For a noisy little frog, is it war or acceptance?
Earth & Sky recently ran a radio show about how the booming population of an alien species of frog, the coqui frog, has become a problem in the state of Hawaii.
Sydney Ross Singer, director of CHIRP, an organization in Hawaii that’s working to gain acceptance of the coqui, told us that the show was one–sided.
Singer wrote, “There is, in fact, no science showing the coquis are a threat to native birds or insects. In fact, coquis eat invasive insect pests, including mosquitoes, fire ants, and other harmful insects. Their sound is loved by millions of people throughout the Carribean, and about half the Hawaii population now accepts and appreciates the coqui.”
For more, check out CHIRP.
Thanks Sidney for another way to look at this “invasive species.”
In fact, I’ve begun to wonder whether the term “invasive species” is really a useful one anyway. Habitats aren’t what they used to be. The world has become a human planet, whether it pleases us or not. Plus the climate is changing, which will alter what grows where. How many habitats are untouched, “native”? Besides, wasn’t every species an invasive species at some time in its history?
Trying to keep new species out and the “native” ones in seems to me to be a losing battle. Why fight? I think we should be looking for a new kind of solution. Should we just let nature find a new balance in this changing world?
Read or listen: Little frogs with big chirp invade Hawaii.
Nature is going to find its own balance in the future. I really wonder whether human being will be a part of it.
Ethan R.
Folks get all worked up because frogs are going extinct and now they get all worked up because there are too many of them.
Plant and animal species crossed oceans, invaded each other’s territory, redesigned ecosystems for millennia prior to human involvement. Darwin’s experiments showing the viability of seeds over time, for example, revealed that species could survive weeks at sea without losing their ability to germinate in a new location/environment. Migratory animals contribute the spread of other species as well…all of this happens with or without people. To infer that the involvement of humans somehow makes this process ‘unnatural’ is not reasonable. Just because humans are involved in some process does NOT mean the process is unnatural.
Certainly we can agree, I suppose, that human beings are a part of the natural world, not apart from it as many seem to believe.
What I would like to suggest here is that while humankind is one of the many miraculous—perhaps the most splendid—of God’s many creations, everything humans DO on the surface of the planet we are blessed to inhabit is not “natural.” For example, the world economy appears to be an artificially designed, distinctly human construction, something that is not a part of the natural world per se, nor does it in many ways resemble the economy of nature.
Many economic theorists make clear their widely shared and consensually validated view that there are not limits to the growth of the global economy. It can expand in a seemingly endless way because the Earth is a cornucopia.
At least to me, it appears our planetary home is finite, with limited resources. The economists’ ideas of human beings living on Earth “without regard for limits to growth” and directing “the infinite expansion of economic globalization” go against the requirements of practical and physical reality and, therefore, could be patently unsustainable.
Two questions I would like to raise now are these: Are the unbridled propagation of the human species and the unchecked increase of human enterprise sustainable or unsustainable and, if sustainable, for how much longer can this tiny planet reasonably be expected to sustain us if we continue to do things as we are doing them now?
Thanks always to E & S.
whho gets to decide which invasive species are good, and which ones are bad?
It used to be that the wind, and rivers, and ocean waves, carried spores of plants and tiny creatures and flying insects from one island or continent to another. And now human beings are also moving species around on the Earth. Could it be that humanity has become something akin to a force of nature?
Yes, indeed, it does appear we can say that 6.5 billion human beings propagating, consuming and producing as we are now could be called a force of nature. But that is not to say that everything the human species chooses to do is good for all time.
Perhaps human beings are engaged in what will soon be correctly described as global “overgrowth” activities, that have been good in the past but cannot forever remain “good” things because of limits to growth which are naturally imposed by biological and physical reality. This is to say simply and directly that humanity could be approaching a point in human history when the scale of the unregulated increase of absolute global human population numbers and human enterprise on a planet with limited resources is patently unsustainable.
Humans need to relax and let mother nature do her thing
The idea of letting “mother nature do her thing” is as appealing as the need for humans to relax. Both of these wondrous things are, in an uncomplicated way, good things, I suppose.
Mother Nature does look to be doing her thing; however, human beings are not relaxing. On the contrary, human beings in the predominant culture on Earth are working feverishly and, by so doing, are rapidly increasing our population numbers which leads to a boost in consumption and then to more production.
Two hundred to two hundred fifty thousand newborns join the human community every 24 hours. They are new consumers of resources for which production is then increased.
The propagation, consumption and production activities of the human species appear to occur in a rapidly cycling positive feedback loop. These currently unbridled activities need to be examined and, if I may add here, perhaps we do need to relax a bit about ECONOMIC GROWTH by preserving more than we plunder, by accumulating less rather than more, by paying as much attention to the maintenance of the integrity of the environment as we do to assuring the success of the human economy.
On the island of Hawaii, Mr. Singer is well known for claiming that the imported coqui frog is somehow a good thing—and some say he has even spread some.
They are a terrible nuisance. They interfere with the peaceful enjoyment of your home, make it hard to sleep, and have done nothing to reduce the mosquitos in our (or other) yard. They must now be disclosed in real estate sales as a negative factor of the property. Our neighbor, from Puerto Rico, fights them.
Some people overlook:—we are in the tropics. We have open air living; few homes are airconditioned. —in Puerto Rico, snakes help control them. We have no snakes. They have no natural enemies here.—Singer’s claim about half the people “accept them”. BS. Almost no one accepts them; they must tolerate them until eradicated from their area.Only half the people on this one island (Hawaii) have them so far.—Dr. Mautz work may be the only hope; you chose the right person to interview.
George Curtis