Florida having problems: Unholy Sacred Ibises and frozen Iguanas.

This is both fascinating and sad. These are species not native to Florida, and steps will have to be taken. I am such a softy when it comes to animals that the thought of eradication breaks my heart.

First those large Sacred Ibises.



From the Ledger environmental editor:

The Unholy Invasion Of the Sacred Ibises



I have only seen one of these ibises. Large and small white ibises wander our neighborhood often because of nearby lakes. The Sacred ones are not as pretty, but it does hurt to think of eradicating them.

Now those frozen Iguanas, really...they fell from trees...frozen.


A remarkable cold snap that brought temperatures in the mid-30s to the Miami area Thursday morning also brought lizards falling out of trees at Bill Baggs Cape Florida State Park on Key Biscayne, the Miami Herald reported.

Frozen Iguanas Fall From Florida Trees



More on frozen iguanas in Pompano Beach, Florida.

Man Rescues Freezing Iguanas



Interesting slideshow at the link.

You just had to say that. :rofl:

http://www.tampabays10.com/news/local/article.aspx?s=rss&storyid=67680

"Egyptian bird invades Florida landfill

West Palm Beach, Florida - Palm Beach County commissioners have decided to let federal authorities decide how to deal with an Egyptian bird species nesting at a landfill.

Landfills are the sacred ibis' only known U.S. habitat out of captivity. Ancient Egyptians revered the birds. Modern officials believe the fast-breeding, garbage-eating ibis could threaten native Florida birds.

About 100 sacred ibises have been spotted in Florida. Local officials say it's up to the federal wildlife, agriculture and parks authorities to come up with a plan to eradicate the birds. State wildlife officials have recommended shooting the birds to prevent the exotic species from endangering local species."

in other words there is totally ZERO reason to assume that the sacred ibis can/will spread or that it is a threat to other species in a natural habitat

landfills are not a natural habitat to begin with, what species are sacred ibis replacing at the landfill, black vulture?

When I first read it I was surprised at all the fuss. Still trying to figure why that one species is upsetting them so much.

but not the ibis. I have native ibis parading across my back yard every day. I can't see why they would be a problem.

I would hate to be the one to make the decision.

I have a soft place in my heart for wood storks. We occasionally get one here. I live on a lake and a lot of birds come by. A wood stork is a pull out the camera occasion.

They are not afraid of people when they live in these city lakes. They are really quite friendly.

a little bird tells me that WOST can take of itself

Apparently, the Sacred Ibis is a nest robber -
From the article

But it's not the population growth itself that's the problem. The problem is that there's a potential, based on observations elsewhere, that sacred ibises could prey on the eggs or nestlings of native wading birds, including the endangered wood stork.

They have car heaters in Florida?

just kidding. Gets pretty cold here at times. The houses here, especially older ones, are not really built for cold weather. North winds really chill a house.

Florida really does get cold, but I think less than we used to. We have not had hard freezes as much in Central Florida as we used to have. Fingers crossed, though.

my friend said they are former pets that got loose, but I wonder if a group didn't escape from a zoo years ago.

It's a strange sight.

near her neighborhood. Like a colony.

She says it is noisy.

they don't hurt anything, they can only nest in...wait for it...a certain introduced species of palm only found in the city, hence they are not found outside of new orleans metro area, and clearly they are no harm to any natural ecosystem

yet the usda spends millions of dollars every year persecuting monk (also called quaker) parrots as an agricultural pest, even though they have never been seen in any agricultural area north of around about the panama canal -- if that far north!

they have colonies in disturbed areas such as the city of chicago, areas of over-developed florida, etc

they are "noisy," yes, and i'm sure the carolina parakeet, our native parrot, was equally noisy, but we killed them all to the last bird

a little noise is a part of the natural world, only the dead are silent

they are diurnal and not "noisy" at night

not saying your friend's parrots are monks/quakers but decent chance that they are

frankly this is another species where it is a TOTAL waste of the federal tax dollar to be chasing around when we have REAL agricultural threats out there

sorry for the rant but urban parrots are simply not a threat to natural environments, the truth is, we as humans are the threat to a great many species of parrots, many that are already gone and extinct forever

.

I remember seeing wild parakeets and parrots in the trees.

I'm so glad they're starting to protect these guys too!

http://video.hsus.org/?fr_story=fb44ab2b11553fb5510cc15d36f784f56bb81df9&rf=bm

in Central Florida with impunity. They have no one controlling them.

http://journals.democraticunderground.com/madfloridian/1378

I really question the notion of invasive species, especially when it comes to an ecology already as disturbed as Florida. The fact is that the old Florida will never return. It has been paved, bulldozed, diverted, and basically destroyed. Some new equilibrium for Florida's ecology will probably include pythons, parrots, exotic iguanas, and various exotic plants that had been brought in by the landscape trade. I hope that it will also include some of the natives from the last 50,000 years, but that is for natural selection to figure out...

