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cane toads get a bad rap.... they make great pets and are easy to keep! i fed mine crickets but they will eat nearly anything including chicken and beef
Speaking of invasive species, it makes me sad that there are kids in the area I grew up in who have never heard a mourning dove and instead grew up with the collared dove, which is invasive. The doleful coo of a mourning dove is so nostalgic to me, but they have at least been pushed out of towns. Hopefully they've not been wiped out entirely. 🥺
STOP spreading missinformation. Do more research BEFORE putting out videos that falsely claim that biological control would work without sideeffects harmfull to native wildlife! The quoted species DID NOT "work" ... neither Cactoplastis-moths nor ladybugs!
It's actually insane how negative Cane Toads are in Australia. Even their tadpoles are poisonous and they are able to kill almost any animal in many different levels of the ecosystem. Crocodiles, small animals, etc. Plus the toad is able to travel pretty far over a decent amount of time. So they essentially flourish like crazy, killing and eating everything, while nothing eats or kills them. It's horrible. Especially in a place with such unique biodiversity like Australia.
Australian cane toad populations are much more cannibalistic than cane toad populations in other areas of the world, and the Australian water rat and some populations of Australian magpies have learned to tear the toad apart and only eat the non-toxic parts of it. So predation against the toads is evolving.
In that case you can't deny how "perfect" the cane toad is by natures design. Honestly I don't know how animals deal with cane toads in their natural habitat? Then again we have the biggest invasive species on this planet, us humans. Nothing comes even close.
As an Australian. We hate cane toads. Kill dozens a week, sometimes more. They are gross and very harmful to our native wildlife here. Hopstop is wonderful. Spray away. Make sure they are cane toads as some native frogs have similar colouring.
We have them here in Florida as well. They poison a lot of dogs that decide to bite them. I carry an air rifle in my truck and dispatch any cane toad I find.
Killing toads sounds super gross. I already feel grossed out squishing insects, I can’t imagine killing toads! Though it sounds like you use a spray to kill them?
And your super living wealthy sugar cane farmers have never been held to account for illegally importing them here ! Now they are destroying native animals here in New South Wales and in the Northern Territory ! Don't start me on the destruction of The Great Barrier Reef by furtilizer runoff ! Your a backward little state with backward little people , how would I know ? I was forced to live there for EIGHTEEN YEARS !
The cassava control was actually extremely cool and the video _should_ have gone into more detail because it is the PERFECT example of how to do biological control: the cassava pest has a natural predator, a parasitic wasp, which will ONLY parasitise cassava pest. Parasitic wasps get very species specific that way. It took a lot of research to find and test this wasp, but it has been a roaring success both in terms of deworming cassava, and in dying off when no longer needed, and in having no effect on any local species.
parasitic wasps are basically as one-to-one as biological controls can get... if we could ever engineer specific wasps for specific pests, we'd never need to test other agents.
I'm personally in favour of experimenting with releasing bears on the streets of Manchester as an attempt at weekend pest control. Both the UK one, and the one in New Hampshire. After all, AnCaps alreaady made the bears there in Grafton, extra feral confused and aggressive, so may as well run with it!
@@TheHorseshoePartyUK Give this person a Nobel Prize. But remember, for the bear infestation to become established, one must have a "donut lady" providing the ancap doughnuts.
From the Philippines, also an island country, we were a massive victim to exactly the same thing. That's how we got cane toads, golden apple snails, tilapia, mosquitofish, carp, giant african snails, guppies, janitor fish, Chinese softshell turtles, water hyacinths, black rat, etc. And unlike first world countries, we do not have the same resources to fight invasive species, causing massive losses in endemic ecosystems. In most of our freshwater waterways for example, very little of our endemic fish species remain.
The golden apple snail and tilapia are food. Collect, cook and eat them! Here in the USA we have invasive silver carp. I have asked repeatedly why my grocery store doesn't carry it. I hope that changes soon.
@@kittimcconnell2633 Unlike our mainland Southeast Asian neighbors, we don't really have a culture of eating snails. Which is why the introduction of golden apple snails from Argentina in the 1980s as an alternative food source was quite stupid, frankly. It's just not something most Filipinos would find appetizing. Some people do eat it. But for the majority, it's too exotic. And I don't see that changing soon. The snails we prefer to eat are marine (abalones, conchs, limpets, rock snails, periwinkles, chitons, etc.). Tilapia and carp, however, are excellent food sources. But at the cost of the loss of native food fish. So I question the necessity of their introduction. The worst affected are isolated lake systems like Lake Lanao, which once hosted a huge variety of large endemic food fish. Most of which are now extinct. And yes, in the US, I've always wondered why fishermen refuse to eat invasive species like carp and snakeheads. I've even heard people say that they don't eat snakeheads because snakeheads are too "scary-looking", which is hilarious considering that a lot of North American food fish are just as ugly. From salmon to catfish to pikes. Snakeheads are literally one of the best-tasting food fish and highly sought after in Asia. It's not like snails or anything too exotic. They're just fish. Eating them would go a long way towards helping control the population.
@@kittimcconnell2633 It doesn't carry carp, cause carp tastes gross! Better to ask your hardware store or gardening supply store why it doesn't sell "charlie carp" fertiliser. That's what we do with carp in Australia, similar to seaweed fertilisers in properties, but has the added bonus of harvesting the carp to make it
@@AngryKittens If you dont' want to eat them locally, maybe you can create an export market for them? Kmart in Australia has a range of water hyacinth products, such as placemats & pot plant covers, that I believe come from your country, or other countries in the region, looking for options of what they can do to get rid of the plants, while also profiting from them in the meantime, due to them taking away other sources of income with their invasive nature. Tbh, I don't think first world makes a difference on this issue, I think it comes down to attitude & determination & innovation in looking for good control & profit making options from them. It's a bit like covid, all the money in the world means nothing if the country doesn't have a desire to fight it, while even some of the poorest countries can outperform the richest, if they have a determination to do so. Only place first world matters I think, is the ability to enforce quarantines. First world countries have the soft power to do that, countries like yours can be bullied out of it on the international stage & accused of putting quarantine in to manipulate global trade rules & requirements & get threatened with sanctions or boycotts if not backing down & allowing the rich countries to do as they like with your country, even when you can see the potential harm they are going to cause - and that is something we should all be addressing together as a global community! Not right when that happens & it happens far too often!
@@mehere8038 No. "Attitude, determination, and innovation" don't do squat when you don't have money for specialized departments/orgs, equipment for monitoring and recording spread, quarantine measures, specialized vehicles/equipment, education of the general public, etc. It's not as simple as turning all water hyacinths into bags. You'll know why if you've seen an entire river covered in water hyacinths. You could make a million bags out of it and still not make a dent. Neither are golden apple snails exportable. They're perishable, not particularly tasty or appetizing, carry diseases like schistosomiasis, and... they're explosively invasive. We're already eating tilapia and carp. As well as turning cane toads into novelty wallets. None of that really help curb their population. It only lets us, at least, benefit from an eological disaster. That applies to covid as well. Like every other developing country, we were left hanging when every first world country snatched up multiple doses of the vaccines as soon as they came out. Leaving us with nothing. People died. We make do. But don't mistake that as being "just as good" as first world resources. It's why there's always been a pushback to green measures among developing countries. Because first worlders seem to be completely incapable of truly understanding the depth of the wealth gap between nations, and what it actually means in practice. It has never been as simple as "just try harder".
The most hilarious parts is rats are nocturnal and mongoose are diurnal. They are pretty much friends. Even with their powers combined they still can’t keep the chickens down
I am from Hawaii... While the mongoose helped a little, the sleep patterns didn't overlap enough with rats. But even worse... Mongoose like eggs, and native birds became under attack and conservationists put out traps to try to catch them. Mongoose are smart though, but I hear of authorities turning a blind eye to hunters going after them in the mountains ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Ps. My aunt had a restaurant and would feed the local feral cats near her backdoor. Keeping that cats near kept rats in check. She was a smart lady and started a catch spay/neuter, ear notch and release program.
@@HiKimiko There's two case studies where they got rid of their feral cats but not the rodents, and the local biodiversity was worse. There are likely certain situations like rodent filled cities where an indoor/outdoor cats feeding on invasive rat may be better, ecological, then indoor cats when considering the national/global impact (pet food, litter; extra toys due to boredom of being inside -- and all the associated costs in live stock, animal welfare, agriculture, transportation, packaging etc.). I tried to find an comparison/breakdown between each but couldn't. TNR/TVHR programs are great to get feral populations in control, cats can reproduce a lot when no predators. (TVHR: vasectomy/hysto -- been looking into the research on gonadectomy [tradtional spay/neuter]... it would be nice of Scishow did a dive into this and research on this, particular in dogs where new research is showing both net increased health and behavior issues. Tho cats due to mammary cancer rates is showing longer lifespan with gonadectomy, but the mental health aspect is less clear)
From Hawaii as well, now they are experimenting with "sterile" mosquitoes to mate with the mosquito population to produce mosquitoes that when they try to reproduce the offspring will not survive (I think that's how it works?) I sure hope they don't screw this up.
Rats are also predators - they kill young birds, insects, and lizards. Tom Scott recently did a video on New Zealands efforts to control rats - an invasive species there also.
Skinner: Well, I was wrong; the lizards are a godsend. Lisa: But isn't that a bit short-sighted? What happens when we're overrun by lizards? Skinner: No problem. We simply release wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. They'll wipe out the lizards. Lisa: But aren't the snakes even worse? Skinner: Yes, but we're prepared for that. We've lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat. Lisa: But then we're stuck with gorillas! Skinner: No, that's the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.
OMG, Stoats in New Zealand... wiped out most of the ground dwelling birds because they were easier to hunt then the European rabbits (double catastrophe!) they were brought in to control. Good episode!
Back in the day, I bicycle toured around NZ for a couple of months and learned that Ring Tail Possums from Australia are also a problem for your beautiful islands.
No, not ringtail possums, brush tail possums. So-called plant eaters which will go back to a rata tree every night until it is dead, as well as scoffing birds, as young and eggs. Not just stoats either, why bring in just stoats when you can also bring in ferrets and weasels, to control the introduced rabbits. Some moron also brought in a pair of foxes but the customs agent drowned them in Lyttelton harbour (that would have been goodbye to kiwis in the South Island). And then there are the cute hedgehogs, quite adept at climbing trees and killing young birds and eggs. Plus the myna bird introduced into the North Island, and starlings. I could go on but I’m getting depressed.
In Pokémon Sun and Moon, which were based off of Hawaii, there are Rattata (a rat-like Pokémon) and Yungoos (a mongoose-like Pokémon) which I just realized were based on this history!
This whole concept reminds me of a book I once read. There was an old woman who swallowed a fly, so she swallowed a frog to eat the fly, but then she had a frog inside so she swallowed a snake to eat the frog, and so on and so forth...
I once swallowed a deer. Then decided to swallow a gun to kill it. But nothing happened. So, I ate a man to shoot the gun to kill the deer. Turns out, the man was a liberal who wanted to abolish the 2nd ammendment. SO...I joined a religious cult to find a far-right Rebublican and swallowed him. He shot the liberal. Then feared judgement from his God, and shot himself. I'm a vegetarian now. I figured, if I have to live with a deer inside of me, I might as well feed the son-of-a-bitch.🤨
We removed introduced predators from a small island off Tasmania. The result was several years of over population of the native marsupials. So much so that many died slowly of starvation. It was awful, but there was nothing to do that wouldn’t cause even more issues. Now the population has settled down to a manageable level....thank goodness. It’s a tough one.
Have they gotten rid of all of the cats off of Bruny Island? I was last there in 2015/2016 and there were still tons of cats eating lots of native wildlife, thanks to humans thinking their precious little kitty wouldn't kill a native bird.
Couldn't they catch and euthanise some of them, at least so they didn't starve to death? That feels like something they could do that shouldn't cause more problems.
@@cggc9510 A lot won't eat them, but what those "owners" (in inverted commas, cause they're not very good at it, are they) dont' seem to realise is that cats have bacteria in their mouth, so ANY break of the skin with a tooth or claw, even if it's "just playing" is a death sentence to native animals, but they die within 24 hours, not immediately, so the owners don't see it, see the animal fly/run off & think it's fine. If they come into wildlife rescue, they're given antibiotics, cause otherwise its effectively a 100% death rate for ANY "cat attack/play". I REALLY wish they'd get this through their heads! & I really wish legislators would get through their heads that cat laws should be the same as dog ones - not permitted out of their yard off a lead! If wandering, collected by council rangers & taken to the pound & hundreds, if not thousands of dollars to get it back out! If we did that, we'd see a HUGE difference in wildlife death numbers! Would still be some in backyards, but nothing like now! Other thing we could do is legislate for all "precious little kitties" to be required to wear scrunchy collars when outdoors. Remember those hair scrunchies from the 1980's? It's been shown that making them for cat collars & putting them on, drops songbird deaths to near zero. Cats learn to stalk silently with bells, but songbirds are very colour focused in life, shows them food & mates & other bird threats, so they never lose effectiveness, ANY bright colour, they see, any movement of a bright colour, the birds are near obsessed by, so cats simply can't get near them without the birds seeing & reacting We have ample solutions, but like you say, the problem is "owner" attitudes!
