Invasion Biology Resources

Compiled by Rick Valley

Here are a couple easy-access books that can up a person's familiarity with the invasion biology scene. They have helped me develop my sense of where I am at and how I may better articulate this when discussing with others.

Alien Species and Evolution by George W. Cox.
Full of loaded language (i.e. fennel is described as a "coarse weed" rather than a feral form of a plant introduced for food and herbal uses) this book does a great job of describing all the myriad ways introduced species interact with their new associates. There is a shortage of definitions for terms, and the conclusions seem arbitrary ("intracontinental species movements are good, intercontinental movements should be restricted") (better talk to some of those birds). There is some repetition of questionable statistics ("causes X million dollars of damage annually"), but it is very interesting to read so much about rapid evolution of species.

Out of Eden: An Odyssey of Ecological Invasion by Alan Burdick.
The author is a senior editor for Discover magazine, and the book lacks index and footnotes -- very much the popular account -- but the best thing about it is the recent scientific history, the accounts of the scientists working, the look at what we don't know, and the trends like the decline in positions for taxonomists (not sexy work for universities to fund -- but how do we know what we are losing in diversity if we can't identify species?). The author spends much time relating experiences with Jim Carlton, a marine biologist, who uses the term "cryptogenic species," meaning a species that has a wide dispersal that predates scientific description and thus cannot at present be assigned a certain native range. It seems that marine biology has much more gray area than land biology. Burdick also mentions an experiment by James A. Drake (U. of Tennessee) who used aquarium ecology examples but was unable to replicate ecologies even though a limited palette of species were introduced in equal numbers with identical timing. 

(Also relevant is Invasion Biology: Critique of a Pseudoscience by David Theodoropoulos.)