The Spiders Are Coming! The Spiders Are Coming!

"Welcome to a new kind of tension

All across the idiot nation

Where everything isn't meant to be okay"

- Green Day, American Idiot

It had been a long time since I'd thought of the northern snakehead.  That's especially strange, because for a while I feel like that's all I ever heard about (I mean, zoologically speaking).  The fish-that-walks (a greatly exaggerated ability) was supposed to slither forth from its pond of first-sighting in Crofton, Maryland, and gradually conquer the country, devouring us all.  People went into a frenzy killing any fish that looked like a snakehead.  They inspired several horror movies and a somewhat irritating novelty song.  State governments set up snakehead sighting hotlines.

I've seen a grand total of one wild introduced snakehead since then.  Ironically, it was in a stream in a zoo.

Society has a tendency to get itself worked into a lather about the latest invasive animal which is going to sweep in from nowhere and destroy the ecosystem and/or our civilization.  Remember the Asian murder hornets last year?  They were supposed to be the Eleventh Plague of Egypt or some such overly dramatic nonsense.  Barely heard a peep about them after that. (These invasive species are usually East Asian in origin - I presume because the climate there is similar to much of the United States, so species from there might be more likely to become established in this country than those from the tropics).

Joro spider, first discovered in Georgia, makes its way to neighboring states

Now, we're hearing about the joro spider (also of East Asia).  These spiders, the young of which travel with parachutes of silk, are currently established in Georgia and are making their way north.  They may end up occupying much of the eastern US.  And the panic has already set in, with some people imagining three-inch spiders flying in through windows and landing on their faces.  To be clear, only the youngsters parachute.  The adults sit in the middle of their webs and do nothing.  So far, ecologists haven't predicted that the spiders are likely to have too big of an impact on our environment, a reminder that all non-native species which become established actually become invasive.

Invasive species are, not to pass a moral judgement on animals (which don't have a say in it, usually) are a bad thing.  We spent an entire month going over this a few years ago.  We should seek to prevent non-native species from getting established outside of their range and, when necessary, we should be willing to remove them to help safeguard species that they threaten.  But let's tone it down a little...