@@conlon4332 Australia's big, it's hard. If you really care about this issue & want to help, best thing you can do is eat kangaroo. Currently around 11% of the required cull is carried out for human meat consumption. There are no predators other than humans for the 3 biggest species, so the other 89% over populate, then when drought hits, they die on mass from starvation & disease & in the process, they also ringbark trees, to eat all bark they can reach, cause they're so hungry & eat all grasses down to the ground, resulting in erosion & they hop up to 100kms every day, looking for food, forming into mega mobs that eat EVERYTHING in the areas they pass through, which then results in smaller animal species dying of starvation too, when they weren't overpopulated & in some cases are even endangered & had plenty of food for their own population, till the reds, greys & euro roos come through & eat everything. The Tasmania situation is sorted now, but the roo situation on the mainland is not! It's an ongoing issue that occurs every 10-20 years with mega starvation/die off events. The natural predator (humans) re-engaging in proper, ongoing population control, like we have for at least 80,000 years, is the best solution to this, eating their meat is the best way to fund this cull & welfare checks on it. Last overpopulation event, in NSW at least, the government acted before the mass disease die offs, creating a new, recreational shooting licence for roos. Stopped the starvation & disease, BUT there were no controls on that! We really don't know the welfare outcomes. They're culled by farmers for dog meat too (under licence) & by professionals for dog meat (under licence) but in all those cases, all can be shot, with no welfare checks. For the human consumption market, only male roos are accepted, so as to ensure there's no joey in a pouch when culled & only single shot, head shots are accepted for meat processing, which means the human consumption shooters are absolutely top notch, they don't miss! They're paid really well per animal & there's NEVER been ANY report or evidence of cruelty from them, despite animal activists putting a LOT of effort into trying to find cases. So yeh, if you really want to help Aussie wildlife, eating kangaroo meat really is the best option & something most people in the world can personally do. Their meat is sold in over 50 different countries, but there's just not enough sales to stabilise the population properly (price gouging on meat prices overseas doesn't help!) Anyway, I just like to share this, cause it really is something almost anyone can do at an individual level if they want to help & get involved. Just do a search for their meat near you & you should find it, must be eaten rare, or minced or it tastes like a rock. Best added to curries & other strong flavour meals if you're not used to game meat taste (tastes great in those settings imo) & no, I don't work for the industry or anything, it's just something I"ve personally discovered & researched, cause I like to think of myself as an ethical eater & that I've been super impressed with. Feral pig meat is the other one that's really good for the environment & animal welfare & conservation, that one often helps in a wide range of countries, not just Australia (although feral pig meat around the world primarily comes from Australia & the US)
It's really funny to me that Hank said that Prickly Pears are native to "the American tropics" when they're also native to most of North America, including his home state of Montana
They'll grow naturally up through large swathes of the Rockies & Great Plains, but their actual home range comes off as greatly exaggerated because many states label a plant as a native species if it grows anywhere within the US & isn't considered a problematic species. Those things will do well just about anywhere, but they require the sandy soil. They also aren't likely to get away from gardens just because nothing will go after the fruit containing the seeds, but when these things find a sandy spot they like, they take over the whole thing from end to end in just a couple of years. My grandmother learned that one the hard way.
I did my Masters work on the rats, mongooses and Coqui frogs of Hawaii. Thank you for saying mongooses as opposed to the many other ways people try to say it.
How about mouses? Or louses? In the rest of zoology saying fishes instead of fish refers to multiple species of fish rather than pluralizing a single species. Same goes for mouses and louses. Not sure why not in this case. Must have their own special language rules, I guess
@@t-bonejones3576 Because "goose" and "mongoose" do not have the same etymological origins, despite the similarity in spelling. Goose is from Old English gōs (plural gēs, hence the modern irregular plural geese). Mongoose is from Portuguese mangusto (plural mangustos). Ultimately from Marathi muṅgūs. It's association with "goose" is folk etymology. As opposed to say "sea goose" (an archaic common name for phalaropes, a type of aquatic bird), which _is_ derived from sea + goose, and thus has "sea geese" as its plural form. It's similar to why you should say "octopuses", not "octopi". Because "octopi" assumes that the suffix of octopus is "-us" (Latin 2nd declension suffix), when it's actually "-pus" (Latinized Greek suffix, meaning "foot"). This is due to erroneous conflation of octopus with other Latin-derived words with an "-us" suffix, like cactus, alumnus, nucleus, radius, etc. Saying "mongeese" sounds very stupid to me.
In the Great Lakes, Alewives are a problem. They are an ocean fish that came in through the canals or ships ballast. Salmon were and still are planted to eat the alewives. We also like to catch and eat the salmon.
I think that genetic engineering like they do with malaria mosquitoes is probably the best way to go. It does take more time for it to work on mammals and other animals bigger than mosquitoes given their longer reproductive cycle but we should think of solutions in a more "natural" timeframe, it's very difficult to change an ecosystem in a few years, let alone months. Just as it takes years and even decades to see the full extent of the repercussions of introducing invasive species, whatever changes we do now will take the same time for their impact to become aparent. I hope I explained myself clearly, my english is not that good 😅
This does sound like another potential solution - using CRISPER technology to modify invasive species to perhaps produce sterile offspring or upset a balance in gender to curb the population (more males, less females). Of course, as with all things that may have enormous ramifications, this needs to be thoroughly tested
Unfortunately I've seen a few articles showing that in lab settings, while many mosquitoes take the harmful genes, other groups of them mutate to avoid it. It's likely that in the wild, isolated populations of the mosquitoes will develop genes to block the implanted ones that cause reproductive harm. Because naturally, in sexually reproducing organisms, while certain genes can be manipulated so that the offspring should always get them, if it's very negative to the species' longevity it will be selected against. Nature and evolution _really_ doesn't like humans trying to tamper and exterminate anything. It definitely still has merit to help limit disease and invasives! It just might not be foolproof.
@@rylandrc Like the video said, transporting of species into other countries is very tightly controlled nowadays. Granted, an animal could be successfully smuggled, but it would be very hard to do, and the animal would not only have to survive the ordeal, but be released into the wild, survive, and find a mate. It's a lot of factors, but I do agree that there is a small chance of that happening. I think the idea that they're going for is that such information would be widely announced and publicized so people know what's going on long enough for the changes to spread throughout the population and for it to eventually die out, thus ending the problem entirely. And of course, as previously mentioned above and in the video, places where such a scenario might happen often already have very tightly regulations on the transporting of species - the last thing they want to do is create another problem by bringing in another invasive species.
I'm surprised you didn't touch on Lake Michigan. The introduction of alewives had shores covered in rotting fish, so they introduced salmon. Then zebra mussels showed up collapsing the entire food chain as salmon competed against native species , only for round gobies to accidentally get introduced and start eating the invasive mussels.
It's not quite the same thing, but in the UK, there was a study about whether to reintroduce beavers who had been extinct for hundreds of years. After ten years of studying it, they still hadn't made their mind up. Then there were some beavers found on the river Otter- that 'oddly' hadn't been there before. Somebody (nobody knows who) had got bored with the study and released them anyway. They're doing great. They did recapture them and test them for a parasite, but they didn't have it, so they let them go again.
@BooBaddyBig Are they popular because they're cute, or popular because they're useful? Apparently, some of my fellow Americans consider them a nuisance, where I'm steadily coming around to the idea that they're useful. I don't live near anywhere that has beavers, so that's why I'm curious.
@@jeffbenton6183 It's because they're cute. They're causing huge practical problems due to a complete lack of predators and environmental changes they cause wiping out native species, and interfering with farming.
Australia has also had a problem with prickly pear, also successfully treated with Cactoblastis (not, of course, to extinction - there are some growing in my neighbourhood, and I live very far from the Tropics), so yeah, there are positives as well.
BUT the cacti are delicious! AND no, not just the fruit... Although I DO love me some prickly-pear jam... BUT I digress... Scorch off the needles with open flame, because trying to remove them with a knife "by hand" generally only gets rid of most of them, and inundates your hand with a steady gain in festering micro-needles embedded in the skin... SO scorch them off. It only takes a few seconds (less than a minute) of open flame and a pair of tongs... Then you slice the pads length-wise to about a half-inch width... and cut down to a reasonably bite-size length... add to salads as a raw veggie... or toss into soup and treat relatively like the Blue Lake green beans... The taste is similar, though the cactus is a tad more pungent or intense about it... YOUNG pads are more tender and lighter, sweeter than older (larger) pads, so you'll want to stick, generally, to pads grown within the last year for optimal flavor experience. Basics for tending, pruning, and keeping the prickly-pear cactus in good condition for regular harvest are relatively straight forward and available all over online, so there's no need in me spoon feeding you your homework, anymore than there's any great need in you trying to single-handedly eat them "into check" for the sake of all Australia... BUT spread the word, and the sooner folks realize they can be a great boon, the sooner they can be both relegated to a non-nuisance and taken full advantage over... The major difficulty with the prickly-pears themselves is all the damn seeds. Yeah, they've got the same "micro-needles" as the pads, and you scorch those over open flame just the same. Sliced down and pounded into a chinois (aka china-hat) to extract juice, or you can follow other "seedy fruit" instructions from a seasoned jam and jelly maker... I've also cut up the fruit and used the knife to scrape out the seeds, but there's quite a bit of "faff" involved there... Then sugar and pectin added, and you can leave most of the fleshy bit (what you can salvage at least) for substance and body... Eaten raw, they're also quite good, just as they are... a natural fruit... pick into SMALL containers as the weight of the pears pressing together WILL "share" the damn needles, breaking needles off from one and embedding them into another... BUT while the skin is a little tough, it's nothing to get excited over in the culinary experience, and just eat them outdoors so everyone can crudely munch and spit seeds like the barbarians we frequently fantasize about... Exotic fruit and interesting fun for all ages... ;o)
Once under control, it is easier to get rid of. BUT when the cactus is gone, you now have to get rid of the new predator that was introduced. So, is bio control really worth it? You are going to spend a bunch of money testing and then even more releasing, then more on monitoring. Keep in mind, the monitoring must go on forever. Wouldn't it be cheaper just to go out for a dozen years and remove the invasive in the first place?
Feral cats are also a huge problem in Hawai'i. They are everywhere. You're as likely to see a feral cat scuttling across the road as a mongoose these days.
The catch and release spay and neutering program is underway though, which is a positive. One of my calicos was born in Hawaii and her mother was a colony cat who was spayed after she gave birth to my cat and her siblings.
update(s) about the cane toad in Australia... 1:they have begun to evolve into two groups, fast movers with longer jumps that cover lots of land (Australia is big) and slower ones that eat more of the local flora 2:some of our snakes have evolved to eat them without being poisoned themselves (yay snakes!)
@@kisakisakura6663 there has been talk about releasing red belly black snakes onto Guam to take out, I think it's cane toads? Or I may have that backwards & Guam may have the snakes as an issue, but red belly black snakes have definately been studied as one of 3 Australian animals found to eat cane toads effectively & therefore considered for release into other areas where cane toads are a problem. None are species specific hunters though, so all have been rejected as options if applying the strict controls over biological control releases that are used in countries like Australia & the US today
@@bltzcstrnx interesting. I see your point, as in weather events, or maybe random selection? However what I mean is we humans set out to solve a problem, and inadvertently create other problems, as unintended consequences. The biggest unintended consequence of digging up fossil fuels is climate change. Maybe us humans are an unintended consequence of nature? This could go down a rabbit hole.
The number one reason the mongoose was a failure for rat control was because rats are nocturnal, and mongooses are diurnal. They never even cross paths.
And how about when the invasion wasn't planned? Our crew filmed the lionfish. Its looks even helped make it a Hollywood star. The problem is that they are not only venomous but extremely hungry. That's why this predator is causing underwater chaos around the world. Originally found in the Pacific Ocean, lionfish invaded seas from the Bahamas to Cyprus, decimating local fish populations as they go. But it isn't all doom and gloom; we talked to scientists that think they may have the answer to controlling them.
Yeah, this is one of those where you need excruciating scientific rigor to even suggest doing. I mean, there are too many obviously bad outcomes to the point we don't even know how many species have gone extinct to our introducing new ones shenanigans.
In the early 80s, I got my very first job in Bozeman at the USDA Rangeland Insect Lab at MSU. Dr. Rees was working on using a type of Boll Weevel to control the thistles on cattle ranges, and was then watching to see whether the native Robber flies were eating the Boll Weevils. My job was basically organizing all of his slides of weevils and flies while his team did all the heavy work. It was only 2 months, and I considered becoming an entomologist for a while. I lost track of how the project progressed, but it was interesting.
I live in New Zealand, and just like in Hawaii we have lots of unwanted introduces species. Rats, possums, weasels, stoats,feral cats and dogs, humans, etcetera.
and you're doing what this video dismissed, with baits through forests & continuing to refill them, cause that's the only option for pests like rats. I think the video should have mentioned you guys in this video, but they probably don't know about you - although they did at least remember to include you on their world map :)
"Unwanted introduced species", Lists humans, lol. It's true that some places would be better off without humans but then you wouldn't be living there and writing your comment either.
10:31 Have they ever tried introducing neutered animals first, as a type of 'final rehearsal' to check for any unforeseen interactions? Obviously we wouldn't be able to see how the population would level out, but it could be a good way to be able to see how these animals would actually behave when let loose in the intended environment. And if it does go wrong, we wouldn't be stuck with them forevermore.
You are on the right track for at least one situation. The single best way to handle feral cat populations is to capture, neuter, and release all the cats you can. They maintain their territories, fill the available niches, and fail to reproduce, thus lowering the population over time in a fairly stable way. If you just remove a cat population, cats in other areas will spread across, and there will be waves of bloom and die-off. Well spotted, conlon.
Yeah, Mina birds are kind of a nusence. and getting rid of either of the 2 species of rats here is a nightmare. Roof rats, or plague, black, climbing, tree rats "lot of names for the same species. and Norway rats or ground, sewer, Hanover and Wharf rats are their other names. The ones shown at 2:11 appear to be norway rats, 1:50 is a small colony of black rats, yes the countable 10 rats is a small colony, very small in fact. I don't see many mongoose around, though they do occasionally pop up, just not in the more urban areas.
