EA To Poison a Pond

[Woodytia]

Heard this on the radio this morning. The EA are going to poison a lake to kill off an invasive species, the top mouthed gudgeon. An attempt will be made to remove all native fish first but for those that slip the net bad luck. The bit that irked me was that the expert who was interviewed intimated that anglers were to blame for the introduction of this little fish.

[The Old Buffer]

Here is the wiki entry for those who are not familiar with the problem posed by this little fellow.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_moroko

[Michael]

I was told by an EA rep at the CLA game show, that they think they were introduced via legal stocking of carp.....

[Santiago]

They poisoned a couple of lakes in Hampshire yesterday, it was on the local news!

[The Old Buffer]

First we have the Signal Crayfish and now we have this pernicious Gudgeon. Its a sad fact that there is always someone stupid enough to introduce these things to our waters and once here they are very difficult if not impossible to eradicate.

[Olly]

Like us taking sparrows to America! Or pet snakes being released in the Everglades; rabbits to Oz; trout to India & rainbow trout to NZ. We must always interfere.

However no one would purposely introduce Top mouthed Gudgeon or Motherless Minnows - they are of no fishery value whatsoever -- accident with a stocking of fish.

[Wandler]

Like us taking sparrows to America! Or pet snakes being released in the Everglades; rabbits to Oz; trout to India & rainbow trout to NZ. We must always interfere.

Or like 'us' going to 'Oz' in the first place!

[Santiago]

I blame the Romans! They were the first http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/ ... abbit.html to bring rabbits to the UK, and possibly carp as well and pussy cats .

Very interesting is the topic of invasive species! For example, I read somewhere that there are now more 'chineese water deer' in the UK than there are in China!!

Then there was the mysterious red bellied piranha in Thames http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3505171.stm.

And a friend of mine was tricked into thinking there are snakehead in his favourite welsh river .

And as for Zander, at least the EA fishery policy still states they should be removed and there is no size limit for taking these invasive fish . Or are Zander OK? Pretty controversial this invasive species business!! To some, some invasive species are OK whereas others are not! Rationaly thinking, it all comes down to environmental impact!

My son who studies ecology told me a story about an island near Australia that had a single lighthouse on it, and the lighthouse keeper was the islands single resident apart from his cat and the wild birds that lived there! Anyways, said lighthouse keeper was a keen ornithologist and spotted a bird species he had never seen before, so he trapped a specimen and sent it to the Natural History Museum on the next visiting boat. Months later a letter arrived from the Natural History Museum to inform the lighthouse keeper that he had found a new species unknown previously to man, and that they wanted another specimen. However, by the time the letter arrived this species of bird was extinct, for the lighthouse keepers cat had caught and eaten them all (they were flightless)!!

[Wandler]

I think the biggest problem surrounding the invasive species debate is the idea that man can still 'control' nature. The fact is we can mess about with it but we still can't control it completely nor should we kid ourselves that it is a good goal to aim for. Recent epidemics of bird-flu or bovine TB or foot and mouth disease or wild fires (not all of them are started by nutters!) etc serve to show just how little control we have over nature when it bites back.

The EA does 'good work' but it is all done in the context of trying to retain 'this sceptred isle' in a state of unsullied virginity. The fact is that it is too late. The genie is already out of the bottle. Nearly all of our landscape is unnatural; there is very little if any real wilderness left in the UK. Our woodlands are full of imports as are our gardens and parks. Our natural predators have been killed off because of superstition and fear.

While I would never condemn the work of the EA we have to admit that in the final analysis it is a political institution which is just tinkering at the edges of nature.

[Northern Eel]

very interesting, but arent we all just inhabitants of planet earth?

thousands of years ago (cavemen times) it was possible to walk straight across the English channel (because it didnt exist) as the UK was joined onto the continent.
Species moved freely & nobody interfered, survival of the fittest or the best at adapting was the order of the day.

I think we interfere too much with nature in an effort to maintain the status quo, when in fact the nature of nature is to change.
Lots of times in history humans have made things worse by interfering.

After the great hurricane of 1987, when a lot of trees had been blown down, there was a big push by the relevant authorities to replant trees & remove the damaged & uprooted ones.
Years later when they took some aerial photographs, it turned out that the areas they left alone, (no replanting & dead trees left on the ground) were in much better shape than the replanted areas because nature had taken its course.

Theres a saying I heard (actually in a Disney film, dont laugh)

"Forever is a long time & time has a way of changing things"