Invasive and non-Native Species

Environmentalists and Naturalists have a fixed ideology and belief system. Some things are right and some things are wrong in this system. For example, their belief on what is a correctly placed animal, and an invading and completely foreign and wrong animal that can be destroyed mercilessly.

Animals spread around the world. They are being discovered in various places all the time, taken as newly discovered and indigenous when they may just be a species that has just got there or evolved. Grey squirrels in the UK are typical of this. Because we know when this ‘invading species’ arrived in the UK, in 1876, 147 years ago, much earlier than a lot of ‘invasive’ environmentalists and naturalists families, they are still classed as a ‘foreign species,’ and not natural. Because they can shrug off ‘squirrel pox’ they are classes as creatures of disease ‘plague carriers,’ but this is only due to the unusual susceptibility of red squirrels to this disease.

The first specific mentions of red squirrels was by Carl Linnaeus in 1758, prior to that being important to the Vikings who from the 700’s probably introduced the species to Britain, there being good evidence that the red squirrel is not necessarily a long term resident, but an imported species as well, being more suited to boreal and coniferous woods rather than the broad leaved woods that are common to the UK.

Recently the introduction of the Pine Marten from Europe has been encouraged in other parts of the UK to limit the grey squirrel as they prey mainly on them rather than the red squirrel, previously at best limited to Northern Scotland, as worst having become extinct in the UK.

Many species that have become extinct in the UK are being openly re-introduced, the original populations and lines having disappeared in a ‘they were similar to this, so this is the same as the original’ thinking, when they are in fact new and novel introductions of completely different species lines that were never in the UK at any time before, sometimes the original line having disappeared hundreds of years ago.

We have:

grey squirrels, introduced in 1876

muntjac deer, introduced in 1896

pheasants, probably arrived 0-100AD

rabbits, probably introduced around 0-100AD

crayfish, probably arrived in the 1930’s

red squirrels, probably introduced around 700AD

honey bees, nearly all apis mellifera mellifera indigenous bees disappeared from about 1904-1916, now replaced mainly with apis mellifera mellifera / apis ligustica hybrids, a few isolated pockets of British bees still existing. Environmentalists and naturalists campaigning for preserving non-indigenous artificial hybrids levels in nature. Most honey bees do not do well in the wild in the UK climate, most colonies dying out quickly without human intervention. Virtually every bee you see day to day is a hybrid of mellifera mellifera combined with mellifera from around the world with various combinations of adami, anatoliaca, carnica, caucasica, cecropia, cypria, lamarckii, ligustica, macedonica, meda, monticola and sahariensis.

Isn’t it about time we classed them as indigenous species and worthy of protection and admiration rather than the non-scientific, illogical and obsessive persecution that we currently are fixated upon, especially the naturalists and environmentalists ‘idée fixe’ that species and populations are fixed and immovable and must stay exactly as they are in exactly where they are found now, when they also campaign for preservation of non-natural species that should logically have no place in their idea of nature, even when evolution tells us creatures change and combine all the time in genetic structure and location.

The idea that evolution and change happens all the time and the consideration that species must remain fixed and unchanged and uncontaminated seems at opposite ends of the spectrum in belief.