🙏 Thank You So Much SciShow for another important tutorial on human positive & negative impact on the environment! Yes , we made mistakes , hopefully we learnt from our mistakes to save & protect whatever natural flora & fauna left from extinction! ... 🐕
Rats are so scary, that when you find out someone introduced a new invasive predator species to eat invasive rats, your second question after "have you learned nothing?" should be "did it work?"
I live in Arkansas and invasive plants like Chinese Privet, bamboos, and others spread so thick and rapidly here. I can't imagine any form of control at this point
As an Environmental Science graduate we talk a lot about biological control as a ecological tool. I think there are some cases where it is valid and could work very well if executed correctly as shown in the video and then there are others that seem like "absolutely not why would you even think that?". An extension of this idea of biological control would be to use other natural factors to control species, I.E ecosystem engineering species or ecosystem engineering as a whole. A paper published out of Australia showed that brush fires can keep invasive mesopredator species in check. Red foxes in this particular case would compete with dingoes for food. The foxes were actually initially introduced to take care of domestic cats, and domestic cats were brought in to... well you get the idea I think. Controlled burning and bush fires not only managed botanical species but also limited domestic cat AND red foxes by altering the landscape enough that the hunting grounds favored the dingo's hunting style more than the foxes and cats. Pretty cool. TL:DR Fire in controlled small amounts is good for the dingoes
@@CaptianMoePedro Dingos aren't actually truly native to Australia though, humans are more native than dingos are & are better placed to eat & use the skins of the species dingos do to control them. On the fire though, if that interests you, there's a number of books about it's original use that you'd probably find fascinating. "the biggest estate, how Aborigines made Australia" Has some really good, introductory info on the subject. Trees in Australia can be divided into fire level types, they range from intolerant to liking cool fires, to loving hot fires & each time a fire goes through, it germinates the seeds of that type of tree, so a cool fire will germinate cool fire liking trees, while a huge, out of control, major fire, will unalive all of those trees & instead germinate the seeds of all the hot fire loving trees, who will then go on to intentionally drop all their leaves & branches in response to hot weather & drought, as well as partly releasing their bark, leaving it hanging in strips, designed to catch any fire that occurs & raise it up into the canopy, to ignite the oil filled leaves, as well as breaking off & flying in the wind, so as to start new ember fires many kms from the original firefront. So the more devastating fires we get in Australia, the more we set the stage for more of the same to worse in the future! Cultural ones on the other hand, when managed properly, in line with cultural knowledge, will intentionally modify the landscape to germinate exactly what trees are desired for best control of the area. Before whites, they used to have hot fire lovers right up to intolerant forests & they had such incredible control, that they could stop the fire within metres of where they wanted it stopped, using only the wind changes & other known conditions that could be managed to create the effect they wanted. Some really amazing stuff if you want to read up on it & koalas btw, feed only on the cool fire liking trees & when a fire goes through where they live, they just climb to the top of the tree & wait it out, cause they know it will just pass under them without issue - except that's not what happens today, due to changes in what trees are around them, but it's what they've evolved to do!
@@mehere8038 Very interesting I'll have to take a look at that! I am in California and wildfires and cultural burning is a huge topic here. Our Oak trees, and sequoia trees and many other species are fire sensitive and fire temperature has a huge role to play in their germination and reproduction. As for dingoes, doing some reading on their taxonomy it seems it's highly controversial some argue their ancestors were introduced making them non-native commensalists with humans. Some suggest that they are more wolf than domestic dog. In 2020 it was claimed they were a domestic dog with domesticated wolf-like ancestors. Also pretty interesting stuff and I'm going to have to read more on it. But in short, yeah seems dingoes may not be native.
@@CaptianMoePedro I'm actually glad to hear it's a huge topic there now. It's always been accepted here, but from my understanding not in teh same way there, so that's great that recognition is happening now & from there you can figure out the place of fires in your country's history & if it should be replicated for the good of the land. Weird how some things each country is advanced on & others they're backwards on. We still deny here that we deliberately released small pox to take them out, but accept the fire stuff. We also btw have "fire raptors" in the north of the country, 3 species of birds that intentionally start fires for hunting. Re the dingo, the give away is the lack of pouch :) All mammals that are native to Australia are marsupials, so there's no question the dingo is out of place, only question is when did it arrive? Seems pretty obvious it was some time after humans, the most likely time being to correlate with the extinction of the Tasmanian Tiger from the mainland. That matches VERY well in terms of the 2 competing & as dingos arrived, tigers disappeared, except in Tasmania, where dingos never arrived, so tigers never went extinct until white humans caused it. There's actually questions as to when humans arrived to, archeolotical evidence now says 65,000-80,000 years ago, but pollen & ash samples actually show major changes in the environment that are consistant with large scale firestick farming & not consistant with any other explanation that's been offered & that change happens 120,000 years ago in one study, 130,000 years ago in another study in another part of the country. The land bridge before that period is actually 160,000 years ago, so that would have had to have been the arrival point if dispersal & population increase was going to occur in time for 130,000 years ago. That seems unlikely for homosapians at this point in time (and only homosapians is likely, no other species is likely into Australia), but homosapian travels & evolution dates are moving back in Africa too, now potentially at 500,000 years ago, so certainly possible we may see that 130,000 years ago date accepted in the future & if so, that gives dingos an even longer potential arrival period, but still seems most likely that they arrived around 5,000 years ago. Whether they're wolf or domestic seems to relate to definitions of the 2 & agendas in interpretation of facts. Definate wolf as an assentor, all dogs have that, but how far back is debated yes, but that far back, I think there's debates about even what domestication was in dogs! Seems likely they were intentionally brought in by humans, for the purpose of assisting in hunting, beyond that, I don't know. In later years, Aboriginal people divided them into 2 groups too, "camp dogs" & "wild dogs", the camp dogs being ones they shared food with & lived with & welcomed into their communities, while the wild ones, they would chase away & not trust not to hurt them/their children. I'm guessing that's a later split, but still interesting when looking at possible histories
As always, the problem comes down to there being three necessary control vectors to using this tool (which biological controls are - a tool to be used, in a box of other tools). Adequate time testing, adequate money spent on ensuring it's proper testing, and proper deployment and monitoring afterwards... and unfortunately, those are all the vectors that people looking to *use* this tool are trying to get rid of or they would just stick with more conventional pesticides or other control measures in the first place. The benefit cited originally (that it's a one-and-done "cheap" alternative you don't need to keep redoing) already suggests that one of those *very* necessary things is something people looking to utilize this tool are already hoping to avoid, and that even *when* regulations are in place that they're not likely to follow through on any of the other bullet points either. This can have disastrous long term damage as we've already seen - cited here are cane toads in Australia and mongoose in Hawaii, but then there are other problems like pacu in New Guinea where it was introduced for farming purposes and ended up explosively destroying the entire ecosystem because of how little research had gone into it. Chernobyl was also a logistical nightmare and failure to follow proper procedures that has helped demonize an altogether less dangerous energy source due to over fixation on the worst, most shoddily handled case examples. People looking to save time, money, and effort are absolutely not going to do the bare minimum that's necessary and *that* is probably the biggest problem for everyone else.
You need to look at the history of biological control in Australia PROPERLY, not just pluck out one example of an animal introduced over a century ago! Biological control in Australia is hugely successful now! There's HUGE amounts of money involved! How much damage do you think 6 billion rabbits do? It's billions, if not trillions of dollars a year, so anything less than that to develop biological controls of them is a saving. Current big one in Australia is attempting to genetically engineer to wipe out mice, if you look at the costs of the last mouse plague in Australia, again, it becomes obvious that a LOT of money can be spent on this project & absolutely be justified. The US does stuff cheap & nasty, but not all countries do! Just look at how much Australia spends on quarantine, so as to save WAY more money than that by preventing diseases & invasive species from making it into the country! We don't even have rabies in Australia, let alone the majority of diseases that devastate farming in most of the world, so that is money WELL worth spending our taxes on as far as all Australians are concerned (but we do expect it to be done properly & for as much money as needed to be spent on research to prevent another rabbits or cane toads event from ever happening again)
Well said! Laziness/greed of people in power (and experts not being given enough power to stop them) is the cause of most societal and environmental problems.
The mongoose didn't really work for the rats because rats are mostly nocturnal while the mongoose is diurnal. But I honestly believe the reason we don't have snakes is an unintended side effect of the mongoose. And I appreciate it.
Can we talk about invasive species accidentally introduced? Like the brown tree snake on Guam. Most native populations of birds have been pretty much eradicated in the wild, and considering I had a brown tree snake come out of the toilet in my house one Saturday night, I have every reason to believe they're pretty hard to keep out of ANY structure. As much as they're a problem to native species, they've also proven destructive to human infrastructure as well. I was out walking our dog one night and saw a bright flash, a less intense glow for about ten seconds, and then watched as villages at the south end of the island started going dark. It didn't take long before Hagatna, Barrigada, Tumon, Tamuning, and Andy South Housing went dark before the blackout moved northward to Yigo and Andersen AFB (Main Base). NOTE: my wife and I PCSed to Andersen just before Typhoon Roy in January 1988 and left just after Typhoon Russ in December 1990 -- it's been awhile. At any rate, it turned out that a brown tree snake had climbed a concrete pole holding up a set of high tension lines. Once out on one of the lines, it decided it wanted to be on the line next to it -- and, in doing so, it conducted several thousand volts and I have no idea how many amps as it made a career transition from predator to light filament. It was pretty cool to watch -- but a night on Guam without air conditioning isn't exactly fun. Let's not do THAT again.
@@mehere8038, let's not and say we did. On the other hand, let's not bother even saying we did. Because what's likely to happen after the red belly black snakes eat all the brown tree snakes? FYI, when we were stationed on Guam, we learned that GovGuam's Department of Agriculture had a variety of recipes for brown tree snake. And there was no limit on how many you could kill!
Using non-native species to control an invasive species may seem logical in theory, but what will the ramifications be? Ecosystems evolve over time; prey/predator relationships are critical to balance. Introduction of unknown variables, especially on endemic species, can be devastating. How will the introduced species be controlled? What effects will they have, aside from their impact on the intended target? Island ecosystems are particularly fragile. The introduction of cane toads is a great example of debacles that can occur from the introduction of non-native species.
Whenever people speak about Biological Control. I always hear " Use a specie not native to the area to control it ", yet I never hear anyone speaking of, " Train a native specie to like a new source of food". For example, the owl in Hawaii might love rats if it were to taste them and such. Among other things... I find that a lot of research look away from the time consuming task of training a native specie. Species that generally, like humans, won't eat something they haven't tried before if given the choice. Put a human before a meal they've eaten every day for their life, a new dish from another part of the world without explaining it. Of course, they will generally choose the former. Animals, that are less logical thinking (generally) are even MORE prone to this. Especially fish. Therefore, I feel like a lot of biological control should focus more on training feral animals through capture and release programs. Where you capture and train them to eat something that is invasive before re-releasing them. Therefore bringing it under control, that way. If we can teach domesticated animals to eat food they typically do not want to eat in the wild, we can probably do it for feral animals too. 1. Captuire potential native prey candidates. 2. Start teh process by feeding them normal prey to reduce stress during the early stages of the capture. 3. Gently scent the prey with the invasive specie. 4. Stuff it through surgery or otherwise with blood or just meat of the invasive specie. 5. Slowly progress to more and more, introduce dishes where the meat is 'served unrecognizable'. 6. Once you introduce both native and invasive prey and it takes a liking to both and it breeds. Release back into the wild... 7. Profit, because it will teach its young, that this invasive thing? Edible.
Don't worry, with all this flying around we're not only mixing our many populations into one big planet-wide population, we're also making sure that any pathogen that pops up gets a chance to say hi to everyone everywhere! Just wait, the pandemics will keep coming. I think birdflu is currently the big contender to watch.
@@bramvanduijn8086 Or, we could have some non-avian dinosaurs around again? If we talk pathogens, if I am not mistaken we still have some samples (anthrax?) around that are very deadly and otherwise wiped-out, making current human populations very succectable to them. Releasing a lot of diffrent bat species into urban areas would also be quite deterimental, seeing as they do carry a lot of viruses and the cross contamination and evolution would just escalate at a pace that would leave us humans quite desperate for vaccines. Hopefully it would also wipe out the anti-vaccers. No need for that part of the population remaining.
@@bramvanduijn8086 And people continue to be more resistant to science (i.e. accepting of vaccines and controls like distancing, handwashing, masking, etc) so the next big pandemic will be ignored by a large percent of the population and given a good foothold
It can work out very well but requires a lot of study. The parasitic flies they released in the US to control prey on exactly 1 species and a lot of testing first (Phorid flies have body structure, which allows them to prey on one species only). It's the same process they are using in Guam to control tree snakes, poisoned dead birds being dropped to kill off the snakes.
In Jamaica during the plantation era, we had a lot of rats eating the sugar cane. So the bright idea was to bring in mongoose. Which are now pest and threaten the population of Jamaican boa and iguana's. Now I am seeing them in my garden, running through my home and threatening my cats. They have no natural predators.
Could you please do a video on the ring neck pheasant release in North America? That was successfully introduced into America and is now a favorite game bird across parts of the northern Great Plains.
Even bringing in an invasive plant to try to deal with an ecological problem can backfire quite badly. Anyone living in the southeast is familiar with Kudzu. Good intentions, whether it be for animal, insect, or plant can often go seriously awry.
When I was a young child there was a mink farm about 15km from my house. They a group of animal activatives raided the farm and released them. For over two weeks, no window could be opened, cats dogs and swans where attached, after the second week, the local hunt and gun club organised a massive cull.
