Aim of Website
"Humans are omnipotent. This thought is not to be encouraged, but here we stand, above all the other fellow organisms in the world. We do not know how many species of organisms there are, but we do know a few particularly well. And we have been particularly kindly in bringing them around the brave new world to travel and experience all of this novelty --- not to mention the dear price some of these have to pay. But we have been generous captains, chauffeurs and pilots. And we did not refrain from being most charitable. We have shown ourselves to be fulsome imbeciles that have muddled up reality, turning it into an imbalanced fairy tale of destruction."
This sketches how the non-native species have come by. In this website, we will investigate the crooked path through which non-native species trample upon in the forest of life, the alien vessels in which they travel, and answer the 'what's, 'how's, 'who's and 'now what's about these fellow inhabitants of the beautiful planet we are living in, finally leading us into the practical actions we should be taking unless we want to watch this beautiful planet's vitality succumb to a giant tangible mob of involuntarily defected brethren. The problem of non-native species is subtle as well as blatant, far-fetched as it is related to our daily lives, and somehow direr than we may be led to think. We will soon see why this is so, and explore possible solutions to the problem, which in turn will lead us back to the appreciation of the severity of the problem itself as many attempted measures of dealing with the ongoing crisis with non-native species have culminated in disappointment.
Introduction to the term Non-native Species
A Non-native Species (NNS) is generally defined as an organism peculiar to a specific area, which can cause environmental, ecological and economic impact with their introduction; or alternatively an organism occupying places beyond its historic range, colonizing ecosystems from which it has been absent all along. This is roughly synonymous to the terms exotic species, introduced species, self-sustaining feral species or naturalized species. The non-native species that are, in effect, particularly active and voracious in displacing indigenous ones, being capable of outcompeting them, are termed invasive --- which in many cases turn out also to be agricultural pests causing substantial economic loss, viruses that threaten public health in periodic outbreaks, or invisible predators that leave us with little wildlife in the countryside ultimately. We will emphasize on the environmental and ecological aspects of such introductions, pointing out how these introductions affect the effective functioning of ecosystems and how these affect humans and the world as a whole.
It is worth pointing out that the negative connotations of the term are quite well grounded for reasons that will present themselves in the following sections. Non-native species can be either beneficial or malevolent, but most have a status that is largely ambiguous; most crops and livestock that have circumglobal ranges are non-native species, and are economically beneficial to humans. In this case the introduced species are largely domesticated and modified, so that they could be nowhere like the original form --- wheat, banana tree, domestic fowl and pigs are good examples. In this case it is important to realize that most of the ecological impact can be attributed to human use, and not to these keystone goods of the economy. Therefore it is sensible to take non-native organisms in the specific sense, dealing mainly with the invasive species that merit immediate concern, as the scale of the current problems are unprecedented --- we shall see why presently. Under all conditions the criteria for an organism to be exotic to a particular area are clearly defined, and will be expanded in the next section.
