From gigantic Burmese pythons spreading like wildfire in Florida to Asian carp threatening to infiltrate the Great Lakes, invasive species are an ever-growing global issue. Using a combination of humor, story-telling, and outstanding interviews, Leslie Anthony manages to make an incredibly technical topic easily digestible and enjoyable in “The Aliens Among Us: How Invasive Species Are Transforming the Planet – and Ourselves.”
His 2017 book focuses primarily on North American cases of invasive animals, pests, and plants. One of those cases is the invasion of Burmese python in the Florida Everglades. Anthony highlights how the species boomed from small numbers let loose by exotic animal owners to “estimates of up to 150,000 pythons now living and multiplying freely in the Everglades.” Anthony also explains how this “pet” was not a huge public concern until a python killed a two-year-old child outside her Tampa home. Finally, laws were implemented against owning or importing this animal without permits. The ban raised public awareness and concern for the number of escapee pythons. It was lost on none that, “The murderous pet was the same species now proliferating in the wilds of the state’s southern tier.”
Burmese Python in Florida. Source: Orlando Weekly
Anthony is an author and a journalist with a background in zoology. His writing is infused with just the right amount of humorous anecdotes, wordplay, and cold hard facts to be accessible for anyone. We jump suddenly from an interview about the stressful creeping of Asian carp up the Mississippi River to a laugh-inducing depiction of a volunteer and the author struggling to rip the stems of Scotch broom out of the ground in Whistler, Canada.
Large Scotch broom plant. Source: United States National Parks Service
Just like eating broccoli with cheese on top, this book tricks you into digesting something good for you while still enjoying its consumption. It immerses the reader in Anthony’s experiences while educating them about the dangers of non-native invasions for the biodiversity, health, and human enjoyment of natural spaces. He explores the enormity of this topic, citing that “these organisms not only have been physically dislocated to new lands from the ecosystems in which they evolved but also, as this book avers, have infiltrated both the public psyche and most institutions in their adopted homes.”
Throughout the book, we are reunited with familiar faces like that of Nick Mandrak, a scientist at the Canada Center for Inland Waters. Our first interaction with Mandrak is hearing his jokes about the “brutalist architecture” of the building and how the mafia must have made loads of money with the Canadian concrete firms of the 60s. Mandrak points out that this revelation apparently, “explains everything about Quebec.” This type of banter is another line that runs continuously throughout the book, providing much needed comic relief while reading such sometimes depressing accounts.
The book’s main five chapters follow the chronology of the invasion curve. The invasion curve shows the exponential growth of invasive species in a new ecosystem over time, starting slowly, increasing rapidly, and eventually plateauing when it reaches its highest sustainable population size. On Anthony’s graph, he uses the sections “prevent,” “eradicate,” “contain,” and “manage” (long-term control on the graph below) to indicate the appropriate type of approach at each stage of the curve.
An invasion curve similar to the one presented in “The Aliens Among Us” Credit: Florida Invasive Species Partnership
The fifth chapter of the book focuses on the reactive approach to addressing invasives. Anthony introduces the use of mitigation strategies. For example, creating sport-hunting events to kill the pythons in Florida or putting out poisoned foods for excessive street cat populations in Australia, the corresponding subsection cleverly titled “Eradicat-er.”
Anthony wraps up the book by addressing the criticism of invasive species regulation. Folks like botanist Ken Thompson argue that invasive species are just a part of, “natural intercontinental movement of various biological taxa.” He also gives updates on the most recent 2016 happenings for each of the stories that he had introduced throughout the book.
One portion that stuck with me throughout the book was the detail-rich explanation about the simple ways that species can be unwittingly trans-located by humans. Whether on our clothes, our shoes, under our vehicles, or another way, humans have a significant role in invasions, and therefore the changes to our treasured surroundings.
Anthony describes how a peaceful day in a Canadian national park, ending at home by Whistler Mountain, undoubtedly caused the spread of multiple species over 100 km. He immediately zooms in on the micro-interactions he had with his surroundings that caused the spread. He recalls seeing the tiny ant crawl across the floor of his car while getting gas and shaking off the dirt from the sneakers he wore on the trip into his home’s flower bed before going inside. The impact of easy-to-overlook actions like these shows how difficult it has become to contain invasive species.
“The Aliens Among Us” is a fundamental and entertaining read for anyone who wants to understand the stakes of the environmental issue that will be infiltrating our lives more and more in the years to come. As Leslie Anthony expresses at the end of the book, “It was no longer possible to ignore it.” Once you read this book, you’ll see invasive species everywhere, and more importantly, you’ll want to do something about it.