Poor Florida.......yet another invasion.

13 years ago

As if the Burmese pythons and gargantuan mosquitoes weren't enough, Florida is being invaded by "one of the world's most destructive invasive species: the giant African land snail, which can grow as big as a rat and gnaw through stucco and plaster." Quote is from the NBC article linked here:

"A Slick Mess"

Here's another quote from the article. The speaker is describing how foreign species can end up in the U.S.

"If you got a ham sandwich in Jamaica or the Dominican Republic, or an orange, and you didn't eat it all and you bring it back into the States and then you discard it, at some point, things can emerge from those products," Feiber said.

Really makes me want to go order a ham sandwich in Jamaica.....

Seriously, sometimes I think we'd have been much better off without air travel. Giant African land snails would stay in Africa, the latest bird flu would stay in China, etc. And I'm sure we'd have fewer wars.

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Comments (5)

patti43
13 years ago
Yep, we get all kinds of "tourists" here. Must be the great weather :-0
jemdandy
13 years ago
Yes, that stuff should stay 'home'. Dandelions and cattails are imports, too. In my part of the country, we are fighting purple loosestrife and garlic mustard. Both are highly invasive. Purple loosestrife grows in wetlands and garlic mustard grows everywhere else.
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susanjf_gw
13 years ago
jem is that the "pretty" purple flowering weed we see all the time? se mi...
alisande
Original Author
13 years ago
We're fighting garlic mustard too. That is, I used to fight it, but my enthusiasm for the battle has waned. Garlic mustard is stronger than I.

Some years ago we inadvertently planted two invasive plants: rosa multiflora and Sweet Rocket (hesperis). No warnings from the nurseries. We were told rosa multiflora was a wonderful shelter for wildlife, so we grew a hedge of it. I'm sure the wildlife loved it, but it gives humans a real problem. It swallowed up parts of my flower beds and sprung up all over the place, "planted" by the birds. It smelled divine for about a week in spring, but you didn't dare get near it because of the terrible thorns. My DS eventually pulled out the enormous bushes using a chain and a pickup truck.

I still love the Sweet Rocket, but it, too, pops up everywhere--this year blanketing the huge vegetable garden. Environmentalists have nothing good to say about it.
bigfoot_liz
13 years ago
actually shockingly the python snake thing is almost a bust, they had a hunt & round up and only came up w a couple hundred this past spring. considering the press on it I honestly thought they would be hauling in thousands! I keep saying if they are finding tons of exotic snakes what is happening to the skins from killing them and why are the prices on snake skin goods not going down LOL. The snail thing is a problem for waterways as are several new pests in south FL that affect AG. Alot of these pests come in on plant material that is started off-shore which is where MOST of the tropicals, annuals & perennial plugs are coming in from. Sometimes new pests & diseases can be attributed to hurricanes or big storms but mostly it is due to humans importing them in some fashion. You do not ever want to try and come thru South FL from outside of this country, especially from a tropical area and try to bring in on your person or luggage a fruit, seed, cutting, plant or food they catch most of those people LOL. Agriculture is a multi-billion $ industry here, we value it above any other form of revenue, you don't mess with it!

YUP believe it or not, nearly every plug plant in those categories in this country is originally grow outside of this country and either flown in or barged in. We do 100,000 1 gal perennials a week & every single one of them is started offshore and overnighted to us. All of our annuals are done that way too. The only plants we self propagate is our woody's and we do our own cuttings, close to 500,000 a week and those plants take close to 2 yrs to be sellable.

As soon as something new is found it literally takes only hours for 75% of this industry to find out about it, start checking our material and notifying the authorities. ~ liz

Poor Florida.......yet another invasion.

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patti43

jemdandy

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Poor Florida.......yet another invasion.

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patti43

jemdandy

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