper on purpose so that must be good for saguaros and barrel cactuses. Don't get defensive. I'm not upset at you. Just think about this argument. It's not a logical argument.
You're saying that if X is good for Y and B causes X' for Z, then B is good.
But you have not established that X' is good for Z, and you haven't established that B causes X for Y.
So if this plant doesn't cause fires for Junipers, and if fires aren't good for desert plants, then how the hell are you arguing this plant is good because it causes fires for desert plants?
Don't take my word for it. Ask ChatGPT if this makes any damned sense. Maybe the matrix can convince you that this is an illogical argument.
I brought up the Juniper as an example of a species that, while native, is handled like a “weed”, and subject to expensive taxpayer funded burn-based removal efforts. This was to rebuke the claim the undereducated love to make of “native=good, introduced=bad”.
If some native are “bad”, perhaps some introduced are “good”. Or, better yet, perhaps we can stop trying to play God all the damn time and just let things play out via the mechanisms of Natural Selection, which as far as I’m concerned have done a pretty darned good job of developing biodiversity so far.
Indeed. When it is something we do not like and consider 'foreign', we call it invasive. When the same thing is considered native, even if its only here for a couple of hundred years, we call it a pioneer species.
Truth is, plants move around the world all the time even without the help of humans, and are relatively quick to adapt. Invasive species exploit a niche in the ecosystem that hasn't been filled yet, and are extremely useful in building up the system. Eventually the system will find a new balance, except when humans keep disturbing it.
Sometimes I think that 'invasive weeds threaten native plants' is the ecological equivalent of 'foreigners taking our jobs'. Preservation turning into botanical racism.
There are definitely some species that are actually not native to an area and are brought by human activity alone. Granted humans (and all our creations) are also natural, but the challenge is that we’re good at creating extreme change over very short timeframes.
Isn’t this just an argument of nihilism? If it doesn’t matter because native/weed is an artificial distinction, or because it is by definition insignificant on a geologic timescale, then why get upset at people trying to change or reverse “the gradient” in any way?
I’m not upset at anyone, though people seem upset at me for pointing out the futility. I suppose the resources could be better spent doing something else, though I couldn’t tell you what that’d be.
All I’ll say is that while I am not a biologist or an ecologist, I do know several who work on conservation projects and efforts to counteract invasive species. This story shares so many similarities with other cases of an introduced species radically changing the regions ecology and that in and of itself is incredibly alarming to them.
Yes, at the end of the day the Earth doesn’t care and life will go on. But trying to maintain some semblance of a minimally invaded ecosystem is valuable to these folks and I greatly respect their efforts.
How to better spend resources than commenting multiple times per hour in defense of the idea that nobody here can prove that an effort to cull an invasive weed will have an impact on the ecosystem in a million years?
You could go lie down and listen to music or something (though I warn you, I can't prove that it will have any effect on a geological timescale).
Well it very likely could be bad for us which I care about for a while.
And it’s actually anti-Darwinian to even refer to “speeding up evolution.” There is no destination here. Things do not necessarily get better, more interesting, more beautiful, and so on. They just change, and they are already changing in ways that don’t seem desirable.
Of course “desirability” itself is subjective as well, in theory. In practice I suspect almost every human would prefer a world that is more biodiverse over one that is less biodiverse, all things being equal. Still a human value, but of course those are all we have when we need to make decisions.
Please provide a reference for the claim that the introduction of this plant to the area will result in less biodiversity across geo-biological timescales.
> Please provide a reference for the claim that the introduction of this plant to the area will result in less biodiversity across geo-biological timescales.
I really try to refrain from making comments like this, but this has to be one of the most simplistic, self-deluded arguments I've seen listed on this site:
"Please provide proof of the impact of this plant on the earth 1 Million years from now. What nobody has shown that? Aha I must be right!"
If your rubric for decision making is that no action matters unless you can beforehand determine its impact 1 million years from now, then it's really not valuable for you to comment on anything or participate in any discussion at all.
