Out of Eden...
bookshelf...
Out of Eden:
An Odyssey
of Ecological Invasion
by Alan Burdick
Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 2005
“Out of Eden” reads almost like two books. The first part focuses heavily on the brown tree snakes that have made life on Guam such a wriggly fright (that is, if you can find them, which despite their great numbers, turns out to be more of challenge than you might think). Even without brown tree snakes -- that anyone knows about -- Hawaii isn’t what it used to be, either: paradise has been transformed by a parade of invaders. Burdick tells these stories well, but I’ve read these tales before.
The book really begins to sing in its second section, which looks at the work of marine biologist Jim Carlton on ship ballast water, as well the research of several of his colleagues / disciples. As Burdick notes, “The rate of global trade has doubled every seven years for the past several decades; some 80 percent of that trade is conducted by ship. On any given day, thirty-five thousand commercial and private ships are in motion, carrying – and dumping – billions of gallons of ballast water: from Seoul to San Francisco, Tokyo to Tasmania, the Black Sea to the Great Lakes, Brazil to Seoul.”
Blimey.
The situation is actually murkier than I imagined. It is not just a matter of exotic species replacing (and often devouring) natives, but of determining whether the natives are really native, or the winners of a previous ballast battle fought hundreds of years ago, before anyone thought to keep track. Also fairly confusing is figuring out why one invasive species succeeds, while another fails. Or how the presence of an exotic species changes the local environment, possibly tipping the balance for more invasions to come.
Burdick is lovely writer, with quirky and poetic turns of phrase where you least expect them:
On hatchery scallops set to sea:
“…The scallops have settled in to. There are a hundred million of them or more out there at this moment: bay scallops and sea scallops, quahogs and clams – molluscan seeds, fruits of the sea – a hundred million bivalves of love, waiting for this day, this moment, eyes wide, spinning in circles, clapping.”
On shipworms:
“…Presumably the shipworm got its start long ago on submerged stumps or sunken logs, then moved, as civilizations became more ambitious, to dugouts, rowboats, schooners, dock pilings. Pliny and Ovid wrote about shipworms. Twelfth-century vessels in the Mediterranean carried shipworms. Christopher Columbus lost two ships to shipworms on his fourth voyage in the West Indies. …Tropical species of shipworm in turn have been found in Long Island Sound just a few miles form Mystic, thriving in the warm effluent of a nuclear power plant in Waterford. I spent many childhood summers on the beach at Waterford; I learned how to sail there. I find it strange now to think that for all biological intents and purposes, I was charting equatorial waters….”
- j.a.g