Mongoose were introduced in Okinawa as well, to curb a venomous native snake found there. As mentioned, while mongoose will eat snakes, if given no other choice, they also like many other things. So far my understanding is that specialized control fencing limits the mongoose spread and helps to control their migration to areas with endangered species known as the Okinawan rail or Yanbaru Kuina Either way the native snakes have not been diminished much by the mongoose. More snakes are killed by other means such as by turning them into Habushu, a local drink.
Same goes for plants. We got plenty invasive species because someone thought a flower looked pretty, planted it in the garden and now they are everywhere.
The African honey bee wasn't released on purpose, but the result was the same, several swarms escaped, and where able to cross-breed with local honey bees, then they began to spread from Brazil northward and to the west across South America, finally making it into North America by way of Texas in 1990. So many innocent people where killed by the aggressive bees on their migration to North America.
This is something I have thought about a lot as my family and I discuss whether or not to use parasitic wasps to control the clothes moths in our house. A lot of the research sounds really good and looks very promising but we know about the cane toads and mongooses so we are hesitant
I think certain kinds of spiders are the best form of moth control. Geckos are the best but then you have a gecko problem and that might be worse depending on what you can live with
@@rachelpickham954 look up parasitic wasps, they're not the wasps you are imagining. They are less than 3mm and highly specialized. There's a great Bizarre Beasts video on fig wasps
I myself am not ever looking to keep an ecosystem the same as it has always been, but rather to keep it stable an as biodiverse as possible. In saying that I have mixed feelings about biological control, on one hand it may be the only way to stabilize many ecosystems but on the other hand its risky. Lets also remember animals like the cattle egret which in the 1930s came from Africa to South America all on their own and now threaten many frogs and lizards with severe decline and are now found all throughout north and south America. They are a naturally invasive species that spread to the Americas on their own! Its facinating.
Even when introducing specialists which only eat one species there's always the risk that they will adapt and move on to easier prey. Evolution is not a process that ever ends unless the species die out. A species can always evolve.
Would like to see details about using milky spore (Paenibacillus papillae) to control Japanese beetles. I've heard both good and bad about the bacterium, and there doesn't seem to be a balanced discussion anywhere about it.
Ah, the law of unexpected consequences. I was on vacation in Hawaii, not aware of the experiment perpetrated in the 1800s. We were sitting outside enjoying breakfast one day when a movement out of the corner of my eye caused me to look hard at the close by palm tree. I saw a brown, red-eyed rodenty creature that I was not expecting to see. Finding out that this was a mongoose, of course I began to see the everywhere we went. I had only known about the snake-eating mongooses of India in the Rudyard Kipling stories.
Please make a video like this about cats and what people can do to keep theirs happy indoors. Cats are the number one invasive species throughout the world, not just the feral ones either. It's mostly people that feed outdoor cats/colonies and the people that let their pet cats roam, but no one has the bollocks to say it's a problem out of fear of being labeled cruel by the uninformed that think their one cat won't make a difference. We need stricter cat laws and there needs to be culling because we can't realistically rehab all of them and TNR doesn't stop hunting or the spread of disease and fleas. It's a shame to see all the native wildlife diminish because people let their cats out. It's also a shame that well meaning people have to carry the burden those so called animal lovers caused; no one wants to kill a cat, but something has to be done for the other animals.
I remember some years back hearing about a bug - maybe a fly or wasp - that singularly predates on fire ants, and introducing them where those have become invasive - in this case Texas - was showing some early good results when the climate was actually compatible. IIRIC fire ants can live anywhere hot but the predator needs a more narrow moisture band.
In the comments I see many people that seem to be experts on the subject that are just belittling others for their lack of knowledge. This is a comment section that many people say what they think is true or what they have heard. Talking down to people that may not know just makes you look bad. On the other hand there are people that calmly explains the facts in an easy to understand way, kudos to those people.
Genetic biological control has been pretty successful, too. The sterile insect technique, pioneered by Knipling, has been key to control of screw worm flies in livestock. Irradiating screw-worm flies (or any other species) to sterilize them calls for a long-term and large-scale operation, however. A modern update of this technique is genetic sterility. My favorite version is a male-transmitted, female-fatal gene. In this, male carriers pass on the female-fatal gene to all their offspring, but all the female ones die...while the sons live to pass on the gene again. This kind of system could, theoretically, lead to extinction of a species (though not likely; having half your genes die out each generation is a strong negative selection pressure) , so it would best be used to control non-native species...particularly populations that are genetically/geographically isolated from native-range populations. A company called Oxitec (now part of Precigen) developed a version of this system for control of Aedes aegypti, (a new world invasive) which transmits several very serious diseases like dengue, yellow fever, chikungunya and zika.
I used to live in Corpus Christi, Texas and there was talk of introducing phorrid flies to combat fire ants. Does anyone know if this has been done anywhere else, and was it successful or not?
Southeastern United States the Tennessee Valley Authority, TVA introduced Kudzu from Japan to control soil erosion oh, it worked but it also went nuts in this area and in some places cost more money to keep areas clean of it as it would just completely take over roads and critical infrastructure projects within a week.
I despise cane toads. I know it’s not their fault they have thrived so well but they are just so overwhelming. Every night hundreds of them come out all across the lawn, porch etc. They poop on the concrete every night. Get into the cat food. And I’ve had many a scare when I’ve gone to put a boot on only to have three cane toads jump out! Yuck😱 They somehow get into everything 😤
At one point in my life, I was very gung-ho on the idea of introducing not just one or a few, but thousands of invasive species from every possible ecosystem to every single other ecosystem, essentially supercharging the evolutionary pressure every creature faces and combating diversity loss by wholesale rapid ecosystem wide cross-introduction of species in both directions, transplanting whole square kilometres of already integrated ecosystems worth of new fauna and flora into other areas to die or thrive. Its probably not a good idea in the medium term when nature takes eons to do it naturally. But it's still so tempting to see what happens when every single species that could possibly survive in an area tries to do so simultaneously. If we ever get an inhabitable planet with a very new/bland/undeveloped ecosystem, the throw everything at the wall and see what sticks once an equilibrium is reached system would seem great.
Dude-- that's essentially what we've done. We've transported thousands of non-native species all over the globe. We know exactly what the result is. It's a massive reduction in biodiversity, as the generalist species wipe everything else out. You get a medal for one of the most idiotic comments on this video.
We even know the time scale that it takes for diversification to reestablish itself. After big wipeouts like the global disaster that did in the dinosaurs and other contemporary species, it takes about 10 million years for diversity to recover.
I used to live in Hawaii, and I would go out and play with the mongoose, as a kid. When they weren't being aggressive in front of people they didn't like or the prey they were going to eat, they were pretty nice, like to play, and even like to cuddle up to you. But as an adult, I would love to own a mongoose for pest control on my residence. I know they'd probably eat the Scorpions, the centipedes, and especially the rattlesnakes. And I bet they would definitely keep the unwanted pests away from my garage, or getting into the house or fenced-in back area. I guess a heart, I'm still a very Avid animal lover.
In South Carolina we used to have a lot of invasive, red, stinging ants that built giant red ant hills out of clay. Stepping in one of those was not fun because they use a fair mode to all staying at the same time. Last time I went back to South Carolina I noticed that there are no red, stinging ants left whatsoever perhaps because they released a wasp that lays eggs in the brains of ants; however, I noticed now there are argentine ants everywhere anywhere you brush leaves they scurry about. They even got into my car and caused traction control and brake sensor failures on top of seatbelt warning, failures, as well as being everywhere else. I imagine that since the red ants were killed now, another species can move in.
Interesting invasions, sand miners in the '60's introduced the South African bitou bush to comply with 'rehabilitation' measures required by the Australian Government. This species quickly established, pushing out native vegetation, and totally dominating beachfront sand dunes. At the same time, South African sand miners introduced the Australian wattle for the same purpose, with a similar outcome.
Great video. Speaking of 1800s idiots, I would love to see a video about the introduction of starlings and house sparrows - and what it did to the blue bird population.
From what I heard Shakespeare’s play inspired people to bring them over in the America and boom went the population. Not they compete with native birds for nesting sites and food.
This is one area genetic modification of animals has direct application. Introducing compounding degenerative diseases, gene targeted viruses, or even just genes that select for only one gender (say… All males) would be self repopulating controls until the pest is extinct, without directly murdering them all. However… Testing. Testing and control of migration would be even bigger concerns, since affected members of the target population would by design be carriers for literal Bioweapons to their parent species.
Hawaii wasn't the first place the Cactoblastis moth was released to control prickly pear. It was Australia under the guidance of the CSIRO (Australian government scientific research) who introduced it after long and very considerable testing to make sure it wouldn't effect the native animals and flora, especially after the cane toad issues. Its interesting to note that the CSIRO was against the release of the cane toad. It was local politicians who pushed for it's release. Hawaii, after the success of the cactoblastis in Australia, decided to follow suit.
Using domesticated species for invasive species control would be a partial solution. Genetically engineering existing species or creating them to eliminate threats then self destruction. Engineered pest control could be used to control farm crop pests.
I live on not the Big Island, but my mom loves mongooses bc they also eat snakes and she abhors snakes and there are no snakes on the islands- shouldn't be any snakes on the islands.
I'm not sure if that counts, but the latest video about the Dung Beetle on this channel made me realize how natural and inexpensive a biological control (in this case a soil control, not a population control) can have and it's impact can be quite imense working on their own. So, it is an interesting resource, although it is very risky and possibly quite dangerous to the environment...so...I guess maybe it is worth the try with caution
May I add one of the very best and most successful biological controls here in Australia? The enormous number of non-native livestock animals led, of course, to a mountain of manure that our native dung beetle species weren’t capable of dealing with (far wetter than native dung). Which is why flies used to be in plague proportions. Not hyperbole. Part of our accent is down to keeping our mouths as closed as possible when speaking, so as not to eat too many flies. We owe being able to retire the hats hung with bottle corks to several African dung beetle species, carefully researched and introduced in the ‘50’s.
Australia imported the "cactoblastis moth" after (officially) millions of hectares were totally dominated by prickly pear cactus People were using horribly toxic poisons that remained in the environment and trying to burn it but many farmers were just forced to leave their farms. The moth was introduced in 1924 and by 1932 had brought more than 7 million hectares back into farming.
"IS BIOLOGICAL CONTROL A GOOD IDEA" is kind of like asking, 'IS FIRE A GOOD THING". The answer depends on the unasked parts of the question. No chemical will give us an option to control malaria. Bio-engineering and subsequent biological competition might. Not that the we can afford to do any less than overstudying the ramifications before committing. There should be a small mountain of red tape between the concept and implementation stage, but we need to allow a path to do it correctly.
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cane toads get a bad rap....
they make great pets and are easy to keep! i fed mine crickets but they will eat nearly anything including chicken and beef
Pronounced "King 'kala-cow-wa'" Pretty close though.:)
Speaking of invasive species, it makes me sad that there are kids in the area I grew up in who have never heard a mourning dove and instead grew up with the collared dove, which is invasive. The doleful coo of a mourning dove is so nostalgic to me, but they have at least been pushed out of towns. Hopefully they've not been wiped out entirely. 🥺
STOP spreading missinformation. Do more research BEFORE putting out videos that falsely claim that biological control would work without sideeffects harmfull to native wildlife! The quoted species DID NOT "work" ... neither Cactoplastis-moths nor ladybugs!
Just wish y'all would of thrown some facts about how ineffective cats are at eating rodents and how they actually have endangered the native birds.
It's actually insane how negative Cane Toads are in Australia. Even their tadpoles are poisonous and they are able to kill almost any animal in many different levels of the ecosystem. Crocodiles, small animals, etc. Plus the toad is able to travel pretty far over a decent amount of time. So they essentially flourish like crazy, killing and eating everything, while nothing eats or kills them. It's horrible. Especially in a place with such unique biodiversity like Australia.
Australian cane toad populations are much more cannibalistic than cane toad populations in other areas of the world, and the Australian water rat and some populations of Australian magpies have learned to tear the toad apart and only eat the non-toxic parts of it. So predation against the toads is evolving.
Native rats and crows have both learned to eat them safely. Both flip them over; no bufotoxin on the belly. The crows eat just the livers.
I have heard that some of your native Australian snakes are evolving to be able to eat cane toads.
@@thekaxmaxyou could also try some bufotoxin lol
In that case you can't deny how "perfect" the cane toad is by natures design. Honestly I don't know how animals deal with cane toads in their natural habitat? Then again we have the biggest invasive species on this planet, us humans. Nothing comes even close.
As an Australian. We hate cane toads. Kill dozens a week, sometimes more. They are gross and very harmful to our native wildlife here. Hopstop is wonderful. Spray away. Make sure they are cane toads as some native frogs have similar colouring.
We have them here in Florida as well. They poison a lot of dogs that decide to bite them. I carry an air rifle in my truck and dispatch any cane toad I find.
Killing toads sounds super gross. I already feel grossed out squishing insects, I can’t imagine killing toads! Though it sounds like you use a spray to kill them?
@@orangebeagle3068 if you use a large-caliber they will explode! And who doesn't love exploding toads?
And your super living wealthy sugar cane farmers have never been held to account for illegally importing them here ! Now they are destroying native animals here in New South Wales and in the Northern Territory !
Don't start me on the destruction of The Great Barrier Reef by furtilizer runoff !
Your a backward little state with backward little people , how would I know ? I was forced to live there for EIGHTEEN YEARS !
Hopstop is a great name!