That is a self-deluded argument, but it isn’t the one I made. It’s the one you saw in the one I made, which reflects more on you than me.
Whether it’s valuable for you to comment on anything or participate in any discussion at all is something I’ll do you the curtesy of leaving you to decide.
Just to rewind, you started with the claim that the distinction between invasive and non-invasive is fully arbitrary and not useful, then further suggested the completely mythological idea that evolution has a “direction” that can be accelerated.
I know nothing about this particular weed and its effects, but I don’t need to in order to know your claims are incorrect.
If you want instead to make the claim “this particular species isn’t invasive and/or doesn’t yield undesirable effects on its environment” then go ahead and do that, but it’s a very different one.
Evolution is just a fancy way of saying stochastic gradient descent of dna in the biosphere. A SGD routine can clearly move “faster” or “slower”, as can be measured by values like “preserved mutations per century”. Whether the “direction” is the same is up for debate (it almost certainly isn’t), but to claim there’s no “speed” metric that can be associated with Evolution is just absurdist head-burying.
Gradient descent is a model of what's actually happening here in reality. Sure, it's useful in some ways and sure, you can label things in your model if it's useful for your thinking.
Frankly not sure what you get out of modeling it that way and labeling "preserved mutations per century" as "speeding up," but feel free to do so.
One issue with the map-territory violation here is that it's very easy to assume the gradient descent is optimizing for something we care about and find desirable. You are smuggling in the idea that later in the gradient descent is "better" than earlier in the gradient descent. There is nothing in reality that necessitates this. It is totally possible for human contributions to this process (model it as gradient descent if you want, model it as "speeding up" if you want) to optimize things that are in fact very very bad for everything that humans care about.
Probably this is also because of evolution, that we'd like to keep things as it is, otherwise we'll be in risky waters. Of course today's "natural weed"s were themselves invasive at some point in the history.
Yes it's startling how fast this chamomile spreads, and we ought to preserve the native brittlebrush. But it's worth considering the effects of 50 years of ground cover, 50 years of pollinators and their predators, 50 years of accumulated organic detritus, 50 years of improved rainwater retention, 50 years of migratory birds bringing seeds in their droppings to a rejuvenated soil substrate. Could any of these things improve local ecology?
I'd imagine that 50 years and thousands of square miles with a radically different emissivity coefficient could even altar weather patterns and change annual rainfall totals. Some of these effects would be straightforward to model. Might we see water table restoration leading to year-round springs instead of annual floods? Could we accelerate any of these effects?
brittlebrush and globemallow are beautiful native plants. Same with the "weed" version of Arizona sunflowers. The 'weed' version of dandylion is pretty gross, but even that I'll sometimes just replant to the desert near me.
But these little yellow ball things are pretty obnoxious. They're easy to identify and pull early though. They're pretty so people are defending them, but I'd rather have native flowers for the native butterflies, bees and humming birds.
Of the approximately 5,000 different species of bees in the United States, around 1,300 live in Arizona, meaning Arizona contains the most diversity of bees in the country, and perhaps the world.
People in these comments think sahara when they think desert. Truth is Arizona is more diverse than most states with their same 5 trees everyone else has and their stupid grass everyone else has.
As for this plant doing anything good, I appreciate your optimism, but I don't think it lives through the summer so it's just a wham bam spread then catch on fire disaster. If we had more rain maybe it would be not so bad. But when it dries out so much and then this is laying around waiting to burn, it's bad news.
It seems that you couldn't do a better job burning the desert down if you wanted to. This literally puts tinder all over the place. You can't rival that even with blowtorches and napalm. You could firebomb the desert and in the absence of this stuff, those fires would burn out in between sections of growth. But with this stuff, one cigarette or lightning strike can take out hundreds of acres.
Personally, I think it's a quite attractive weed. I don't want it in my yard, and I've gotten rid of it a few times now, but I don't mind it. It's just a part of lawn maintenance, and there is a period of time where I enjoy the natural growth before a manicure.
That being said, it has made some abandoned plots look like meadows now, in my opinion. I welcome the change.