Here's a twist

Here's a cool post from the herp forum. In the last couple of years that forum has attracted several overseas contributors. Adds an interesting take on this familiar subject.
snake eating pumpkinseed

People everywhere can be equally dopey. Some Japanese have introduced centrarchids into various bodies of water, and largemouth bass have been introduced into some Central American lakes.

there are reports of N.tesselata dieing by trying to swallow one of these! The reason was the fish's very sharp spiky back flipper!

Edited by sandtiger, 18 June 2009 - 10:28 PM.

Why on earth would some moron want to introduce largemouth bass to south america, where they already have so many much more interesting fish to catch, peacock bass being only one small example?

The same reason they stock our eastern brook trout in the west and Europe, and western rainbows and European browns here. Nobody's happy with what they already have.

Don't forget about Japan, Australia and South Africa for our friend salmoides.

And the worst thing is they're putting this generalist predator in all these places that are potentially zoogeographically depauperate and they go bonzo on a bunch of stuff that evolved during the last epoch without predators of this sort. I'd be a heckuva lot more worried about largemouth (generalist) than snakeheads (specialist).

It's not just limited there. As I'm learning more about the niche envelope of generalist species, the more I think moving banded darter, for example, around would be an awful thing. As best I can quantify, they seem to have the one habitat characteristic of "water". Can you say "round goby invasion"?

Todd

A crawfish researcher at USL in Lafayette, La. told me a story many years back that the Japanese introduced Red Swamp ( procambrus Clarkii (?) crawfish into China as a means of destroying the rice crops and starving the Chinese....circa 1930's......

Now, 70-80 years later, its a huge aquaculture industry.

Any truth to the orgins of the crawfish in China?

Greg