Everyone Fighting Invasive Species

B L A C K W A T E R   N A T I O N A L   W I L D L I F E   R E F U G E,   Md.,   Sept. 27 -- Bill Geise has met the enemy. It’s a swamp rat as big as a pit bull and about as affable. A quartet of orange buckteeth jut from its pinched face like a mouthful of Doritos.

Those chisels are good for one thing: tearing out acres of tender salt marsh plants by the roots.

The nutria is native to South America but has invaded this tranquil, tawny fringe of Chesapeake Bay where Geise wandered as a boy.

Safe from predators a hemisphere away, flotillas of the web-footed rodents are defoliating one of the United States’ richest preserves. One third of the refuge’s original 23,000 acres of whispering bull rush and cordgrass now are silent mud flats and sterile bays that stretch for miles into the hazy horizon.

A Plant for a Plant The nutria is killing the place Geise loves. He aims to return the favor. “To me,” complains Geise, now the Blackwater’s fire warden, “nutria are no different than somebody taking a bulldozer to the marsh.”

Ecologists estimate that more than 6,000 alien plant and animal species like the nutria have invaded the United States, with dozens more arriving each year.

A few arrived with the first Europeans 500 years ago, but the increase in global trade and tourism in the jet age has turned the trickle of previous centuries into a torrent.

They cross oceans and continents in the shoes and luggage of tourists, in shipping ballast, in packing materials, even in bald tires heading to recapping plants. Most are stowaways; some are brought in deliberately.

Changing Whole Ecosystems

Aliens are redrawing the global landscape in ways no one imagined. They crowd out native plants and animals, spread disease, damage crops and threaten drinking water supplies. At Yellowstone Lake, alien sport fish introduced by fishermen munch on endangered cutthroat trout. In large parts of San Francisco Bay, aliens account for nine out of 10 species.

Exotic species are a parasite on the U.S. economy, sapping an estimated $138 billion annually according to a Cornell University study. That’s nearly twice the annual state budget of New York, or a third more than Bill Gates’ personal fortune.

Aliens have contributed to the decline of 42 percent of the country’s endangered and threatened native species, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Nor is it a one-way street. The North American gray squirrel is wiping out native red squirrels in Europe. An Atlantic jellyfish contributed to the collapse of Black Sea fisheries already weakened by pollution.

Ecologists warn that, collectively, this “biological pollution” poses nearly as great an environmental threat as habitat losses generated by more familiar enemies of nature including development, clear-cut logging, overgrazing and oil spills.

The Battle Rages On

“We have inaugurated a new era of ecological chaos,” said Chris Bright of the Worldwatch Institute in Washington. “When an exotic establishes a new beachhead, it can spread to new areas and adapt. This is happening all the time, virtually everywhere.”

So far, like human immigration control, the battle against alien species has been spotty, expensive and largely ineffective.

Two dozen federal agencies have stitched together a crazy quilt of detection and eradication efforts with state and local authorities. But much of the effort is aimed at ports, borders and threats to crops. There is little left over to combat emergencies.

In February, President Clinton formed a Cabinet-level task force to defend more strenuously against exotic species. Three departments, Interior, Agriculture and Commerce, are seeking $28.8 million in fiscal year 2000 for a wider battle.