Monday Invasive Species Blogging
Slow news day, so why not link to Mark Kaufmann’s Washington Post article about the environmental damage done by brown tree snakes in Guam. Although I have to admit that it’s a sign of just how slow a newsday this is that the whole snake situation isn’t really news. Rather, he explains that it’s already “one of the most infamous examples of what can happen when a nonnative species is introduced into a new environment.” Specifically, the snake “all but destroyed bird life on the northern Pacific island of Guam” after its introduction in the 1940s. All that’s new today is that we’ve learned that the environmental damage done by the snake is even larger in scope than previously believed.
Oh, well, maybe something more interesting to write about will come along . . . it’s a little disappointing for so little to be happening on the new blog’s official first day.
33 Responses to “Monday Invasive Species Blogging”
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August 11th, 2008 at 1:41 pm
A rather imperial YGLESIAS … or is it OZYMANDIAS?
We who are about to comment, salute you!
August 11th, 2008 at 1:43 pm
BTW, the quick posting is already better than the Atlantic. But can we have the comments-posted-by-whom column as before?
Oh, and t-shirts.
August 11th, 2008 at 1:47 pm
I know this may not be your baliwick, but I think what’s happening in Georgia may be of interest. From the sounds of it, Sherman’s planning on burning Atlanta to the ground and then sweeping a 50-mile path of destruction on his way to Savannah
August 11th, 2008 at 1:53 pm
If I had a blog and my production was the one I read today on a supposedly slow day by you, I would be a happy man.
August 11th, 2008 at 1:53 pm
Yeah, the events in Georgia are huge and continuing apace.
Here is what the AFP is saying:
Russian forces have occupied the city of Gori and Georgian forces are fortifying positions near Tbilisi to defend the capital, the secretary of Georgia’s security council, Alexander Lomaia, told AFP on Monday.
“Russian forces are occupying Gori,” a key city about 65 kilometres (40 miles) northwest of the Georgian capital Tbilisi, he said. “This is a total onslaught.”
“Georgian armed forces received an order to leave Gori and to fortify positions near Mtskheta to defend the capital,” he said, referring to a town 24 kilometres from Tbilisi…
August 11th, 2008 at 1:55 pm
Asps. Very dangerous. You go first.
August 11th, 2008 at 1:58 pm
In “The Age of Missing Information” (pp 153-154), Bill McKibben tells about the first nightly newscast via communications satellite, back in ca. 1962. Unfortunately, it was apparently a slow news day. David Brinkley, reporting from Paris, said “Via Telstar, there is no important news.”
August 11th, 2008 at 2:04 pm
Invasive species can do lots of damage, even wiping out competitive ones in addition to other prey.
Note what has happended with the GOP: the neo-cons, corp-cons and theo-cons moved in on the home-grown moderate conservative Republicans and wiped them out (well, except for a few zoo-protected specimens like Dick Lugar (IN)). Along the way to imposing the Reagan Regime on the Dems, they gobbled up their ‘friends’ within the GOP. All that is left is white snakes embedded in the GOP and the government like a winter snake nest underground.
Are their any examples of invasive species that have been eliminated (or controlled) once they have dominance?
August 11th, 2008 at 2:09 pm
Slow newsday?
War in Europe escalates, U.S. evacuating citizens from Georgia.
McCain still old and ignorant.
Hawaii still a state.
August 11th, 2008 at 2:09 pm
So Guam has few birds, lots of snakes, and the number of spiders is increasing. Sucks to be them.
August 11th, 2008 at 2:10 pm
I really do wish people would take this seriously. McCain derides funding for anti-snake activity funding in appropriations bills (usually inserted by Sen. Inouye) as pork; if he’d an ounce of imagination he could extrapolate what’s happened on Guam (over 1/2 of bird species decimated) to Hawai’i if that snake got here. There’s a serious effort to inspect every airplane which lands here to keep that thing out. The economic damage to Guam’s electrical grid is nothing to sneeze at; if it were to happen in Hawai’i it would do serious harm.
However, since Cokie Roberts and her ilk think we’re all elitists, I suppose we can afford to pay for those efforts ourselves.
