geekosystem

It's starting to look like it's possible that Florida's much-ballyhooed invasion by ravening hordes of Burmese pythons may have been a bit overblown. While officials cry out that hundreds of thousand the animals are invading the state, turning places like the Everglades into nothing more than enormous python spas, a month long python hunt in the state just came to a close telling a different story. 30 days of hunting by as many as 1,500 people registered snake hunters out to bag the most pythons netted an unexpectedly low total catch -- just 50 snakes.

Invasive species are, well, invasive. The label's given to those critters that didn't originate from a given area but have moved in and are destroying the habitat for other species. Generally speaking, they upset the somewhat delicate cycle that's already in place. Asian carp is one example of an invasive species in Minnesota, though they don't appear to be widespread yet. Peter Sorensen, director of the Minnesota Aquatic Invasive Species Research Center, thinks that "Judas" fish could be used to track down any populations and remove them. First, we'd have to figure out how to sterilize them, though.

Invasive species can be bad times pretty much anywhere, but nowhere do they cause so much trouble as an island. In the closed environment of an island, just a couple of out of place animals can utterly transform an entire ecosystem. Invasive brown tree snakes in Guam have devastated populations of native birds that once dined on the island's spiders. With those birds on the ropes, Guam's spiders have taken the run of the place. The result is an arachnid population boom so serious that gaps in the island's tree canopy are now regularly filled with enormous spiderwebs. For every one spider on neighboring islands not afflicted by tree snakes, Guam now hosts up to 40 of the creepy crawlers, turning Guam from a tropical island paradise to a snake and spider dominated horror show right out of every Dungeon Master's dreams.

This past Tuesday, another somber reminder of last year's horrific tsunami that devastated Japan washed up on the coast of the United States. An enormous section of dock from Misawa in northern Japan traveled across the Pacific ocean for over a year before finally washing ashore on Agate Beach, Oregon. Removing the enormous piece of debris will be tricky, but the non-native species onboard may pose the real threat.