dock from Japanese tsunami

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I realize this is old news but it sparked some indignation.

Researchers are worried organisms on the dock will find their way to land and infest the North American continent so they scraped everything away before contamination could occur. Here's info from an article in the Wall Street Journal.


Along for the ride were hundreds of millions of individual organisms, including a tiny species of crab, a species of algae, and a little starfish all native to Japan that have scientists worried if they get a chance to spread out on the U.S. West Coast.

"This is a very clear threat," said John Chapman, a research scientist at Oregon State University's Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport, where the dock float washed up early Tuesday. "It's exactly like saying you threw a bowling ball into a China shop. It's going to break something. But will it be valuable or cheap glass. It's incredibly difficult to predict what will happen next."

Plans were being considered by state authorities to scrape all the living things off the dock and bury them in the sand, so they would not spread, Mr. Chapman said.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... 17188.html

Now, what I wonder is, how do we know that we should not allow these creatures access to our continent? Maybe it's their destiny and this is how evolution happens? The dock finding a way to this continent was no accident. It is just part of the natural order of life and everyone should chill and let nature take its course. If humans were around billions of years ago stopping meteorites and comets from crashing to Earth, the planet wouldn't have any water today. Is it necessary to always stop things from happening?

Invasive species can lead to die offs and extinction. Maybe in the long term a new and balanced environment will result, but in the short term (short being anywhere from months to decades to thousands of years) the environment will not be in equilibrium. People could starve, species could become extinct. Our planet's environment is suffering because of Humans bringing invasive species all over the place, to where they have no natural predators, or to where there is no defense adapted to them. A dock dislodged from Japan carrying organisms might as well be a ship from Japan dumping its ballast into our river, coast or inland waters. Or us doing the same to them.

This is where evolution and natural selection occur though. Species adapt this way.

Human species believes it is their divine right to go anywhere on the planet and elsewhere if possible, so why do we have the authority or the right to prevent other species from making journeys of their own? No one stops our journey so must we stop that of other life forms?

When in natural history have plants or animals from one side of the planet arrived thousands of miles away in an extremely short amount of time, disrupting completely different ecosystems on a massive, short term scale, without humans bringing them there on purpose or by accident? Preserving species from extinction also means protecting them from each other. Equilibrium is the desired state, because our civilization requires it. For example: Imagine that the Japanese Giant Hornet was introduced to North America by accident. This hornet can quite easily destroy our honey bees en masse, which would lead to huge disruptions down the line in food production- and not just for humans. Honey bees are an extremely important part of our ecosystem.

Also I hold no beliefs on divinity of humans, we have evolved to this point that we are the only species to understand the complex systems that drive this world's ecology (and still a basic understanding I suppose). We are in essence, the "caretaker species" that natural selection led to, the only species in our planet's evolutionary history with the power to prevent the destruction of our little biosphere

The Honeybee could develop a natural adaption to this Japanese hornet. Take, for instance, Honeybees and Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD.) CCD involves the sudden disappearance of a colony with very little to no dead workers around the hive and no known reason. It affects millions of Honeybees a year in the US. Some beekeepers have lost millions of bees, nearly their entire supply in some cases, driving them out of business. Researchers are attempting to discover why CCD occurs. In the process, they have discovered many organisms and illnesses in the US Honeybee population. In order to control a certain species of mite, Varroa for instance, Apistan is used but it is thought this might be a factor in CCD, so bee keepers are attempting to build up their bees tolerance and natural defenses against these mites by making sure the bees are well kept and fed. Taking all the honey away, for instance, can deprive a bee of nutrients. Badly bred queens can cause a weakened colony. Simply destroying the mite with poison is not the answer.

Consider the countless micro organisms in the frozen liquids of meteors and comets that have fell to Earth. This is where the origins of life on this planet are. It all came from someplace else, originally. What would have happened if someone thought it dangerous and unwise so decided to prevent it?

