Short Wave - What's Missing From The Invasive Species Narrative?

Episode Date: August 28, 2024

At first glance, the whole narrative of aquatic invasive species may seem straightforward: A bad non-native species comes into a new ecosystem and overruns good native species. But the truth? It's a little more complicated. To tear down everything we thought we knew about invasive species and construct a more nuanced picture, host Emily Kwong talks to experts Ian Pfingsten, who works on the United States Geological Survey's Nonindigenous Aquatic Species Database, and Nicholas Reo, a Canada Excellence Research Chair in Coastal Relationalities and Regeneration.Check out episode where we get into the annual python challenge we referenced in this episode. Have a favorite invasive species or one you really can't stand? Email us at [e-mail] — we'd love to hear your take!See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, shortwavers, Emily Kwong here. I'm going to take you back to the mid-80s, a time with some really big boats and some really tiny aquatic stowaways. Ian Finxton, who works for the United States Geological Survey, or USGS, described this for me. Imagine huge freighters moving up river, snaking their way from the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes.

releasing and discharging all their ballast water into the waters of the Great Lakes. Ballast water, that's what's pumped into a boat to stabilize it before a long journey. And once the boat gets enough cargo to stabilize on its own, the ballast water can be released. The thing is, these freighters got their ballast water at a freshwater port in Eastern Europe. And they dumped that water into the lakes once they arrived. And unbeknownst to them, because it wasn't on anybody's radar, these tiny little by-valves were entering into the system. These tiny little bivalves hitchhiking their way to America were called zebra muscles. And quickly, these zebra muscles made their way into the local aquatic ecosystem and took

over. They were basically super effective filter feeders. So they were out competing a lot of the other bivalves for nutrients. And they were causing impediments and costly infrastructure problems for a lot of the citizens. It's estimated that zebra mussels annually caused $300 to $500 million in damages to power plants, water systems, and industrial water intakes in the Great Lakes region. And so this, this is one that started the awareness and sort of federal response to aquatic non-native species in the United States, really what got my program that I'm with at the USGS off the ground in the early 90s. The program Ian's talking about is called the non-indigenous aquatic species database.

And this database has cataloged about 1,300 non-native taxa or groups of organisms. These are plants and animals or other living organisms in an ecosystem where they don't naturally exist. Now, that doesn't make them invasive. Invasive is a special term. That's when non-native species cause some kind of harm to the economy, the environment, or human health. Like zebra mussels or water hyacinth. These purple floating flowers, which are often branded the world's worst aquatic weed. I've watched a pond go from pristine, no coverage and open waters,

and just be within the next year completely covered from shore to shore in waterheist and then changes the whole dynamics of the system. Native species have just not evolved to compete with these new arrivals. Now, at first glance, this narrative of aquatic invasives is pretty straightforward. non-native species shows up, takes over, local environment suffers. But Nick Rio cautions that tale. He's an associate professor in indigenous studies at Simon Fraser University and says the species aren't really the problem human industry is.

I see a lot of scapegoating in the form of, you know, if we can get rid of that species, then we've solved the problem, we've fixed the issue. But I kind of see that as a bit of a Band-Aid approach. that lets people off the hook. So today on the show, the invasive species crisis, our part in creating the problem and how we could play a part in the solution. I'm Emily Kwong, you're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.

To examine this relationship between non-native species, invasive species, and us, we wanted to bring together the perspectives of two people who work on the issue directly. Ian and Nick, starting with Ian to lay out the basics. And the first question I wanted to ask him is besides ballast water, how else are species hopping ecosystems? From his work with the USGS, how does he even know a species has arrived in a new place? We tend to see things when they're right at our doorstep, right? We see them when they're in the pond or our water garden and our yard in our neighborhood parks, you know, on the side of the road.

When they're directly affecting us, that's what we notice them. that we're in. We're very, very human-centric in that way. So by the time we're seeing these species, they're already established. They're already taking over. They're already probably causing impacts. Rarely do we catch them right at the moment that they've been introduced. What we're seeing is typically after they've already established and they've started spreading. Well, I've learned from your work that one of the ways species are spreading is through storm surges. So that is when sea levels temporarily rise because of storm. it opens up these channels of water that flood across the land.

How do you even get alerted that a storm has forced a species into a new area? How do you know? We don't usually have the opportunity to go out and say, okay, these species are using these corridors that are created just for this short period. But we sometimes will see the after effect. We'll see fish that are on somebody's yard that normally wouldn't be there. So it's a matter of knowing where the species was prior and then having the opportunity to either get a report in or go and visit a site where the species is now present. So you gather these reports and synthesize this information, you put these species in the database.

