Florida's fugitive species

By Rachael Bale, ANIMALS Executive Editor

It’s a very Florida thing: Rodent-size snails, dog-size lizards, and fish that walk. No other where else in the United States has more nonnative plants and animals than the Sunshine State. (Above, a green iguana, one of many across Florida descended from former pets.)

Many of them are descended from exotic pets that escaped or were dumped by their owners. Usually, when an animal is released into a habitat not its own, it won’t survive. The end.

But sometimes, in the absence of its usual predators or in the presence of new, inferior peers, these nonnative interlopers “become supremely powerful, tyrannizing the food chain and throwing the whole delicate balance into riot,” writes Matthew Wolfe for Nat Geo.

This is how parts of Florida came to be overrun with giant African land snails, Argentine black-and-white tegus, walking catfish (below left), giant Burmese pythons, South American wild hyacinth macaws (above left), bearded dragons (above right), and hissing Muscovy ducks (below right). While this sounds like a classic “oh Florida” problem, invasive species are a major issue around the world. Asian longhorned beetles are eating through Europe and North America’s forests; cane toads in Australia eat anything they can fit in their mouths; and Nile perch, when introduced to Lake Victoria in East Africa, ate or out-competed at least 200 native fish species to extinction.

Invasive species cost more than a trillion dollars in damage and control costs each year, according to one estimate.

And then there’s us. Humans. “It is ironic...that the word invasive is applied by the one species that is the most invasive of all, spreading unchecked across Earth, claiming dominion over every plant, animal, bacterium, fungus, and virus in its orbit,” Wolfe writes. And now we’re stuck desperately trying to fix imbalances that may be unfixable.

The pythons, parrots, and pepper trees are certainly part of Florida’s “ambient weirdness,” as Wolfe calls it, but it’s a weirdness we’re better off without. Check out Wolfe’s colorful dispatch from Florida’s battle against invasives here.

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TODAY IN A MINUTE

R.I.P. Michael Collins: The Apollo 11 astronaut, who died Wednesday at age 90, was often called the loneliest man in the world for remaining in lunar orbit while his two colleagues made history on the moon. But Collins argued it gave him time alone with the spaceship that carried him 60 miles from the lunar surface. “Please, another black coffee while I finish this tube of my favorite, the cream-of-chicken soup,” Collins wrote in 2019 of his lunar orbiting experience for Nat Geo. “And the thermostat, 76˚F. Good, very comfy here.” Before splashdown, Collins scrawled this: “Spacecraft 107, alias Apollo 11, alias ‘Columbia,’ the finest ship to come down the line, God bless her.” After NASA, Collins was a director of the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum and a longtime member of the National Geographic Society's board of trustees.

Busy as a ... well, these beavers got to work and shut down a Canadian town’s internet service for 36 hours. Turns out, the beavers used that wiring to help build a dam, CBS News reports. Hat tip to Nat Geo’s Dina Fine Maron for the item.

A monarch memorial: Some see butterflies as a sign of the presence of a lost loved one. So when a grieving Massachusetts father built a backyard garden, he raised butterflies in his late daughter’s garden. Now, he’s sending milkweed seeds from Keri’s garden to anyone in the country who wants them. This project is a way of keeping his daughter—and endangered monarch butterflies—alive, he tells the Boston Globe.

Safari gone wrong: For eight years, the NRA chief’s slaughter of an elephant in Botswana’s Okavango Delta was hidden. Now footage obtained by the New Yorker and The Trace shows what happened when guides tracked down an elephant for Wayne LaPierre. “After LaPierre’s first shot wounded the elephant, guides brought him a short distance from the animal, which was lying on its side, immobilized. Firing from point-blank range, LaPierre shot the animal three times in the wrong place,” Mike Spies writes. Another person in the party fired the shot to kill the suffering animal. His clumsiness with the gun, Spies says, undermines the image he’s cultivated as an exemplar of American gun culture.

Follow-up: In unanimous votes, Florida’s House and Senate passed a bill to protect interconnected habitats for wide-ranging wildlife, including the endangered Florida panther. The Florida Wildlife Corridor Act calls for $300 million in state conservation land acquisition in the fast-developing state, but it awaits the governor’s signature and final state budget agreements. Among the bill’s champions is photographer and Nat Geo Explorer Carlton Ward, Jr., founder of the Path of the Panther initiative.

Related: How America’s most endangered cat could help save Florida

INSTAGRAM PHOTO OF THE DAY

After-dinner entertainment: A red fox kit—just a few weeks old—plays with the remnants of dinner, a ring-necked pheasant wing. Red fox kits spend their first few weeks of life inside a den with the vixen (mother). When they are roughly 3 to 4 weeks old, they emerge from the den, and start exploring their surroundings. The parent foxes will sometimes bring back live prey to the kits, so they can practice. (Above, a fox in Riverview, in the Canadian province of New Brunswick.)

A red fox with a taste for deli: Watch this red fox make and eat a six-layer sandwich

IN A FEW WORDS

THE BIG TAKEAWAY

Not pandas: The animals here may not seem cute and cuddly, but they are just as worthy of help as big cats, pandas, gorillas, elephants, and other glory animals. “Can’t we broaden the list of animals considered appealing and even beautiful?” asks Nat Geo’s Christine Dell’Amore. (Clockwise from left: an aye-aye, a nocturnal primate that rids trees of pests, boosting forest health; a Mindoro dwarf buffalo, which remains in only one mountainous area of the Philippines; a numbat, a distant cousin of the Tasmanian tiger; and a California condor, North America’s largest land bird, with a 9.5-foot wingspan.)

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THE LAST GLIMPSE

Rent a chicken: First, Americans adopted pups and cats to get through the lockdown. Now, chickens are a source of comfort, and the eggs they produce are a bonus. Demand for chicken rentals has surged during the pandemic, as renting is a way to try out ownership. “These animals have a way of seducing people,” John Farrugia, owner of CT Rent a Hen, tells Nat Geo. (Above, chickens have become popular pandemic pets. The birds can live up to 10 years.)

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