Thursday 7 June 2012

Conundrum

The Safari spotted this in the news today and pondered the American's dilemma of what to do with it seeing as how it has potentially invasive species attached. But then is this not a natural phenomenon - a tsunami, natural event, washes a piece of stranded driftwood into the sea which then crosses the ocean and lands on a far flung shore with its passengers intact - all perfectly natural. In this case the 'driftwood' is a man-made structure but does that really make a difference to the naturalness of the event? Yes, there are very concerns about invasive species indeed invasives pose one of the highest threats to biodiversity world wide after habitat loss; but in this context the invasion is as natural as natural gets and not at all like someone dumping pigs on Hawaii, Foxes in Australia or New Zealand Pygmy Weed in a Blackpool pond. 
Any thoughts from anyone?
Goin to drop a name now...if you watched Springwatch the other day  and saw the worm piece well the ID chart they held up was written by the chap who came to the North Blackpool Pond Trail to investigate 'our' worms at the weekend.
Patch 2 only had a couple of Grey Seals and a Great Crested Grebe but a short venture onto the beach in the rain gave us a new seaweed we've yet to identify.


All this marine mullarky leads us neatly to the fact that it's World Oceans Day tomorrow.
Where to next? Probably something or somewhere mariney.
In the meantime let us know what's drifting invasively in to your outback.

Late Edit - On the marine World Oceans Day theme just found this shocking piece of news - something tells me that many of our species aren't fit to walk the beautiful blue and green face of this wonderful planet.

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