August 11th, 2008 at 2:21 pm
McCain derides funding for anti-snake activity funding in appropriations bills (usually inserted by Sen. Inouye) as pork…
I think Senator McCain actually has the right idea. If we can get all the snakes to prefer eating pork instead of eating birds, endangered bird species are more likely to survive.
Also, I think we should strengthen the electrical grids in Guam and Hawaii so they are not susceptible to damage from people sneezing. There will be a greater risk of sneezing damage if the increase in bird population (brought on by snakes shifting to a pork-rich diet) causes a bird-flu epidemic.
August 11th, 2008 at 2:23 pm
Didn’t this movie used to have a war in it?
Doesn’t the speculative rather than dry reporting nature of the blog free you to guess at what the hell President Mikhail Saakashvili could possibly have expected to happen?
August 11th, 2008 at 2:26 pm
Linkmeister Says:
August 11th, 2008 at 2:10 pm
[...] if he’d an ounce of imagination he could extrapolate what’s happened on Guam (over 1/2 of bird species decimated) to Hawai’i if that snake got here. There’s a serious effort to inspect every airplane which lands here to keep that thing out.
****************
My friends,
I doubt McCain goes in for the talkies, but I’m sure he has at least one staff member who can inform him of the importance of keeping snakes off planes.
August 11th, 2008 at 2:30 pm
Oh, well, maybe something more interesting to write about will come along . . .
You still haven’t said anything about John Edwards…
August 11th, 2008 at 2:38 pm
Say something about Edwards.
August 11th, 2008 at 2:41 pm
We could discuss the possibility of Kobe or LeBron going to play in Europe for $50 million a year. Instead we get Guam snake posts. I have had it with these m&therf@cking snakes on this m*therf#cking blog!
August 11th, 2008 at 2:48 pm
http://www.friendsofmccain.com/news/dspnews.cfm?id=145
Let me briefly highlight just some of the egregious examples of pork contained in either in the conference report or the statement of managers for FY 2005:
.
.
.
• $1 million for the Brown Tree Snakes. Once again, the brown tree snake has slithered its way into our defense appropriation bill. I’m sure the snakes are a serious problem, but a defense appropriations act is not the appropriate vehicle to address this issue.
Congress should use some vehicle other than the Defense Appropriations Bill to fund inspection of Defense Department equipment by Defense Department personnel for brown tree snakes. That’s just straight talk, my friends.
August 11th, 2008 at 3:55 pm
Monad,
Good catch.
When Guam’s rep was on Colbert she talked about this and pointed out what a porblem it was for the military.
August 11th, 2008 at 4:17 pm
At one time, Guam didn’t have snakes. Now that it does, it’s a PITA for people as well as the native fauna. The buggers get into everything, and it’s a trip to the doctor if you get bitten.
Nothing new to you all on the mainland. But, if anything like that gets established in Hawaii, people are going to get killed until they relearn how to live. It would cost us the big bucks in ag, the visitor industry, and while trying to keep that crap from gumming up the engine of modern life.
August 11th, 2008 at 5:41 pm
And what about the Chinese Pear?
August 11th, 2008 at 6:55 pm
Well, see, the problem is that Yglesias has no clue about so many things that snakes are all he can deal with when there’s more than one thing going on in the world.
I notice he has no email address here so I can’t send him any more articles about Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. so he’ll be even more clueless from here on out than he was before.
By the way, as to “people getting killed” by brown tree snakes, Wikipedia has this to say:
And:
August 11th, 2008 at 8:54 pm
Those of us who live in Hawaii are very concerned about the damage that the Brown Tree Snake could and would do to the enviornment of our islands. This might be a slow news day to you but we live in fear that the Feds will stop airplane inspections from Guam and, in doing so, allow this unwanted and destructive pest into our environment. Like Guam, we have no predators to fight such an invasion and our, already threatened, bird populations would be devasted in short time.
August 11th, 2008 at 9:38 pm
The browntree snake (and a host of other species) should be part of defense spending. The US military (inadvertently) has been responsible for the introduction of a plethora of invasive species as they move men and equipment around the globe. The browntree snake colonized gaum as a stowaway in or on US military supplies/equipment.
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