The cassava control was actually extremely cool and the video _should_ have gone into more detail because it is the PERFECT example of how to do biological control: the cassava pest has a natural predator, a parasitic wasp, which will ONLY parasitise cassava pest. Parasitic wasps get very species specific that way. It took a lot of research to find and test this wasp, but it has been a roaring success both in terms of deworming cassava, and in dying off when no longer needed, and in having no effect on any local species.
parasitic wasps are basically as one-to-one as biological controls can get... if we could ever engineer specific wasps for specific pests, we'd never need to test other agents.
@@alveolateand that's why I never kill wasps
I'm personally in favour of experimenting with releasing bears on the streets of Manchester as an attempt at weekend pest control. Both the UK one, and the one in New Hampshire. After all, AnCaps alreaady made the bears there in Grafton, extra feral confused and aggressive, so may as well run with it!
@@TheHorseshoePartyUK Give this person a Nobel Prize. But remember, for the bear infestation to become established, one must have a "donut lady" providing the ancap doughnuts.
@@Zaihanisme These wasps are usually tiny - often sub mm. The angry ones that attack humans are 2-4cm.
From the Philippines, also an island country, we were a massive victim to exactly the same thing. That's how we got cane toads, golden apple snails, tilapia, mosquitofish, carp, giant african snails, guppies, janitor fish, Chinese softshell turtles, water hyacinths, black rat, etc. And unlike first world countries, we do not have the same resources to fight invasive species, causing massive losses in endemic ecosystems. In most of our freshwater waterways for example, very little of our endemic fish species remain.
The golden apple snail and tilapia are food. Collect, cook and eat them! Here in the USA we have invasive silver carp. I have asked repeatedly why my grocery store doesn't carry it. I hope that changes soon.
@@kittimcconnell2633 Unlike our mainland Southeast Asian neighbors, we don't really have a culture of eating snails. Which is why the introduction of golden apple snails from Argentina in the 1980s as an alternative food source was quite stupid, frankly. It's just not something most Filipinos would find appetizing. Some people do eat it. But for the majority, it's too exotic. And I don't see that changing soon. The snails we prefer to eat are marine (abalones, conchs, limpets, rock snails, periwinkles, chitons, etc.).
Tilapia and carp, however, are excellent food sources. But at the cost of the loss of native food fish. So I question the necessity of their introduction. The worst affected are isolated lake systems like Lake Lanao, which once hosted a huge variety of large endemic food fish. Most of which are now extinct.
And yes, in the US, I've always wondered why fishermen refuse to eat invasive species like carp and snakeheads. I've even heard people say that they don't eat snakeheads because snakeheads are too "scary-looking", which is hilarious considering that a lot of North American food fish are just as ugly. From salmon to catfish to pikes. Snakeheads are literally one of the best-tasting food fish and highly sought after in Asia. It's not like snails or anything too exotic. They're just fish. Eating them would go a long way towards helping control the population.
@@kittimcconnell2633 It doesn't carry carp, cause carp tastes gross! Better to ask your hardware store or gardening supply store why it doesn't sell "charlie carp" fertiliser. That's what we do with carp in Australia, similar to seaweed fertilisers in properties, but has the added bonus of harvesting the carp to make it
@@AngryKittens If you dont' want to eat them locally, maybe you can create an export market for them? Kmart in Australia has a range of water hyacinth products, such as placemats & pot plant covers, that I believe come from your country, or other countries in the region, looking for options of what they can do to get rid of the plants, while also profiting from them in the meantime, due to them taking away other sources of income with their invasive nature.
Tbh, I don't think first world makes a difference on this issue, I think it comes down to attitude & determination & innovation in looking for good control & profit making options from them. It's a bit like covid, all the money in the world means nothing if the country doesn't have a desire to fight it, while even some of the poorest countries can outperform the richest, if they have a determination to do so. Only place first world matters I think, is the ability to enforce quarantines. First world countries have the soft power to do that, countries like yours can be bullied out of it on the international stage & accused of putting quarantine in to manipulate global trade rules & requirements & get threatened with sanctions or boycotts if not backing down & allowing the rich countries to do as they like with your country, even when you can see the potential harm they are going to cause - and that is something we should all be addressing together as a global community! Not right when that happens & it happens far too often!
@@mehere8038 No. "Attitude, determination, and innovation" don't do squat when you don't have money for specialized departments/orgs, equipment for monitoring and recording spread, quarantine measures, specialized vehicles/equipment, education of the general public, etc.
It's not as simple as turning all water hyacinths into bags. You'll know why if you've seen an entire river covered in water hyacinths. You could make a million bags out of it and still not make a dent. Neither are golden apple snails exportable. They're perishable, not particularly tasty or appetizing, carry diseases like schistosomiasis, and... they're explosively invasive. We're already eating tilapia and carp. As well as turning cane toads into novelty wallets. None of that really help curb their population. It only lets us, at least, benefit from an eological disaster.
That applies to covid as well. Like every other developing country, we were left hanging when every first world country snatched up multiple doses of the vaccines as soon as they came out. Leaving us with nothing. People died.
We make do. But don't mistake that as being "just as good" as first world resources. It's why there's always been a pushback to green measures among developing countries. Because first worlders seem to be completely incapable of truly understanding the depth of the wealth gap between nations, and what it actually means in practice. It has never been as simple as "just try harder".
The most hilarious parts is rats are nocturnal and mongoose are diurnal. They are pretty much friends. Even with their powers combined they still can’t keep the chickens down
I am from Hawaii... While the mongoose helped a little, the sleep patterns didn't overlap enough with rats. But even worse... Mongoose like eggs, and native birds became under attack and conservationists put out traps to try to catch them. Mongoose are smart though, but I hear of authorities turning a blind eye to hunters going after them in the mountains ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Ps. My aunt had a restaurant and would feed the local feral cats near her backdoor. Keeping that cats near kept rats in check. She was a smart lady and started a catch spay/neuter, ear notch and release program.
Let's put in use human extermination capability!
@@HiKimiko There's two case studies where they got rid of their feral cats but not the rodents, and the local biodiversity was worse. There are likely certain situations like rodent filled cities where an indoor/outdoor cats feeding on invasive rat may be better, ecological, then indoor cats when considering the national/global impact (pet food, litter; extra toys due to boredom of being inside -- and all the associated costs in live stock, animal welfare, agriculture, transportation, packaging etc.). I tried to find an comparison/breakdown between each but couldn't.
TNR/TVHR programs are great to get feral populations in control, cats can reproduce a lot when no predators. (TVHR: vasectomy/hysto -- been looking into the research on gonadectomy [tradtional spay/neuter]... it would be nice of Scishow did a dive into this and research on this, particular in dogs where new research is showing both net increased health and behavior issues. Tho cats due to mammary cancer rates is showing longer lifespan with gonadectomy, but the mental health aspect is less clear)
From Hawaii as well, now they are experimenting with "sterile" mosquitoes to mate with the mosquito population to produce mosquitoes that when they try to reproduce the offspring will not survive (I think that's how it works?)
I sure hope they don't screw this up.
Do they taste good?
Rats are also predators - they kill young birds, insects, and lizards. Tom Scott recently did a video on New Zealands efforts to control rats - an invasive species there also.
Skinner: Well, I was wrong; the lizards are a godsend.
Lisa: But isn't that a bit short-sighted? What happens when we're overrun by lizards?
Skinner: No problem. We simply release wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. They'll wipe out the lizards.
Lisa: But aren't the snakes even worse?
Skinner: Yes, but we're prepared for that. We've lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat.
Lisa: But then we're stuck with gorillas!
Skinner: No, that's the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.
OMG, Stoats in New Zealand... wiped out most of the ground dwelling birds because they were easier to hunt then the European rabbits (double catastrophe!) they were brought in to control. Good episode!
Back in the day, I bicycle toured around NZ for a couple of months and learned that Ring Tail Possums from Australia are also a problem for your beautiful islands.
No, not ringtail possums, brush tail possums. So-called plant eaters which will go back to a rata tree every night until it is dead, as well as scoffing birds, as young and eggs. Not just stoats either, why bring in just stoats when you can also bring in ferrets and weasels, to control the introduced rabbits. Some moron also brought in a pair of foxes but the customs agent drowned them in Lyttelton harbour (that would have been goodbye to kiwis in the South Island). And then there are the cute hedgehogs, quite adept at climbing trees and killing young birds and eggs. Plus the myna bird introduced into the North Island, and starlings. I could go on but I’m getting depressed.
@@ronkirk5099 and brush tail possums!
We should introduce an Eagle asap, I think it could do very good!
@@falkkiwiben you're kidding right?
In Pokémon Sun and Moon, which were based off of Hawaii, there are Rattata (a rat-like Pokémon) and Yungoos (a mongoose-like Pokémon) which I just realized were based on this history!
This whole concept reminds me of a book I once read. There was an old woman who swallowed a fly, so she swallowed a frog to eat the fly, but then she had a frog inside so she swallowed a snake to eat the frog, and so on and so forth...
She died of course.
They wiggled and giggled and jiggled inside her!
Yessss! This is the first thing they think about when they want to do this.
😂😂 you're absolutely right!
I once swallowed a deer. Then decided to swallow a gun to kill it. But nothing happened. So, I ate a man to shoot the gun to kill the deer. Turns out, the man was a liberal who wanted to abolish the 2nd ammendment. SO...I joined a religious cult to find a far-right Rebublican and swallowed him. He shot the liberal. Then feared judgement from his God, and shot himself. I'm a vegetarian now. I figured, if I have to live with a deer inside of me, I might as well feed the son-of-a-bitch.🤨
We removed introduced predators from a small island off Tasmania. The result was several years of over population of the native marsupials. So much so that many died slowly of starvation. It was awful, but there was nothing to do that wouldn’t cause even more issues. Now the population has settled down to a manageable level....thank goodness.
It’s a tough one.
That's what happens when you shoot all the Tasmanian tigers!
Have they gotten rid of all of the cats off of Bruny Island? I was last there in 2015/2016 and there were still tons of cats eating lots of native wildlife, thanks to humans thinking their precious little kitty wouldn't kill a native bird.
Couldn't they catch and euthanise some of them, at least so they didn't starve to death? That feels like something they could do that shouldn't cause more problems.
@@cggc9510 A lot won't eat them, but what those "owners" (in inverted commas, cause they're not very good at it, are they) dont' seem to realise is that cats have bacteria in their mouth, so ANY break of the skin with a tooth or claw, even if it's "just playing" is a death sentence to native animals, but they die within 24 hours, not immediately, so the owners don't see it, see the animal fly/run off & think it's fine. If they come into wildlife rescue, they're given antibiotics, cause otherwise its effectively a 100% death rate for ANY "cat attack/play". I REALLY wish they'd get this through their heads! & I really wish legislators would get through their heads that cat laws should be the same as dog ones - not permitted out of their yard off a lead! If wandering, collected by council rangers & taken to the pound & hundreds, if not thousands of dollars to get it back out! If we did that, we'd see a HUGE difference in wildlife death numbers! Would still be some in backyards, but nothing like now!
Other thing we could do is legislate for all "precious little kitties" to be required to wear scrunchy collars when outdoors. Remember those hair scrunchies from the 1980's? It's been shown that making them for cat collars & putting them on, drops songbird deaths to near zero. Cats learn to stalk silently with bells, but songbirds are very colour focused in life, shows them food & mates & other bird threats, so they never lose effectiveness, ANY bright colour, they see, any movement of a bright colour, the birds are near obsessed by, so cats simply can't get near them without the birds seeing & reacting
We have ample solutions, but like you say, the problem is "owner" attitudes!
@@conlon4332 Australia's big, it's hard. If you really care about this issue & want to help, best thing you can do is eat kangaroo. Currently around 11% of the required cull is carried out for human meat consumption. There are no predators other than humans for the 3 biggest species, so the other 89% over populate, then when drought hits, they die on mass from starvation & disease & in the process, they also ringbark trees, to eat all bark they can reach, cause they're so hungry & eat all grasses down to the ground, resulting in erosion & they hop up to 100kms every day, looking for food, forming into mega mobs that eat EVERYTHING in the areas they pass through, which then results in smaller animal species dying of starvation too, when they weren't overpopulated & in some cases are even endangered & had plenty of food for their own population, till the reds, greys & euro roos come through & eat everything. The Tasmania situation is sorted now, but the roo situation on the mainland is not! It's an ongoing issue that occurs every 10-20 years with mega starvation/die off events. The natural predator (humans) re-engaging in proper, ongoing population control, like we have for at least 80,000 years, is the best solution to this, eating their meat is the best way to fund this cull & welfare checks on it.
Last overpopulation event, in NSW at least, the government acted before the mass disease die offs, creating a new, recreational shooting licence for roos. Stopped the starvation & disease, BUT there were no controls on that! We really don't know the welfare outcomes. They're culled by farmers for dog meat too (under licence) & by professionals for dog meat (under licence) but in all those cases, all can be shot, with no welfare checks. For the human consumption market, only male roos are accepted, so as to ensure there's no joey in a pouch when culled & only single shot, head shots are accepted for meat processing, which means the human consumption shooters are absolutely top notch, they don't miss! They're paid really well per animal & there's NEVER been ANY report or evidence of cruelty from them, despite animal activists putting a LOT of effort into trying to find cases.
So yeh, if you really want to help Aussie wildlife, eating kangaroo meat really is the best option & something most people in the world can personally do. Their meat is sold in over 50 different countries, but there's just not enough sales to stabilise the population properly (price gouging on meat prices overseas doesn't help!)
