The Sunshine State’s warm and inviting subtropical climate is ideal for humans — but people aren’t the only ones crowding into...
Florida: An exotic haven
Invasive exotic plant and animal species are taking over our state’s fragile native ecosystems
Florida is so beautiful, everyone — and everything — wants to live here. They can take over something as small as a garden, or as large as a national park. They can be a minor inconvenience, like armadillos in your backyard, or a dangerous threat, such as an Eastern coyote that will eat small dogs and cats. Exotic plants and animals cost Floridians millions of dollars every year, ruining crops and killing off native wildlife. Yet most Floridians don’t know much about exotics. Florida’s problems have everything to do with location, explained Ed Freeman, director of land protection for Sarasota-based environmental group Wildlands Conservation. Florida is at the convergence of three bioregions: the southern end of the temperate zone, the northern end of the tropics, and the eastern end of the southwestern zone. “Things that live in any of those three bioregions, which covers almost anything, will live here,” Freeman said. They amount to an estimated 125 invasive plant species on Florida’s 11 million acres of public conservation land alone. It’s estimated that 15 percent of public lands — 1.6 million acres — are infested with exotic plants, and the state of Florida spends $38 million each year to control them. And then there are the exotic animals: feral hogs that wreak havoc, microscopic insects that destroy crops and iguanas that eat endangered gopher tortoise eggs. In many cases, the damage cannot be undone. “Some of these things, you’d have to go into a time machine to reverse them,” said Ralph Mitchell, director and horticulture agent for the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences extension in Charlotte County. Plants such as the Brazilian pepper tree and insects like fire ants are so ubiquitous, all of the money and effort in the world probably wouldn’t eradicate their populations. Consider that Brazilian pepper controls an estimated 700,000 acres from North Central to South Florida, according to the Tampa Bay Estuary Program. And more than 300 million acres in the U.S. are occupied by the red imported fire ant, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Why have they become so rampant, and, in many cases, in a such a short amount of time? The beauty of Mother Nature is the system of checks and balances that formed over millions of years of evolution. In an environmental ecosystem, every plant and animal has its purpose and place. This is why melaleuca is merely a plant in its native continent of Australia, but an uncontrollable pest in Florida’s waters. It’s all relative. “A weed,” Mitchell said, “is just a plant out of place.” Without a natural competitor, the ecological yin and yang does not exist. With the balance broken, some species are able to procreate unfettered. And though human beings have caused a great deal of environmental disruption, sometimes through ignorance and other times by accident, we also have the power to set things right. Whether it’s through new laws that forbid the importation of invasive exotics, or the manpower required to go out and remove them, millions of dollars go toward controlling invasive plants and animals in Florida every year. But for the experts, priority number one is public education. “The biggest thing that we’re up against is ignorance. People just don’t know,” Freeman said. “Once they open their eyes and they know what a Brazilian pepper looks like, they see the problem. They’re everywhere.”
Charlotte Sun
Aug. 10, 2008
By NEIL HUGHES
Staff Writer
Just as more people move to the Sunshine State, so, too, do all kinds of unwelcome guests — plants and animals known as invasive exotics.