What's then the goal? Like, what is the larger purpose of doing this mapping and this careful cataloging of non-Indigenous aquatic species? So there's the optimistic and sort of pessimistic or cynical side of that answer, the cynical pessimistic side, is that we're basically documenting sort of the spread and demise of like our ecosystems and things like that. And in a way, yes, we are keeping historical records of how these things are getting here, how these species are moving, how, you know, the impacts that they are causing. the counter to that pessimism a little bit is that, yes, we are watching a lot of these things take place and we're seeing like we need to encourage more people to understand what's going on. Mapping work like what Ian does brings these non-native species front and center.

But what if some prove invasive and do cause harm to the local wildlife and economy? Well, there's a ton of management strategies out there from spraying pesticides to unleashing other competitive organisms. There's even a contest in the Florida Everglades to hunt the Burmese python. We talked about that on Friday's episode of Shortwave. But Nick Rios says control strategies miss the point. That invasive species are symptomatic of a bigger problem.

I'm asking how humans relate to ecosystems. Nick is a member of the Sioux-St. Marie tribe of Chippewa Indians. And he told me this story about an invasive species in his home community, the Upper Lakes area of Michigan. Picture lakes surrounded by cat tails, these long grass-like plants with cylindrical brown flowerings at their top. Over 150 years ago, a non-native narrow-leaf cattail species arrived to the area and mixed with the native broad-leaf cattail. So there's this hybrid cattail that behaves completely differently. It's much more invasive. It's much more aggressive.

Okay. And so over the last, say, 30, 40 years, we've seen marshes in that Upper Great Lakes area go from being highly, highly diverse, high-functioning aquatic wetlands, Great Lakes coastal marshes, transition to almost hybrid cattail monocultures. And so nowadays, you go up there and you'll just see cat tails as far as the eye can see. Wow. So that's a really dramatic change because of an invasive species. So is anyone working on a way to stop these hybrid cat tails from spreading? Yeah, so there's a research group based at Loyal University of Chicago. And they've had a lot of success experimenting with ways of sort of mitigating,

cutting back populations of the hybrid cat tail and getting some of the other aquatic plants to kind of rebound. One thing that's really interesting about their work is that it started out by, doing lots of different kinds of experimentation that was really sort of based in western science but then as that group started to partner with my tribe they brought in some other perspectives you know we have a lot of our tribal citizens who are a decent number who trap and one of the animals that they trap is muskrap so what they do is they they cut down to to make their lodges they make these big sort of like open water potholes and then densely vegetated near-shore wetland ecosystems.

So these researchers are mimicking that in their work, and they're cutting, they're trying to cut big old potholes in the hybrid cattail stands and cutting big trails in them with different kinds of equipment and having really good success. Wow. So the biologists are taking their cues from the muskrat, which sounds like true indigenous knowledge at work in some ways, is to like see yourself in cooperation with the species that are there.

Yeah. You said earlier that scapegoating invasive species is a Band-Aid approach, which I took to mean that, like, placing blame on invasives for the demise of an ecosystem is not the point. Like, what is the point for you? So the reason we see so many species introductions in the United States is because we consciously decide not to interrupt economic activity. And we have very lax rules and laws and regulations.

in terms of the movement of goods and services in and out of U.S. borders and U.S. waters in particular, and those lax policies in terms of monitoring and comings and goings of goods and services. That's primarily what leads to these introductions and the reason that so many of them get in and get well established. In the context of this conversation, that does mean being really strict about the comings and goings of goods and services

and making sure we're careful, it slows things down. We need to prevent these plants, plants and animals from accidentally moving from continent to continent. We're going to have to slow things down. Yeah, right. So you're saying we need to prevent the spread of invasive species in the first place and regulate shipping, commerce trade. But when species do jump ecosystems, what do you personally think should happen then? It's not that we need to just like embrace newcomers. And some of my work has been misinterpreted and saying that.

Like just kind of wholesale. Just embrace them. They're here. Okay, welcome them. Right. They still need to be managed. The other thing that I think we need to do is establish relationships with indigenous people or people who have really close, longstanding relationships with plants and animals from where they originally came from. You know, so like we need to connect with indigenous peoples from Japan and look at Japanese knotweed and say, what are the, what's your relationship to this plant? What are the sort of gifts that it offers your community? and get their advice for how we start interacting with them. I think that's really interesting because the majority of invasive species are spread by us, by human activity.

And I guess in order to take responsibility for our part in that ecosystem, we need to think like an ecosystem, right? Like trade knowledge, information, be interdependent. Yeah. You know, we need to continue a lot of the mitigation work that we do. We need to do more prevention, early detection and prevention work. But for the plants that are, you know, already here, like, Japanese not weed.

Like, maybe they can help us with some things. This episode was produced and generally masterminded by Hannah Chin. It was edited by our showrunner Rebecca Ramirez. They both checked the facts. Quasi Lee was the audio engineer. Beth Donovan is our senior director, and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcast and strategy. I'm Emily Kwong.

Thanks for listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.