As long as there are food and nectar plants, pollinators, herbivores and predators, I think that an ecology can become viable. I am not so hung-up on purely native species (being a member of an invasive species myself...)

-app

http://newsdaily.com/Science/UPI-1-20071114-15292100-bc-us-ibis.xml

"The sacred ibis -- an ancient revered by the Egyptians and depicted in hieroglyphics on their pyramids -- has begun nesting in western Palm Beach County preserves and the Everglades National Park. Researchers said they fear that if the birds multiply unfettered, they'll threaten native species such as the white ibis and the federally endangered wood stork, The South Florida Sun-Sentinel reported Wednesday.

County commissioners voted to join the cooperative effort to remove the birds from South Florida, killing them with gunshots if necessary, despite objections from some local environmentalists, the Fort Lauderdale newspaper reported.

Audubon of Florida, in a letter supporting the eradication effort, said the fear is the sacred ibis, if left unchecked, could devastate the populations of other wading birds by preying on chicks and eggs. Activist Rosa Durando said it has not been documented that the sacred ibis poses a threat to local birds. She said development posed a greater threat.

She said killing the birds would be similar to "handling a flea with an atom bomb."

Many birds are predators toward the chicks and eggs of other birds. Seems like a drastic move.

however there is also merit to the concept that we need to set priorities and make choices

some of the species introduced to florida are of genuine concern and will cause genuine hardship, i think it's best to spend limited budgets on known threats

there are places in the americas where iguanas are caught, killed, and eaten, to the point where they are endangered, this is not an animal that is difficult to catch, remove, and deal with if it's causing a problem, it's a vulnerable animal

as for the sacred ibis, a bird that can only inhabit landfills, which is not a natural environment to begin with, it seems a waste of time to worry about it

a $1 spent persecuting an ibis on a landfill is a $1 not being spent to remove nuisance bullfrogs or nuisance invasive fish that are provably harming the ecosystem

It really is amazing how voracious and competitive bullfrogs are to other amphibians, and escaped Tilapia and other African cichlids are really wreaking havoc with native fish populations. But will these be the primary herp's and fishes that can successfully inhabit a 21st-century Florida, precisely because of their adaptivity? As native frogs wither under glyphosate runoff, acid rain, and increased UV exposure (to name just three of the many anthropogenic causes of their population crashes), might the obnoxious bullfrog not be exactly what it will take to keep any amphibians in FL wetlands?

Don't get me wrong, I'm rooting for the native treefrogs and other wondrous but endangered creatures. The loss of any of these species is a silencing of nature's loveliest harrmonies. But as sparrow populations crash in Britain (Sparrows! How can such an adaptive species already be that stressed?), part of my brain thinks that Bullfrogs are better than no amphibs at all. Cichlids are better than empty waters, etc.

I reckon it's gonna be a rough ride ahead. :scared:

-app

Green spaces, permeable to rainwater, building and holding soils, and providing nesting spaces to wildlife, seem in awful short supply these days in many parts of the world. If I were spending the conservation $$$, I'd be buying land left and right, and also helping farmers and foresters better integrate their working-lands into a functional-conservation ethic (I do a lot of this latter part in my job already, but alas, my land-buying budget is tapped-out)...

Just my too-late-to-edit-above-post $0.02

-app

Learn a bit about the Melaleuca Tree and the Bufo Marinas Toad as well as the http://www.floridagardener.com/pom/Schinusterebinthifolius.htm">Florida Holly or Brazilian Pepper.

We have plenty of invasive species that have really screwed with the environment.

Humans have screwed with the environment, and invasive species happened to be around to take advantage of vacant niches or other ecological chaos.

What would be better, Bufo Marinas dominating, or no toads at all? Melaleuca trees or soil runoff? I don't honestly know the answers, but belieeve me, I have been studying issues related to ecosystem collapse for decades. And my studies lead me to believe that the final conclusion has not yet been made on such topics.

-app

wading bird populations... Iguanas most likely do the same to local reptile populations. God, not to mention the cane toads...

THEY HAVE TO GO :(

They are not happy campers. Animal services will do nothing, so they are thinking of taking matters in to their own hands.

Boca Grande, Florida, in a dither over its iguana population,

If you go to the Boynton Inlet they are all over the place.
I remember during Hurricane Frances, there was one in our backyard. He stayed up in that tree the entire storm. Plus, when we got it down, Animal Care and Control refused to take it away. They also told us we couldn't kill it. What could we do with it??

I really don't.

