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wanderingghost wrote

As someone who has a background in ecology, over the longterm, I think its a losing battle. We've essentially created one giant supercontinent due to how rapidly we travel around the globe and how much we transport. As long as species have a similar climate to colonize(say eastern gray squirrels in Eastern North America to Great Britain), and the means to do so (carried as pets, curiosities, etc), they're going to spread. The best thing in that regard is to at the very least stop making things worse by radically restricting human travel and taking biosecurity from the joke it is into making it into something serious and formidable. I'm pretty hopeless though on this because most folks probably don't want it, and I'm not sure there's a way you could make them want it.

I think its important that we try to unfuck nature as much as possible first though by slowing their spread/reversing it when and where possible, and unfortunately for many innocent creatures, that means eradication. Efforts to control animal populations like white tailed deer (A native non-invasive species that people consider a nuisance nonetheless) in the eastern US through birth control have failed spectacularly. Culling is really the only realistic option. Call it murder if you must, but we shit the bed and its our mess to clean up.

I think an example where the destruction of invasive animal species is readily apparent is in New Zealand with rats eating the eggs of flightless birds. There are no native species of mammals in New Zealand, and so the birds that have adapted to the island have not had small predatory mammals as part of their evolutionary pressure for millions of years. This is true of many polynesian islands. In New Zealand I think there's a real chance of creating isolated pockets as refuge for these species (indeed a small island was actually fully cleared of rats to serve as a conservation breeding area for critically endangered flightless birds), but as I mentioned earlier, once a species has become endemic, its next to impossible to fully eradicate.

I think that we have a moral duty to preserve as many species as possible, where possible. Doing so means tackling invasive species. That often means killing innocents. No real way around that.

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