In the war of attrition against invasive species, the invaders claimed a clear victory in a half-mile-long pond in Georgetown, MA, this week. Sadly, the visiting team got a little help from the home crowd, so-to-speak. For years the Pentucket Pond Committee has worked by appointment of the Georgetown Conservation Commission to keep a marauding fresh water seaweed called fanwort from turning this 90-acre waterbody into a swamp. When the weed grows freely, the dead vegetation build-up causes decay that consumes dissolved oxygen fish need to breath. It's a process called hypoxia.  So, the thought was: if fanwort grows unchecked fish die.

The primary means of combating fanwort is salting the water with a floride-based chemical called Sonar. A brief internet search turned up this Cornell study over collateral damage concerns from possible misuse of Sonar, but few other problems with the weed-killer. Such misuse was among the reasons the Georgetown Con Com and the state's Natural Heritage and Endangered Species Program were annually concerned over the Sonar program in Pentucket. The bigger problem hobbling the Pentucket Sonar program has more to do with the tiny fish below called the bridle shiner, which takes refuge in the dense thickets of fanwort. Apparently, fanwort isn't bad for all fish. (It's possible that the hypoxia kills big fish more than minnows. We're not sure.)

The state has taken a shine to the shiner because its numbers have mysteriously plummeted in some East Coast waters and it's considered endangered in Massachusetts. In the Chesapeake Bay, they've disappeared entirely. In an email circulated last week, the Pentucket Pond Committee chairman indicated he was growing weary of “butting heads” with the state and local government. This year, when funding was cut for the Sonar treatments, the chairman announced his seat was open and he is moving south. Presumably, fanwort will now run amok in Pentucket Pond and what was once a decent local fishing hole will now be home to a rare minnow, a whole lot of seaweed and little else. In some respects it comes down to this or this.

Take a monent and click on the two links just above. This should be a no-brainer: get the Sonar and get busy in Pentucket Pond before fishing season starts, right? This is not a no-brainer. Groups like the pond committee are fighting all manner of invasive species all over the country often with government support. This link says there are 19 federally funding projects in the Stimulus Plan costing the $38m, but Recovery.gov lists 92 such projects under a search for “invasive species”. It's anyone's guess what's actually being spent each year to combat invasive species, or how it's being spent, through the Stimulus Plan or any of the many other federal, state and local programs. The federal government is not famed for its attention to detail when it comes to spending tax dollars and effectively combating invasive species is all about the details. Not just in the application of herbicides like Sonar, which is handled by licensed contractors, but in any number of biological, chemical and mechanical programs out there. Ecosystems are very complex, all sorts of long term factors come into play when you start fiddling with them.

What we're trying to say is, perhaps Pentucket is not the first such effort we're going to see abandon in the next few years and maybe it's not such a bad thing. There will be a big price to pay. Places like Pentucket will change dramatically, like this image of an unknown pond in Idaho neutered by another invasive called milfoil. But eventually, these ecosystems will find a new balance and the fight will be over. We can survey the landscape to get a better idea of what we're battling. If you want government to get involved, the few gains in beating back invasive species have come from biological controls. Fund those efforts more vigorously.

In the meantime, if well-meaning people like the Pentucket Pond Committee want to volunteer their efforts, environmental regulators are sure to look a little more kindly on hand-to-hand combat like the folks pictured here, as opposed to WMD like Sonar. This country's open ended “wars” on ill defined entities like drugs, poverty and terrorism are short on victories and definition but long on expense and frustration. War may not have been formally declared on invasive species in this country, but it's being waged and lost nonetheless. You need only to look at some of the headlines listed in the column at right on this page, to see how this war is going. You can more easily argue the merits of continuing any of the three other battles, but popular wisdom has it that fooling with Mother Nature is not nice, let alone declaring war on her. Invasive species may be a man-made problem, but these plants and animals are still very much a part of nature.

As bad as we've come to view invasive species as being, every once in a while along comes one that upsets convention. European starlings are a marvel in flight, not bad looking either. They came to this country when some genius decided the US should be home to every bird mentioned in the works of Shakespeare. As mentioned in the Opinion page today, they have gained a few fans in this country. As this piece points out they are also something of a flight risk when they get sucked into jet turbines. So ,the government just green-lighted a plan to permit poisoning of several thousand of the things in Pennsylvania. These massive flocks of birds are known to also make a mess out of an occasional corn field. Not everyone is in love with them. We bring it up here in a shameless attempt to increase traffic on the Invasive page.

Recently the Boston Globe had a piece on invasive species which talked of efforts to clean ship ballast water before the ship takes it on—ship ballast water being a likely source of most of the marine invasives in this country. The idea in the article was that water born invasives can't hitch a ride in ship's ballast if you clean the water before the ship takes it on. The article was fine up to this line: All this has sent engineers, scientists, and coastal resource managers scrambling to find ways to deal with these marine invaders before it's too late.

Take a look around you folks, it is too late. Invasives are like global warming: we're a day late and a dollar short on this problem. Unlike global warming, invasives are a natural process (Indeed, you could almost argue that global warming is a natural process, but we won't go there today.) Whether it's Kudzu climbing all over Alabama or zebra mussels clogging industrial cooling systems in the Great Lakes, invasives are plants and animals A.K.A. FOOD!.

Is it unreasonable to think that at some point another species is going to discover that milfoil which is turning ponds into swamps, is edible? I offer up the invasive greencrabs which make great bait for our native blackfish which make great fried fish sandwiches for our native filet-o-fish-o-philes.

I don't mean to belittle the invasives problem this planet is facing. Invasive plants and animals  kill off competeing plant and animals and that reduces biodiversity. But I'd like to argue that some well intending folks misunderstand biodiversity. It's wonderful to have all these species but we've already done so much damage to this planet that biodiversity will suffer considerably greater reductions in the years to come. It can't be avoided.

So, the question becomes how much effort do we put into curbing invasives when natural forces will eventually smooth out these vicious populations swings while we devote ourselves to more productive or promising pursuits, like non-point source pollution or global warming or proliferation of plastics or proliferation of poisons.To illustrate my point NY's  Suffolk Times today had a piece about folks striping invasive phragmites A.K.A. reeds out of an Orient, NY pond which is being choked off by the invasive. I've also spoken with folks ripping waterchestnut out of Boston's Charles River and other folks pulling milfoil out of tiny Mill Pond in NH. Invariable their enjoyment of the waterbody is driving their effort as much as environmental concerns. But is it the best thing over all for the environment?

To illustrate my point NY's  Suffolk Times today had a piece about folks striping invasive phragmites A.K.A. reeds out of an Orient, NY pond which is being choked off by the invasive. I've also spoken with folks ripping waterchestnut out of Boston's Charles River and other folks pulling milfoil out of tiny Mill Pond in NH. Invariable their enjoyment of the waterbody is driving their effort as much as environmental concerns. But is it the best thing over all for the environment?