We have hawks in our residential neighborhood. We used to have several birdfeeders and bird baths...lovely setting. We had to stop using them because of the hawks. They would catch a cardinal or a blue jay and sit in the yard ripping them apart.

Or the neighbors' cats would lurk and catch the birds as they bathed and ate. Lovely birds.

But no more. I guess there are all kinds of species that are harmful in one way or the other.

sacred ibis a dangerous exotic species? sorry i will have to see some evidence of that

cattle egret is an "invasive" introduced species that has spread across both of the americas and it has not proven to do one bit of harm, it is a harmless insect eater that took a niche that wasn't being occupied

i see no evidence that the sacred ibis has any ability to spread any distance or do any harm, let's see it if it exists

same with the iguanas, if they are a problem, pick 'em up, cook 'em up, and eat 'em, and pretty soon there won't be any more iguanas, you know like they do in central america, it isn't like these animals are quick to get away

let's focus on true harmful invasives like some of the bullfrogs, water hyacinths etc.

crying fear of the sacred ibis frankly borders on the silly to my mind

if they prey on wood stork eggs, well, let's see the proof, i've seen wood stork and i've seen sacred ibis, and frankly if i were the ibis, i'm the one who would be worried!

Some are disease vectors that damage other species by perpetuating and spreading non-native diseases.

Some alter nutrient flow across the landscape in fundamental ways that put native species at a competitive disadvantage.

Some directly compete with natives for breeding or nesting territory, water resources, food resources, or just aggressively exclude them from areas because they look and behave similarly.

Some have a tendency to feed on non-native plants, in the process spreading seeds of those non-native plants far and wide and creating huge problems by altering basic plant communities.

Exotics ARE a problem in many cases, and all have the potential to be a problem if we hit certain unforeseen triggers down the line. To that end, when we have an established, localized population, one that can be eradicated with relatively minimal effort, we should eradicate it.

Current policy allows people to bring whatever the hell they want into this country, without demonstrating that it isn't an invasive, provided it isn't on the small list of prohibited species. That's a good way to end up with such wonderful landscape altering introductions as leafy spurge, Canada thistle, spotted knapweed, mile-a-minute weed, zebra mussels, Dutch elm disease, chestnut blight, European starlings, house sparrows, silver carp, bighead carp, northern snakeheads, and so on. Sure, once these things escape containment and propagate across the landscape we'll say "Oh, better add that one to the list of things people can't import," but by that point the horses are out of the barn. If we keep on with this policy of waiting for definitive proof of harm outside lab settings, we'll keep finding new and destructive invasives causing ecological and economic damage. Then we'll keep spending hundreds of billions of dollars mitigating the effects. I, for one, do not like that policy.

has cattle egret, introduced in the 1950s, ever proven to be a problem? no, it is beneficial

"kill em all and let god sort em out" is not good public policy, it's a corporate welfare for these businesses that rake it in removing or killing otherwise harmless species

an animal that can only survive on a landfill or an certain specialized species of tree that is itself introduced and only found in landscaped environments is not a threat to anybody

science should be about using our heads, not kneejerk "all that is foreign is evil"

They spread naturally from Africa in the past century - first to South America, then up through the Caribbean to Florida.

Generally, they are not a problem - their food and nesting requirements seem to be different than others.


Starlings and House Sparrows, on the other hand, are a major problem.

All they need is a biological release, such as from competition with another species, or from a certain predator, or from a certain disease, or through hybridization with a distinct yet related population, etc. For a good many, that never happens. For others, it happens simply as a matter of release into an environment where it does not share recent evolutionary history with the natives. For many between those extremes, it happens decades or centuries later with a small climate shift, a loss of some other native species, or introduction of another species. We never really know exactly what the release mechanism will be until after it has occurred.

And let's be clear here, we're talking about species moved around by humans, not those that disperse between continents by means of geologic events and such. There are examples of those sorts of dispersals in fossil history-dispersal of North American megafauna into South America when the Panamanian land bridge rose several million years ago, dispersal of Eurasian megafauna into North America during the last glaciation-as well as a few historic or protohistoric examples of dispersals by birds to distant islands or new continents. Your cattle egret is one of these "natural" dispersals, which happen, on average, at a geologic rate. When we're discussing introduced species, exotics, that sort of thing, we're talking about species transported by humans into new habitats beyond what were previously barriers to dispersal. That now occurs at a shocking rate between all continents and all oceans, with the end effect of spreading a relatively small number of habitat generalists across the globe at the expense of relatively many species of habitat specialists. That loss of biodiversity may not manifest in strictly economic terms, but it does foreclose on an unknown number of scientific possibilities in the short term and on entire evolutionary trajectories in the long term.

