Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Alien Invasion

All week the BBC website will be looking at alien invaders to the UK.

This is nothing to do with little green men but at non native flora and fauna that has been introduced into the UK either deliberately or by accident. The report will look at different types of invaders and the affect this has on our enviroment and how it impacts us directly.

There is a report from the wonderful national trust garden at Stourhead (see plants below).

There are to be stories on:
Plants click the links to see and hear the videos.
insects
waterflife and here
the next generation

(i'll update the links as they come on-line)

This concern though is all very well but it is a little worrying that to counter the threat of Japanese Knotweed there are proposals to introduce insects from Japan to eat the knotweed and control it. This is all very well but it reminds of the following.

There was an old lady who swallowed a fly
I don't know why she swallowed a fly - perhaps she'll die!
There was an old lady who swallowed a spider,
That wriggled and wiggled and tiggled inside her;
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly;
I don't know why..........

I really don't see this changing though, I'd imagine as I type some gardener somewhere wants to introduce a plant to make his/her garden look nice.

2 comments:

KAZ said...

This sort of thing really scares me as I'm phobic to frogs and I remember the cane toads in Australia.
I don't mind spiders at all - but there's some really dangerous ones living in UK now.
Eeeh!

Jane Adams said...

I was worried about the insects they might introduce... look what has happened to our poor old native ladybirds! Pushed out by the big-tough harlequins. I hope they know what they are doing! Jane

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