Anyway, I just like to share this, cause it really is something almost anyone can do at an individual level if they want to help & get involved. Just do a search for their meat near you & you should find it, must be eaten rare, or minced or it tastes like a rock. Best added to curries & other strong flavour meals if you're not used to game meat taste (tastes great in those settings imo)
& no, I don't work for the industry or anything, it's just something I"ve personally discovered & researched, cause I like to think of myself as an ethical eater & that I've been super impressed with. Feral pig meat is the other one that's really good for the environment & animal welfare & conservation, that one often helps in a wide range of countries, not just Australia (although feral pig meat around the world primarily comes from Australia & the US)
I can't be alone in feeling like the plural of "mongoose" should definitely be mongeese.
In Canada we have a large population of meese.
I definitely agree
was just about to comment that 😂
You are alone. So very alone. 😔
I was thinking the same thing
It's really funny to me that Hank said that Prickly Pears are native to "the American tropics" when they're also native to most of North America, including his home state of Montana
Just don’t let them eat my SPAM and sweet beans on ice.
Yeah, I think a lot of people (myself included tbh) automatically interpret "native species" as "endemic species", even when they know the difference.
Ironic, these are one of those species you can get an industry from
They'll grow naturally up through large swathes of the Rockies & Great Plains, but their actual home range comes off as greatly exaggerated because many states label a plant as a native species if it grows anywhere within the US & isn't considered a problematic species. Those things will do well just about anywhere, but they require the sandy soil. They also aren't likely to get away from gardens just because nothing will go after the fruit containing the seeds, but when these things find a sandy spot they like, they take over the whole thing from end to end in just a couple of years. My grandmother learned that one the hard way.
Lol Americans are dumb they think tropical areas are super seperate and exotic from the rest of the country
I did my Masters work on the rats, mongooses and Coqui frogs of Hawaii. Thank you for saying mongooses as opposed to the many other ways people try to say it.
Mongeese
Sure. Because one sounds very intelligent saying "gooses"
Mongeese
How about mouses? Or louses?
In the rest of zoology saying fishes instead of fish refers to multiple species of fish rather than pluralizing a single species.
Same goes for mouses and louses.
Not sure why not in this case. Must have their own special language rules, I guess
@@t-bonejones3576 Because "goose" and "mongoose" do not have the same etymological origins, despite the similarity in spelling. Goose is from Old English gōs (plural gēs, hence the modern irregular plural geese). Mongoose is from Portuguese mangusto (plural mangustos). Ultimately from Marathi muṅgūs. It's association with "goose" is folk etymology.
As opposed to say "sea goose" (an archaic common name for phalaropes, a type of aquatic bird), which _is_ derived from sea + goose, and thus has "sea geese" as its plural form.
It's similar to why you should say "octopuses", not "octopi". Because "octopi" assumes that the suffix of octopus is "-us" (Latin 2nd declension suffix), when it's actually "-pus" (Latinized Greek suffix, meaning "foot"). This is due to erroneous conflation of octopus with other Latin-derived words with an "-us" suffix, like cactus, alumnus, nucleus, radius, etc.
Saying "mongeese" sounds very stupid to me.
In the Great Lakes, Alewives are a problem. They are an ocean fish that came in through the canals or ships ballast. Salmon were and still are planted to eat the alewives. We also like to catch and eat the salmon.
I think that genetic engineering like they do with malaria mosquitoes is probably the best way to go. It does take more time for it to work on mammals and other animals bigger than mosquitoes given their longer reproductive cycle but we should think of solutions in a more "natural" timeframe, it's very difficult to change an ecosystem in a few years, let alone months. Just as it takes years and even decades to see the full extent of the repercussions of introducing invasive species, whatever changes we do now will take the same time for their impact to become aparent.
I hope I explained myself clearly, my english is not that good 😅
Have you watched Mimic? lol
This does sound like another potential solution - using CRISPER technology to modify invasive species to perhaps produce sterile offspring or upset a balance in gender to curb the population (more males, less females). Of course, as with all things that may have enormous ramifications, this needs to be thoroughly tested
Unfortunately I've seen a few articles showing that in lab settings, while many mosquitoes take the harmful genes, other groups of them mutate to avoid it. It's likely that in the wild, isolated populations of the mosquitoes will develop genes to block the implanted ones that cause reproductive harm. Because naturally, in sexually reproducing organisms, while certain genes can be manipulated so that the offspring should always get them, if it's very negative to the species' longevity it will be selected against.
Nature and evolution _really_ doesn't like humans trying to tamper and exterminate anything. It definitely still has merit to help limit disease and invasives! It just might not be foolproof.
Until someone brings an infected animal back to a country where they are native. Then you have genetic engineering happening where it wasn't intended.
@@rylandrc Like the video said, transporting of species into other countries is very tightly controlled nowadays. Granted, an animal could be successfully smuggled, but it would be very hard to do, and the animal would not only have to survive the ordeal, but be released into the wild, survive, and find a mate. It's a lot of factors, but I do agree that there is a small chance of that happening.
I think the idea that they're going for is that such information would be widely announced and publicized so people know what's going on long enough for the changes to spread throughout the population and for it to eventually die out, thus ending the problem entirely. And of course, as previously mentioned above and in the video, places where such a scenario might happen often already have very tightly regulations on the transporting of species - the last thing they want to do is create another problem by bringing in another invasive species.
I'm surprised you didn't touch on Lake Michigan. The introduction of alewives had shores covered in rotting fish, so they introduced salmon. Then zebra mussels showed up collapsing the entire food chain as salmon competed against native species , only for round gobies to accidentally get introduced and start eating the invasive mussels.
Currently studying this as part of my environmental science degree - the complexities are absolutely mindblowing
You're rotting your brain with that pseudoscience.
It's not quite the same thing, but in the UK, there was a study about whether to reintroduce beavers who had been extinct for hundreds of years. After ten years of studying it, they still hadn't made their mind up. Then there were some beavers found on the river Otter- that 'oddly' hadn't been there before. Somebody (nobody knows who) had got bored with the study and released them anyway. They're doing great. They did recapture them and test them for a parasite, but they didn't have it, so they let them go again.
Beavers are such a useful keystone species, that I wouldn't even mind seeing them become invasive somewhere.
@@jeffbenton6183 They actually are in Patagonia. But apparently it's difficult to get people onboard with controlling them because they're so popular.
@BooBaddyBig Are they popular because they're cute, or popular because they're useful? Apparently, some of my fellow Americans consider them a nuisance, where I'm steadily coming around to the idea that they're useful. I don't live near anywhere that has beavers, so that's why I'm curious.
@@jeffbenton6183 It's because they're cute. They're causing huge practical problems due to a complete lack of predators and environmental changes they cause wiping out native species, and interfering with farming.
Australia has also had a problem with prickly pear, also successfully treated with Cactoblastis (not, of course, to extinction - there are some growing in my neighbourhood, and I live very far from the Tropics), so yeah, there are positives as well.
BUT the cacti are delicious!
AND no, not just the fruit... Although I DO love me some prickly-pear jam... BUT I digress...
Scorch off the needles with open flame, because trying to remove them with a knife "by hand" generally only gets rid of most of them, and inundates your hand with a steady gain in festering micro-needles embedded in the skin... SO scorch them off. It only takes a few seconds (less than a minute) of open flame and a pair of tongs...
Then you slice the pads length-wise to about a half-inch width... and cut down to a reasonably bite-size length... add to salads as a raw veggie... or toss into soup and treat relatively like the Blue Lake green beans... The taste is similar, though the cactus is a tad more pungent or intense about it... YOUNG pads are more tender and lighter, sweeter than older (larger) pads, so you'll want to stick, generally, to pads grown within the last year for optimal flavor experience.
Basics for tending, pruning, and keeping the prickly-pear cactus in good condition for regular harvest are relatively straight forward and available all over online, so there's no need in me spoon feeding you your homework, anymore than there's any great need in you trying to single-handedly eat them "into check" for the sake of all Australia... BUT spread the word, and the sooner folks realize they can be a great boon, the sooner they can be both relegated to a non-nuisance and taken full advantage over...
The major difficulty with the prickly-pears themselves is all the damn seeds. Yeah, they've got the same "micro-needles" as the pads, and you scorch those over open flame just the same. Sliced down and pounded into a chinois (aka china-hat) to extract juice, or you can follow other "seedy fruit" instructions from a seasoned jam and jelly maker... I've also cut up the fruit and used the knife to scrape out the seeds, but there's quite a bit of "faff" involved there... Then sugar and pectin added, and you can leave most of the fleshy bit (what you can salvage at least) for substance and body... Eaten raw, they're also quite good, just as they are... a natural fruit... pick into SMALL containers as the weight of the pears pressing together WILL "share" the damn needles, breaking needles off from one and embedding them into another... BUT while the skin is a little tough, it's nothing to get excited over in the culinary experience, and just eat them outdoors so everyone can crudely munch and spit seeds like the barbarians we frequently fantasize about... Exotic fruit and interesting fun for all ages... ;o)
Once under control, it is easier to get rid of. BUT when the cactus is gone, you now have to get rid of the new predator that was introduced. So, is bio control really worth it? You are going to spend a bunch of money testing and then even more releasing, then more on monitoring. Keep in mind, the monitoring must go on forever. Wouldn't it be cheaper just to go out for a dozen years and remove the invasive in the first place?
@@cggc9510 Especially when it's as delicious as EVERY PART of the prickly-pear cactus! ;o)
Feral cats are also a huge problem in Hawai'i. They are everywhere. You're as likely to see a feral cat scuttling across the road as a mongoose these days.
And lots of people feed cats
Feral animals that are often pet animals...non native cats , snakes, birds, and dogs are some of the worst at times.
@@kevins8575 some feed feral cats, and often wrongly wild life generally.
Feral cats are a problem most places on Earth
The catch and release spay and neutering program is underway though, which is a positive. One of my calicos was born in Hawaii and her mother was a colony cat who was spayed after she gave birth to my cat and her siblings.
update(s) about the cane toad in Australia...
1:they have begun to evolve into two groups, fast movers with longer jumps that cover lots of land (Australia is big) and slower ones that eat more of the local flora
2:some of our snakes have evolved to eat them without being poisoned themselves (yay snakes!)
time to release more snakes! [I'm obviously jocking. Snakes as amazing as they are can be a pe(s)t.]
1 = Oh wow, that's interesting but also sucks ☹️
2 = Also yay snakes!! 🐍
Crows and magpies too. And I heard something about baby crocs also maybe evolving to safely eat the babies? Not sure about that
@@kisakisakura6663 there has been talk about releasing red belly black snakes onto Guam to take out, I think it's cane toads? Or I may have that backwards & Guam may have the snakes as an issue, but red belly black snakes have definately been studied as one of 3 Australian animals found to eat cane toads effectively & therefore considered for release into other areas where cane toads are a problem. None are species specific hunters though, so all have been rejected as options if applying the strict controls over biological control releases that are used in countries like Australia & the US today
Thank goodness that Australia has lots of native snakes to choose from.
Us humans are really good at unintended consequences.
Nature is really good at unintended consequences.
@@bltzcstrnx interesting. I see your point, as in weather events, or maybe random selection? However what I mean is we humans set out to solve a problem, and inadvertently create other problems, as unintended consequences. The biggest unintended consequence of digging up fossil fuels is climate change. Maybe us humans are an unintended consequence of nature? This could go down a rabbit hole.
The number one reason the mongoose was a failure for rat control was because rats are nocturnal, and mongooses are diurnal. They never even cross paths.
typically, the people making these decisions are politicians who no scientific knowledge.
Interesting.
I think they were imported into the Caribbean to control snakes in the cane fields. That is what I heard about Puerto Rico anyway.
And how about when the invasion wasn't planned? Our crew filmed the lionfish. Its looks even helped make it a Hollywood star. The problem is that they are not only venomous but extremely hungry. That's why this predator is causing underwater chaos around the world. Originally found in the Pacific Ocean, lionfish invaded seas from the Bahamas to Cyprus, decimating local fish populations as they go. But it isn't all doom and gloom; we talked to scientists that think they may have the answer to controlling them.
You heard it here, from Hank Green himself!
"... We cannot go back in time."
I feel like this is a turning point in history.
That is a terrible pun and you should go home and think about what you've done.
"Time keeps on slippin' slippin' slippin... into the future..." ;o)
Yeah, this is one of those where you need excruciating scientific rigor to even suggest doing. I mean, there are too many obviously bad outcomes to the point we don't even know how many species have gone extinct to our introducing new ones shenanigans.
Kudzu in the southern US was a bad one too. That stuff grows so fast.
In the early 80s, I got my very first job in Bozeman at the USDA Rangeland Insect Lab at MSU. Dr. Rees was working on using a type of Boll Weevel to control the thistles on cattle ranges, and was then watching to see whether the native Robber flies were eating the Boll Weevils. My job was basically organizing all of his slides of weevils and flies while his team did all the heavy work. It was only 2 months, and I considered becoming an entomologist for a while. I lost track of how the project progressed, but it was interesting.
Crazy how not just doing the first thing that comes to your head can be beneficial.
I live in New Zealand, and just like in Hawaii we have lots of unwanted introduces species. Rats, possums, weasels, stoats,feral cats and dogs, humans, etcetera.
and you're doing what this video dismissed, with baits through forests & continuing to refill them, cause that's the only option for pests like rats. I think the video should have mentioned you guys in this video, but they probably don't know about you - although they did at least remember to include you on their world map :)
"Unwanted introduced species",
Lists humans, lol. It's true that some places would be better off without humans but then you wouldn't be living there and writing your comment either.
Not just feral cats but people who have outdoor cats too!
I think about this way too often. As I learned in pre-K: I know an old lady who swallowed a fly...
+
10:31 Have they ever tried introducing neutered animals first, as a type of 'final rehearsal' to check for any unforeseen interactions? Obviously we wouldn't be able to see how the population would level out, but it could be a good way to be able to see how these animals would actually behave when let loose in the intended environment. And if it does go wrong, we wouldn't be stuck with them forevermore.
