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South American weevils released in UK waterways to tackle invasive weed


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3 hours ago, john.k said:

Water hyacinth and Nile cabbage......disappeared from the river s and dams here within six months of introduction of beetles.

 

 

Blocked solid with beetles now, presumably?

 

🤣

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17 hours ago, tree monkey said:

Yup, control is what it's about, it's highly unlikely biological control would achieve eradication outside of a controlled environment,  some sort of biological control is used for azolla and that keeps coming back.

 

It still makes me twitchy though, unforseen outcomes are just that unforeseen, natural systems are incredibly complex and most management attempts are best guess, releasing none native species into an alien habit is sketchy 

Just so - what so often comes back to bite us are second order changes - too often we limit ourselves to assessing first order (the immediate) effects. But what happens if something else changes?

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33 minutes ago, Mike Todd said:

Just so - what so often comes back to bite us are second order changes - too often we limit ourselves to assessing first order (the immediate) effects. But what happens if something else changes?

 

This is degenerating into "what-aboutery" -- just in case there's a tiny chance of an unforeseen negative outcome (even though this has been thought about by experts who actually understand the issues and risks) let's not do something which will almost certainly improve the situation. Emphasize the negative and ignore the positive, just like the Daily Wail 😞

 

On the same basis, we wouldn't have any Covid vaccines -- or indeed, *any* vaccines, or new drugs -- because there's always a (hopefully very small) risk that *something* might go wrong. And let's pick out a disaster like thalidomide to make the point, and ignore all the other successful drugs that have saved millions of lives since.

 

Risk management is all about balancing out these factors, and making a decision based on this (including "unknown unknowns" and [possible disasters); without this, irrational "fear-of-the-new" would mean we could never find *any* new solutions to fix new problems.

Edited by IanD
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46 minutes ago, Mike Todd said:

Just so - what so often comes back to bite us are second order changes - too often we limit ourselves to assessing first order (the immediate) effects. But what happens if something else changes?

Exactly 

13 minutes ago, IanD said:

 

This is degenerating into "what-aboutery" -- just in case there's a tiny chance of an unforeseen negative outcome (even though this has been thought about by experts who actually understand the issues and risks) let's not do something which will almost certainly improve the situation. Emphasize the negative and ignore the positive, just like the Daily Wail 😞

 

On the same basis, we wouldn't have any Covid vaccines -- or indeed, *any* vaccines, or new drugs -- because there's always a (hopefully very small) risk that *something* might go wrong. And let's pick out a disaster like thalidomide to make the point, and ignore all the other successful drugs that have saved millions of lives since.

 

Risk management is all about balancing out these factors, and making a decision based on this (including "unknown unknowns" and [possible disasters); without this, irrational "fear-of-the-new" would mean we could never find *any* new solutions to fix new problems.

I totally appreciate the work done to ensure the safety of this, but there is a history of none native imports into different habits around the world and many examples of unforseen outcomes.

The research done on this is reassuring but as I suggested earlier on and Mike has pointed out above, natural systems are complex and life is very adaptable.

I am not against this but it makes me nervous

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4 hours ago, tree monkey said:

Exactly 

I totally appreciate the work done to ensure the safety of this, but there is a history of none native imports into different habits around the world and many examples of unforseen outcomes.

The research done on this is reassuring but as I suggested earlier on and Mike has pointed out above, natural systems are complex and life is very adaptable.

I am not against this but it makes me nervous

Especially with climate change

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