We're talking about a hornet that can get almost 2 inches long with a gigantic, toxic stinger, and razor mandibles!! ! It can also call its friends when it finds a nest to attack. It actually kills Humans; it is considered the most lethal animal in Japan

They have tried introducing our honeybee to Japan, because their native honeybees (one that does have a defense against the hornet) are considered less productive. However, North American honeybees are not able to develop a defense, and usually just get wiped out. If the giant hornet were introduced in North America, they would be an absolute blight. There are species that are simply too aggressive to be introduced into an environment which has no defense. Macro-evolution does not really happen in human timescales, so the only certainty is that the ecosystem will be damaged



I think Panspermia is a very interesting possibility. Organic compounds arriving here by comet or meteor, most definitely did play a role in the origins of life here, but the meteors themselves seem to be extremely unlikely places for life to develop. Indeed, if Panspermia is ongoing in our solar system, it is more likely Earth is the source of any life on other planets here. We get hit with very large rocks every once in a while; if microbes can survive in space, sealed within ejecta, Earth organisms could spread through our little neighborhood.

Earlier in the solar system's history we were quite a bit closer to other stars, and there were many more planets that could have been bombarded by asteroids with Earth life. These planets could have then been captured by the gravity of a nearby star, as during this time (4-3 bya) the system was quite turbulent, with giant impacts frequent and planets being tossed around, some smashed together, some thrown out of the solar system to wander or join another star; before the stable orbits today were arrived at. There are some tentative fossils suggesting microbial life started evolving on Earth at this early time, so spreading from here to other worlds during this period of heavy bombardment could have been possible. There could even be further exchanges between planets as ejecta from "colonized" planets is thrown to the origin planet (such as the controversial fossilized Mars microbes found here in meteors) and so on.

Last edited by Vigilans on 13 Jun 2012, 8:44 pm, edited 2 times in total.

It's Maddness

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cane_toads_in_Australia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_carp ... th_America

Does not appear to have worked well. These are the two times I have heard of it happening.

The meteors contain frozen liquid where the microbes are. They are just carriers of organic matter but the point is, they delivered life from one place to another without interruption from humans.

So when a meteorite or comet hits earth, part of it is frozen and it melts. When it does, microbes are left within the liquid that melted. They warm up and begin to evolve into various organisms.

How can an invasive species be any worse than genetically modified food?

First a motorcycle, now a whole loading dock.

How did those make it past that big garbage patch?

The meteors carry organic compounds, they do not carry microbes.

GM Foods have terminator genes that make them sterile and thus extremely unlikely to overwhelm the native ecology

Researchers have found fossilized bacteria in meteorites. Bacterii are microorganisms hence "microbes." They contain organic compounds as well, like amino acids. Isn't it exciting these little guys spent so much time zooming through space? This is why the organisms' journeys are sacred, just like humans. They should not be denied.


Yes but genetically modified produce such as corn do pass their genes on to bacteria so that it becomes genetically modified also.

Last edited by ooOoOoOAnaOoOoOoo on 15 Jun 2012, 1:07 am, edited 1 time in total.

I found this interesting story on the blue green algae. That stuff that makes people sick when there's too much of it in lakes in the summer time? It's not even indigenous to Earth! It's just another one of those conflab invasive species!

In a nutshell: Hoover broke open a crumbly, rare meteorite called a carbonaceous chondrite, the interior of which revealed microscopic fossils of bacteria including mineralized cyanobacteria, common blue green algae. Many of the bacteria can be classified and some are unknown. The Fox article quotes Hoover as saying, “The exciting thing is that they are in many cases recognizable and can be associated very closely with the generic species here on earth. There are some that are just very strange and don’t look like anything that I’ve been able to identify, and I’ve shown them to many other experts that have also come up stumped.”

http://aquapour.com/alien-bacteria-foss ... st/556290/

Fascinating!

Here's and article about various scientists who found stuff in meteorites:

http://www.examiner.com/article/hoover- ... meteorites

Or they get wiped out and replaced.

Won't don't you volunteer to have some japanese knotweed in your garden and don't bother bringing along any of it's predators.

After it has killed off everything else in your garden and destroyed the foundations to your house, perhaps you will be more inclined to say bugger off to evolution and napalm it with extreme prejudice.