You are on the right track for at least one situation. The single best way to handle feral cat populations is to capture, neuter, and release all the cats you can. They maintain their territories, fill the available niches, and fail to reproduce, thus lowering the population over time in a fairly stable way. If you just remove a cat population, cats in other areas will spread across, and there will be waves of bloom and die-off. Well spotted, conlon.
Yeah, Mina birds are kind of a nusence. and getting rid of either of the 2 species of rats here is a nightmare. Roof rats, or plague, black, climbing, tree rats "lot of names for the same species. and Norway rats or ground, sewer, Hanover and Wharf rats are their other names.
The ones shown at 2:11 appear to be norway rats, 1:50 is a small colony of black rats, yes the countable 10 rats is a small colony, very small in fact.
I don't see many mongoose around, though they do occasionally pop up, just not in the more urban areas.
🙏 Thank You So Much SciShow for another important tutorial on human positive & negative impact on the environment! Yes , we made mistakes , hopefully we learnt from our mistakes to save & protect whatever natural flora & fauna left from extinction! ... 🐕
Rats are so scary, that when you find out someone introduced a new invasive predator species to eat invasive rats, your second question after "have you learned nothing?" should be "did it work?"
I live in Arkansas and invasive plants like Chinese Privet, bamboos, and others spread so thick and rapidly here. I can't imagine any form of control at this point
To put a positive twist on things, Hawaii should never have a Cobra problem!
Just so long as they don’t put a bounty on rats or mongoose!
Epic topic. I love this channel
As an Environmental Science graduate we talk a lot about biological control as a ecological tool. I think there are some cases where it is valid and could work very well if executed correctly as shown in the video and then there are others that seem like "absolutely not why would you even think that?". An extension of this idea of biological control would be to use other natural factors to control species, I.E ecosystem engineering species or ecosystem engineering as a whole. A paper published out of Australia showed that brush fires can keep invasive mesopredator species in check. Red foxes in this particular case would compete with dingoes for food. The foxes were actually initially introduced to take care of domestic cats, and domestic cats were brought in to... well you get the idea I think. Controlled burning and bush fires not only managed botanical species but also limited domestic cat AND red foxes by altering the landscape enough that the hunting grounds favored the dingo's hunting style more than the foxes and cats. Pretty cool. TL:DR Fire in controlled small amounts is good for the dingoes
So what you're saying is that dingoes are like phoenixes.
@@bramvanduijn8086 precisely more dingoes will spawn if you light a bush fire 😂
@@CaptianMoePedro Dingos aren't actually truly native to Australia though, humans are more native than dingos are & are better placed to eat & use the skins of the species dingos do to control them.
On the fire though, if that interests you, there's a number of books about it's original use that you'd probably find fascinating. "the biggest estate, how Aborigines made Australia" Has some really good, introductory info on the subject. Trees in Australia can be divided into fire level types, they range from intolerant to liking cool fires, to loving hot fires & each time a fire goes through, it germinates the seeds of that type of tree, so a cool fire will germinate cool fire liking trees, while a huge, out of control, major fire, will unalive all of those trees & instead germinate the seeds of all the hot fire loving trees, who will then go on to intentionally drop all their leaves & branches in response to hot weather & drought, as well as partly releasing their bark, leaving it hanging in strips, designed to catch any fire that occurs & raise it up into the canopy, to ignite the oil filled leaves, as well as breaking off & flying in the wind, so as to start new ember fires many kms from the original firefront. So the more devastating fires we get in Australia, the more we set the stage for more of the same to worse in the future! Cultural ones on the other hand, when managed properly, in line with cultural knowledge, will intentionally modify the landscape to germinate exactly what trees are desired for best control of the area. Before whites, they used to have hot fire lovers right up to intolerant forests & they had such incredible control, that they could stop the fire within metres of where they wanted it stopped, using only the wind changes & other known conditions that could be managed to create the effect they wanted. Some really amazing stuff if you want to read up on it
& koalas btw, feed only on the cool fire liking trees & when a fire goes through where they live, they just climb to the top of the tree & wait it out, cause they know it will just pass under them without issue - except that's not what happens today, due to changes in what trees are around them, but it's what they've evolved to do!
@@mehere8038 Very interesting I'll have to take a look at that! I am in California and wildfires and cultural burning is a huge topic here. Our Oak trees, and sequoia trees and many other species are fire sensitive and fire temperature has a huge role to play in their germination and reproduction. As for dingoes, doing some reading on their taxonomy it seems it's highly controversial some argue their ancestors were introduced making them non-native commensalists with humans. Some suggest that they are more wolf than domestic dog. In 2020 it was claimed they were a domestic dog with domesticated wolf-like ancestors. Also pretty interesting stuff and I'm going to have to read more on it. But in short, yeah seems dingoes may not be native.
@@CaptianMoePedro I'm actually glad to hear it's a huge topic there now. It's always been accepted here, but from my understanding not in teh same way there, so that's great that recognition is happening now & from there you can figure out the place of fires in your country's history & if it should be replicated for the good of the land. Weird how some things each country is advanced on & others they're backwards on. We still deny here that we deliberately released small pox to take them out, but accept the fire stuff. We also btw have "fire raptors" in the north of the country, 3 species of birds that intentionally start fires for hunting.
Re the dingo, the give away is the lack of pouch :) All mammals that are native to Australia are marsupials, so there's no question the dingo is out of place, only question is when did it arrive? Seems pretty obvious it was some time after humans, the most likely time being to correlate with the extinction of the Tasmanian Tiger from the mainland. That matches VERY well in terms of the 2 competing & as dingos arrived, tigers disappeared, except in Tasmania, where dingos never arrived, so tigers never went extinct until white humans caused it.
There's actually questions as to when humans arrived to, archeolotical evidence now says 65,000-80,000 years ago, but pollen & ash samples actually show major changes in the environment that are consistant with large scale firestick farming & not consistant with any other explanation that's been offered & that change happens 120,000 years ago in one study, 130,000 years ago in another study in another part of the country. The land bridge before that period is actually 160,000 years ago, so that would have had to have been the arrival point if dispersal & population increase was going to occur in time for 130,000 years ago. That seems unlikely for homosapians at this point in time (and only homosapians is likely, no other species is likely into Australia), but homosapian travels & evolution dates are moving back in Africa too, now potentially at 500,000 years ago, so certainly possible we may see that 130,000 years ago date accepted in the future & if so, that gives dingos an even longer potential arrival period, but still seems most likely that they arrived around 5,000 years ago. Whether they're wolf or domestic seems to relate to definitions of the 2 & agendas in interpretation of facts. Definate wolf as an assentor, all dogs have that, but how far back is debated yes, but that far back, I think there's debates about even what domestication was in dogs! Seems likely they were intentionally brought in by humans, for the purpose of assisting in hunting, beyond that, I don't know. In later years, Aboriginal people divided them into 2 groups too, "camp dogs" & "wild dogs", the camp dogs being ones they shared food with & lived with & welcomed into their communities, while the wild ones, they would chase away & not trust not to hurt them/their children. I'm guessing that's a later split, but still interesting when looking at possible histories
As always, the problem comes down to there being three necessary control vectors to using this tool (which biological controls are - a tool to be used, in a box of other tools). Adequate time testing, adequate money spent on ensuring it's proper testing, and proper deployment and monitoring afterwards... and unfortunately, those are all the vectors that people looking to *use* this tool are trying to get rid of or they would just stick with more conventional pesticides or other control measures in the first place. The benefit cited originally (that it's a one-and-done "cheap" alternative you don't need to keep redoing) already suggests that one of those *very* necessary things is something people looking to utilize this tool are already hoping to avoid, and that even *when* regulations are in place that they're not likely to follow through on any of the other bullet points either.
This can have disastrous long term damage as we've already seen - cited here are cane toads in Australia and mongoose in Hawaii, but then there are other problems like pacu in New Guinea where it was introduced for farming purposes and ended up explosively destroying the entire ecosystem because of how little research had gone into it. Chernobyl was also a logistical nightmare and failure to follow proper procedures that has helped demonize an altogether less dangerous energy source due to over fixation on the worst, most shoddily handled case examples.
People looking to save time, money, and effort are absolutely not going to do the bare minimum that's necessary and *that* is probably the biggest problem for everyone else.
You need to look at the history of biological control in Australia PROPERLY, not just pluck out one example of an animal introduced over a century ago! Biological control in Australia is hugely successful now! There's HUGE amounts of money involved! How much damage do you think 6 billion rabbits do? It's billions, if not trillions of dollars a year, so anything less than that to develop biological controls of them is a saving. Current big one in Australia is attempting to genetically engineer to wipe out mice, if you look at the costs of the last mouse plague in Australia, again, it becomes obvious that a LOT of money can be spent on this project & absolutely be justified.
The US does stuff cheap & nasty, but not all countries do! Just look at how much Australia spends on quarantine, so as to save WAY more money than that by preventing diseases & invasive species from making it into the country! We don't even have rabies in Australia, let alone the majority of diseases that devastate farming in most of the world, so that is money WELL worth spending our taxes on as far as all Australians are concerned (but we do expect it to be done properly & for as much money as needed to be spent on research to prevent another rabbits or cane toads event from ever happening again)
Well said! Laziness/greed of people in power (and experts not being given enough power to stop them) is the cause of most societal and environmental problems.
Thanks for finally getting to the instances that worked -- or seemed to.
I love you guys thanks for everything¡¡¡¡
The mongoose didn't really work for the rats because rats are mostly nocturnal while the mongoose is diurnal. But I honestly believe the reason we don't have snakes is an unintended side effect of the mongoose. And I appreciate it.
Great video, great info, we love Hank
Tom Scott just did a video on how they have successfully eradicated rats from one section of New Zealand!
"It is a horrendous pest and a nuisance," is how people tend to describe me too so I'm a big fan of the small asian mongoose
Always interesting, thank you.
Can we talk about invasive species accidentally introduced? Like the brown tree snake on Guam. Most native populations of birds have been pretty much eradicated in the wild, and considering I had a brown tree snake come out of the toilet in my house one Saturday night, I have every reason to believe they're pretty hard to keep out of ANY structure.
As much as they're a problem to native species, they've also proven destructive to human infrastructure as well. I was out walking our dog one night and saw a bright flash, a less intense glow for about ten seconds, and then watched as villages at the south end of the island started going dark. It didn't take long before Hagatna, Barrigada, Tumon, Tamuning, and Andy South Housing went dark before the blackout moved northward to Yigo and Andersen AFB (Main Base). NOTE: my wife and I PCSed to Andersen just before Typhoon Roy in January 1988 and left just after Typhoon Russ in December 1990 -- it's been awhile.
At any rate, it turned out that a brown tree snake had climbed a concrete pole holding up a set of high tension lines. Once out on one of the lines, it decided it wanted to be on the line next to it -- and, in doing so, it conducted several thousand volts and I have no idea how many amps as it made a career transition from predator to light filament. It was pretty cool to watch -- but a night on Guam without air conditioning isn't exactly fun.
Let's not do THAT again.
Red belly black snakes eat them in the wild, you can introduce them to eat the tree snakes if you want to :)
@@mehere8038, let's not and say we did. On the other hand, let's not bother even saying we did. Because what's likely to happen after the red belly black snakes eat all the brown tree snakes?
FYI, when we were stationed on Guam, we learned that GovGuam's Department of Agriculture had a variety of recipes for brown tree snake. And there was no limit on how many you could kill!
Wow! As an Australian, I am aware of so many examples of this not working. I had no idea it ever worked!
Excellent review, as usual. Well done 😎👍
SciShow video: Mongooses
My brain, unprompted: Mongeese
Haha
My brain: Mongeeses
“Peter, I made sloppy joes”
Using non-native species to control an invasive species may seem logical in theory, but what will the ramifications be? Ecosystems evolve over time; prey/predator relationships are critical to balance. Introduction of unknown variables, especially on endemic species, can be devastating. How will the introduced species be controlled? What effects will they have, aside from their impact on the intended target? Island ecosystems are particularly fragile. The introduction of cane toads is a great example of debacles that can occur from the introduction of non-native species.
Whenever people speak about Biological Control. I always hear " Use a specie not native to the area to control it ", yet I never hear anyone speaking of, " Train a native specie to like a new source of food".
For example, the owl in Hawaii might love rats if it were to taste them and such. Among other things... I find that a lot of research look away from the time consuming task of training a native specie. Species that generally, like humans, won't eat something they haven't tried before if given the choice.
Put a human before a meal they've eaten every day for their life, a new dish from another part of the world without explaining it. Of course, they will generally choose the former. Animals, that are less logical thinking (generally) are even MORE prone to this. Especially fish.
Therefore, I feel like a lot of biological control should focus more on training feral animals through capture and release programs. Where you capture and train them to eat something that is invasive before re-releasing them. Therefore bringing it under control, that way. If we can teach domesticated animals to eat food they typically do not want to eat in the wild, we can probably do it for feral animals too.
1. Captuire potential native prey candidates.
2. Start teh process by feeding them normal prey to reduce stress during the early stages of the capture.
3. Gently scent the prey with the invasive specie.
4. Stuff it through surgery or otherwise with blood or just meat of the invasive specie.
5. Slowly progress to more and more, introduce dishes where the meat is 'served unrecognizable'.
6. Once you introduce both native and invasive prey and it takes a liking to both and it breeds. Release back into the wild...
7. Profit, because it will teach its young, that this invasive thing? Edible.
We need to release a new predator for humans. I suggest giant prehistoric eagles.
