Development opportunity for bison, deer and lodgepole pineJOHN MORTON, head biologist at the enormous Kenai National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, recently drove a mechanical auger through two feet of lake ice, looking for an aquatic invader called elodea. To his dismay, he found it. Elodea is a popular aquarium plant that probably escaped into the wild when people dumped their fish tanks into lakes. It seems to spread on the floats of sea planes. Mr Morton’s agency recently spent more than half a million dollars eradicating the damaging weed in three of the Kenai refuge’s roughly 4,000 lakes.
Biologists spend a good deal of time and money trying to knock back or exterminate invasive species. Britons bash rhododendrons; New Zealanders drop rat poison from helicopters; Americans and Canadians are trying (and mostly failing) to stop Asian carp from spreading. But global warming is confusing matters. Mr Morton now thinks that some plants and animals should be encouraged to move to new territory.
In the past 60 years Alaska has warmed by 1.7°C—twice as much as the rest of the United States. In the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge, an...Continue reading
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