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Keeping foreign critters at bay
As trade increases so do invasions that can cripple local flora and fauna
Hugh MacIsaac tells a hobo story worthy of a Gordon Lightfoot ballad, if the outcome weren't so potentially damaging to North American forests.
An unknown number of diminutive travelers recently jumped ship in Montreal and rode the rails to British Columbia, sharing boxcars with a shipment of stone slabs from Norway. As the wood-crated slabs were transferred from the ship to rail cars, someone noticed a few stowaways but said nothing.
By the time the shipment arrived in British Columbia, however, researchers at a Canadian federal lab there heard about the vagabonds, and put a sample of the packing wood in a sterilized room.
"They found adults of more than 40 different species of bugs, including three species of boring beetles of a type that could wreak havoc with hardwood and softwood forests," says Dr. MacIsaac, a biology professor at the University of Windsor in Ontario.
No one knows whether any of these insects escaped to establish colonies in the New World. "They took a 3,500-kilometer journey, and boxcars are not exactly airtight," he wryly notes.
Variations on MacIsaac's tale are being repeated worldwide as countries struggle to fend off invasive species from invisible organisms to creatures such as the northern snakehead. This voracious freshwater fish native to China has riveted the attention this month of officials from the state of Maryland and the US government.
On one level, bringing "exotic" species into a country can be beneficial if they can be kept local, researchers say. They note that many of the biggest cash crops in the US are imports, for example. But trouble arises when nonnative organisms brought in to control pests, or as food or pets, or inadvertently arriving in ship ballast water, freight packing material, or luggage quickly spread beyond their initial colony.
And while researchers are trying to develop more sophisticated tools to forecast a species' arrival or trace its region of origin, the first line of defense, they say, remains the shippers, fishermen, and tourists who unwittingly serve as transport for these ecological shock troops.
As if to underscore the importance of the issue, this week lawmakers in Washington are circulating a draft revision of the National Invasive Species Act, originally passed in 1990 and reauthorized in 1996. The reauthorization is set to expire this year. The newest proposal would strengthen the federal government's hand in dealing with invasive species, particularly aquatic creatures.
"In the United States and Canada, there's a sense of urgency" about the problem, MacIsaac says.
Indeed, in the US alone, an estimated 50,000 nonnative invasive species cost the country $137 billion a year, according to David Pimentel, an ecologist at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY. He notes that 42 percent of the native species currently listed as threatened or endangered in the US were herded onto those lists by nonnative invasive species.
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