Don't worry, with all this flying around we're not only mixing our many populations into one big planet-wide population, we're also making sure that any pathogen that pops up gets a chance to say hi to everyone everywhere! Just wait, the pandemics will keep coming. I think birdflu is currently the big contender to watch.
@@bramvanduijn8086 Or, we could have some non-avian dinosaurs around again? If we talk pathogens, if I am not mistaken we still have some samples (anthrax?) around that are very deadly and otherwise wiped-out, making current human populations very succectable to them. Releasing a lot of diffrent bat species into urban areas would also be quite deterimental, seeing as they do carry a lot of viruses and the cross contamination and evolution would just escalate at a pace that would leave us humans quite desperate for vaccines.
Hopefully it would also wipe out the anti-vaccers. No need for that part of the population remaining.
@@bramvanduijn8086 And people continue to be more resistant to science (i.e. accepting of vaccines and controls like distancing, handwashing, masking, etc) so the next big pandemic will be ignored by a large percent of the population and given a good foothold
It can work out very well but requires a lot of study. The parasitic flies they released in the US to control prey on exactly 1 species and a lot of testing first (Phorid flies have body structure, which allows them to prey on one species only).
It's the same process they are using in Guam to control tree snakes, poisoned dead birds being dropped to kill off the snakes.
In Jamaica during the plantation era, we had a lot of rats eating the sugar cane. So the bright idea was to bring in mongoose. Which are now pest and threaten the population of Jamaican boa and iguana's. Now I am seeing them in my garden, running through my home and threatening my cats. They have no natural predators.
I love hank and his bro so much
Could you please do a video on the ring neck pheasant release in North America? That was successfully introduced into America and is now a favorite game bird across parts of the northern Great Plains.
Even bringing in an invasive plant to try to deal with an ecological problem can backfire quite badly. Anyone living in the southeast is familiar with Kudzu. Good intentions, whether it be for animal, insect, or plant can often go seriously awry.
When I was a young child there was a mink farm about 15km from my house. They a group of animal activatives raided the farm and released them. For over two weeks, no window could be opened, cats dogs and swans where attached, after the second week, the local hunt and gun club organised a massive cull.
Mongoose were introduced in Okinawa as well, to curb a venomous native snake found there. As mentioned, while mongoose will eat snakes, if given no other choice, they also like many other things. So far my understanding is that specialized control fencing limits the mongoose spread and helps to control their migration to areas with endangered species known as the Okinawan rail or Yanbaru Kuina Either way the native snakes have not been diminished much by the mongoose. More snakes are killed by other means such as by turning them into Habushu, a local drink.
Sometimes it works, sometimes it backfires. Using ducks to control locusts etc
As a mongoose, I confirm we have been here in Hawaii for generations and we aren't going back, this is our home now. Deal with it😂😂
Same goes for plants. We got plenty invasive species because someone thought a flower looked pretty, planted it in the garden and now they are everywhere.
The African honey bee wasn't released on purpose, but the result was the same, several swarms escaped, and where able to cross-breed with local honey bees, then they began to spread from Brazil northward and to the west across South America, finally making it into North America by way of Texas in 1990. So many innocent people where killed by the aggressive bees on their migration to North America.
This is something I have thought about a lot as my family and I discuss whether or not to use parasitic wasps to control the clothes moths in our house. A lot of the research sounds really good and looks very promising but we know about the cane toads and mongooses so we are hesitant
But parasitic wasps are basically native to everywhere, aren’t they?
I think certain kinds of spiders are the best form of moth control. Geckos are the best but then you have a gecko problem and that might be worse depending on what you can live with
The fact that you're considering using WASPS to control moths in your house made me scream. Would you live with the wasps??? What if they sting you???
@@rachelpickham954 look up parasitic wasps, they're not the wasps you are imagining. They are less than 3mm and highly specialized. There's a great Bizarre Beasts video on fig wasps
@@rachelpickham954They’re exceptionally tiny-under a millimeter long-so they’re not a threat to people.
Hawai'i is THAT far away? It somehow never dawned on me that they were almost halfway across the Pacific.
I myself am not ever looking to keep an ecosystem the same as it has always been, but rather to keep it stable an as biodiverse as possible. In saying that I have mixed feelings about biological control, on one hand it may be the only way to stabilize many ecosystems but on the other hand its risky. Lets also remember animals like the cattle egret which in the 1930s came from Africa to South America all on their own and now threaten many frogs and lizards with severe decline and are now found all throughout north and south America. They are a naturally invasive species that spread to the Americas on their own! Its facinating.
It's because of sci show I went back to school for conservation in my 30's,.. right now haha it's like I literally listen to science for fun!!
Even when introducing specialists which only eat one species there's always the risk that they will adapt and move on to easier prey. Evolution is not a process that ever ends unless the species die out. A species can always evolve.
The strawberry guava just don't produce edible fruit for people anymore. But they still produce enough for birds to spread. It was a huge fail
Would like to see details about using milky spore (Paenibacillus papillae) to control Japanese beetles. I've heard both good and bad about the bacterium, and there doesn't seem to be a balanced discussion anywhere about it.
When Winter time rolls around the gorillas freeze to death
Ah, the law of unexpected consequences. I was on vacation in Hawaii, not aware of the experiment perpetrated in the 1800s. We were sitting outside enjoying breakfast one day when a movement out of the corner of my eye caused me to look hard at the close by palm tree. I saw a brown, red-eyed rodenty creature that I was not expecting to see. Finding out that this was a mongoose, of course I began to see the everywhere we went. I had only known about the snake-eating mongooses of India in the Rudyard Kipling stories.
Please make a video like this about cats and what people can do to keep theirs happy indoors.
Cats are the number one invasive species throughout the world, not just the feral ones either. It's mostly people that feed outdoor cats/colonies and the people that let their pet cats roam, but no one has the bollocks to say it's a problem out of fear of being labeled cruel by the uninformed that think their one cat won't make a difference. We need stricter cat laws and there needs to be culling because we can't realistically rehab all of them and TNR doesn't stop hunting or the spread of disease and fleas. It's a shame to see all the native wildlife diminish because people let their cats out. It's also a shame that well meaning people have to carry the burden those so called animal lovers caused; no one wants to kill a cat, but something has to be done for the other animals.
I remember some years back hearing about a bug - maybe a fly or wasp - that singularly predates on fire ants, and introducing them where those have become invasive - in this case Texas - was showing some early good results when the climate was actually compatible. IIRIC fire ants can live anywhere hot but the predator needs a more narrow moisture band.
In the comments I see many people that seem to be experts on the subject that are just belittling others for their lack of knowledge. This is a comment section that many people say what they think is true or what they have heard. Talking down to people that may not know just makes you look bad. On the other hand there are people that calmly explains the facts in an easy to understand way, kudos to those people.
Genetic biological control has been pretty successful, too. The sterile insect technique, pioneered by Knipling, has been key to control of screw worm flies in livestock. Irradiating screw-worm flies (or any other species) to sterilize them calls for a long-term and large-scale operation, however. A modern update of this technique is genetic sterility. My favorite version is a male-transmitted, female-fatal gene. In this, male carriers pass on the female-fatal gene to all their offspring, but all the female ones die...while the sons live to pass on the gene again. This kind of system could, theoretically, lead to extinction of a species (though not likely; having half your genes die out each generation is a strong negative selection pressure) , so it would best be used to control non-native species...particularly populations that are genetically/geographically isolated from native-range populations. A company called Oxitec (now part of Precigen) developed a version of this system for control of Aedes aegypti, (a new world invasive) which transmits several very serious diseases like dengue, yellow fever, chikungunya and zika.
I used to live in Corpus Christi, Texas and there was talk of introducing phorrid flies to combat fire ants. Does anyone know if this has been done anywhere else, and was it successful or not?
7:05 yep Australia has these too😢
Southeastern United States the Tennessee Valley Authority, TVA introduced Kudzu from Japan to control soil erosion oh, it worked but it also went nuts in this area and in some places cost more money to keep areas clean of it as it would just completely take over roads and critical infrastructure projects within a week.
I despise cane toads. I know it’s not their fault they have thrived so well but they are just so overwhelming. Every night hundreds of them come out all across the lawn, porch etc. They poop on the concrete every night. Get into the cat food. And I’ve had many a scare when I’ve gone to put a boot on only to have three cane toads jump out! Yuck😱 They somehow get into everything 😤
At one point in my life, I was very gung-ho on the idea of introducing not just one or a few, but thousands of invasive species from every possible ecosystem to every single other ecosystem, essentially supercharging the evolutionary pressure every creature faces and combating diversity loss by wholesale rapid ecosystem wide cross-introduction of species in both directions, transplanting whole square kilometres of already integrated ecosystems worth of new fauna and flora into other areas to die or thrive.
Its probably not a good idea in the medium term when nature takes eons to do it naturally. But it's still so tempting to see what happens when every single species that could possibly survive in an area tries to do so simultaneously.
If we ever get an inhabitable planet with a very new/bland/undeveloped ecosystem, the throw everything at the wall and see what sticks once an equilibrium is reached system would seem great.
Dude-- that's essentially what we've done. We've transported thousands of non-native species all over the globe. We know exactly what the result is. It's a massive reduction in biodiversity, as the generalist species wipe everything else out. You get a medal for one of the most idiotic comments on this video.
We even know the time scale that it takes for diversification to reestablish itself. After big wipeouts like the global disaster that did in the dinosaurs and other contemporary species, it takes about 10 million years for diversity to recover.
I used to live in Hawaii, and I would go out and play with the mongoose, as a kid. When they weren't being aggressive in front of people they didn't like or the prey they were going to eat, they were pretty nice, like to play, and even like to cuddle up to you. But as an adult, I would love to own a mongoose for pest control on my residence. I know they'd probably eat the Scorpions, the centipedes, and especially the rattlesnakes. And I bet they would definitely keep the unwanted pests away from my garage, or getting into the house or fenced-in back area. I guess a heart, I'm still a very Avid animal lover.
In South Carolina we used to have a lot of invasive, red, stinging ants that built giant red ant hills out of clay. Stepping in one of those was not fun because they use a fair mode to all staying at the same time. Last time I went back to South Carolina I noticed that there are no red, stinging ants left whatsoever perhaps because they released a wasp that lays eggs in the brains of ants; however, I noticed now there are argentine ants everywhere anywhere you brush leaves they scurry about.
They even got into my car and caused traction control and brake sensor failures on top of seatbelt warning, failures, as well as being everywhere else. I imagine that since the red ants were killed now, another species can move in.
In New York there is a problem with Purple Loosestrif and it was brought under control with a beetle that then died out due to the climate.
Interesting invasions, sand miners in the '60's introduced the South African bitou bush to comply with 'rehabilitation' measures required by the Australian Government. This species quickly established, pushing out native vegetation, and totally dominating beachfront sand dunes.
At the same time, South African sand miners introduced the Australian wattle for the same purpose, with a similar outcome.
Great video. Speaking of 1800s idiots, I would love to see a video about the introduction of starlings and house sparrows - and what it did to the blue bird population.
From what I heard Shakespeare’s play inspired people to bring them over in the America and boom went the population. Not they compete with native birds for nesting sites and food.
This is one area genetic modification of animals has direct application. Introducing compounding degenerative diseases, gene targeted viruses, or even just genes that select for only one gender (say… All males) would be self repopulating controls until the pest is extinct, without directly murdering them all. However… Testing. Testing and control of migration would be even bigger concerns, since affected members of the target population would by design be carriers for literal Bioweapons to their parent species.
Hawaii wasn't the first place the Cactoblastis moth was released to control prickly pear. It was Australia under the guidance of the CSIRO (Australian government scientific research) who introduced it after long and very considerable testing to make sure it wouldn't effect the native animals and flora, especially after the cane toad issues. Its interesting to note that the CSIRO was against the release of the cane toad. It was local politicians who pushed for it's release. Hawaii, after the success of the cactoblastis in Australia, decided to follow suit.
Using domesticated species for invasive species control would be a partial solution. Genetically engineering existing species or creating them to eliminate threats then self destruction. Engineered pest control could be used to control farm crop pests.
I live on not the Big Island, but my mom loves mongooses bc they also eat snakes and she abhors snakes and there are no snakes on the islands- shouldn't be any snakes on the islands.
I'm not sure if that counts, but the latest video about the Dung Beetle on this channel made me realize how natural and inexpensive a biological control (in this case a soil control, not a population control) can have and it's impact can be quite imense working on their own.
So, it is an interesting resource, although it is very risky and possibly quite dangerous to the environment...so...I guess maybe it is worth the try with caution
May I add one of the very best and most successful biological controls here in Australia? The enormous number of non-native livestock animals led, of course, to a mountain of manure that our native dung beetle species weren’t capable of dealing with (far wetter than native dung). Which is why flies used to be in plague proportions. Not hyperbole. Part of our accent is down to keeping our mouths as closed as possible when speaking, so as not to eat too many flies. We owe being able to retire the hats hung with bottle corks to several African dung beetle species, carefully researched and introduced in the ‘50’s.
Australia imported the "cactoblastis moth" after (officially) millions of hectares were totally dominated by prickly pear cactus People were using horribly toxic poisons that remained in the environment and trying to burn it but many farmers were just forced to leave their farms. The moth was introduced in 1924 and by 1932 had brought more than 7 million hectares back into farming.
"IS BIOLOGICAL CONTROL A GOOD IDEA" is kind of like asking, 'IS FIRE A GOOD THING". The answer depends on the unasked parts of the question. No chemical will give us an option to control malaria. Bio-engineering and subsequent biological competition might. Not that the we can afford to do any less than overstudying the ramifications before committing. There should be a small mountain of red tape between the concept and implementation stage, but we need to allow a path to do it correctly.
We need to invest our time learning how to live with this planet instead of forcing it to change around us.