My approach is not to "kill them all and let God sort them out." I advocate halting anthropogenic homogenization of ecologies globally. That means when we find a small, localized population of something in a place where it is not native, and we know it is there as a result of human action, we should remove that population. If we wait until the population grows beyond control or becomes naturalized, and then we discover it is causing a previously unknown problem for which there is no mitigation (for example, causes extinction of an endemic species), we will not be able to remove it from the landscape. There are many examples of this happening as a result of human introductions (caulerpa in the Mediterranean, cats in Australia, cheatgrass in North America, rats and pigs almost everywhere, lionfish in the Caribbean, the list is long), people knowing about it early enough to remove the exotic, waiting too long, and then having the new species blow up to the point that it causes severe ecological and/or economic damage.

Australia and New Zealand have moved to a clean list law, whereby any species not previously cleared is not permitted to be carried into the country. This as opposed to the American dirty list law, which I described in the previous post. That, in conjunction with removal of these localized populations of exotics, should be our national approach to biological materials. It will save us untold time, money, and opportunity in the long run. Or we could just cross our arms, equate the idea of protecting biodiversity with xenophobia, and open up the floodgates. I know where I stand.

I strongly suspect that a lot of the invasive plant hysteria is cultivated by herbicide manufacturers more than it is driven by actual science. I'm not saying that herbicides CAN'T be beneficial when one needs to manage Asian Bittersweet or some other forest-strangling plant (they truly can do some good in such contexts), but the sprayer need not be the first or the only tool in the kit.

-app

<http://www.invasiveplants.net/>

<http://www.usna.usda.gov/Gardens/invasives.html>

<http://tncweeds.ucdavis.edu/>

Google will give you a few hundred thousand similar pages. Lots of actual science there (also available in any library) documenting the negative impacts of all manner of invasive plants on native ecosystems. Most discussions of control are comprehensive, involving use of mowing, grazing, fire, hydrology management, discing, herbicides, and a few other novel treatments. The Nature Conservancy's site offers a substantial discussion of that topic.

You could also check things out the old-fashioned way. Check online to see if there is an NRCS or Nature Conservancy office near you, and contact them to ask if the "invasive plant hysteria" is supported by facts. They may offer to show you how a place can change fundamentally with an infestation of, depending on your location, tamarisk, purple loosestrife, leafy spurge, honeysuckle, garlic mustard, cheatgrass, Brazilian pepper, kudzu, or many others from a disconcertingly long list of non-native plant species. Most of these are not controllable to any real extent even with herbicides, hence the necessity of preventing these sorts of introductions on this continent. As soon as they are naturalized, we're just along for the ride.

Both environmentally and financially.

I think some of us are concerned at who gets to decide and why.

We can't just go around killing all of them all the time.

which means that if we have to kill an invasive species if it can be shown that they will harm the native ecosystem, we do, no matter how cute that invasive species is. If they are not a threat, then leave them alone.

The most dangerous invasive species in the U.S.?? CATS. They kill 1 BILLION birds a year. IMHO, any cat outdoors should be dead.

Not native to North America.


Sorry...couldnt resist.

The night-crawler type earthworm was brought from Europe, but all American gardeners are happy to have them in their gardens.

Honeybees? Also EXOTICS (yikes! run! :yoiks: ), yet people are (quite legitimately) worried about their declines.

As Pitohui mentioned above, Iguanas are an important food animal in Central America. Maybe our descendants will be foraging across Florida in nomadic bands during winters when the temperate north is too cold to survive without oil, subsisting on iguanas, trying to avoid the pythons and anacondas, and curing their infections with Melaleuca leaves. The invasives may be one of the few things they thank us for...

-app

Some biologists do argue for removal, others point to the late Pleistocene when North America still had an intact set of megafauna that included a couple species of horse, then argue that horses should stay (I like to point out that if we go that far, we might as well bring in some lions, elephants, llamas, and whatever other analogues we can find). But the decision to keep them isn't done on the merits of biology, it's become a political decision. Hence, even if biologists said "We want to remove these horses," politicians would say "That's really just too bad," and then use funding cuts or agency realignments or lawsuits or any other tool at their disposal to prevent removal. So it isn't just a question of biology, it's a question of what is politically expedient in the moment, and to hell with the consequences down the road.

He can surely get another fantastically bizarre novel out of this.

That's enough to get him started anyway. Love his books.

They stopped rebuilding it and now the Iguanas can get in the house. He now has an Iguanas living under the warm TV in the FR. They leave it alone and it leaves them alone. No problem and it kills all the bugs and spiders etc. They enjoy knowing it's there doing them a favor and giving him a warm home full of captive bugs. A true symbiotic relationship.

Thanks for sharing. :-)

KUDZU.

We suspect it is the culprit that crept over the fence and destroyed a hedge. It's terrible.

And the 3 hurricanes we had in 2004 helped spread some bad stuff.