Sounds reasonable. I don’t know anything about the subject so I’m hoping someone else has a comment.

Like or Dislike: 0  0 (0)

You’re right, fire ants are easier to spot than microbes, which is why MAF surveillance programmes have spotted them twice, and early enough to destroy them (only one nest on each occasion). But give the buggers enough time…….

Alastair,

The key to Peak Oil ‘improving our biosecurity’ is that it will firstly almost eliminate trans-oceanic flight. Secondly, as you say, economic activity will be so depressed that there will be a substantial reduction in trade. Not only can we expect ship sailings to reduce in number, but the ships themselves and the tonnages they carry will be smaller. No more car carriers in from Japan, no more bulk iron-sand carriers moving to China.

Like or Dislike: 0  0 (0)

And I don’t think peak oil will actually hit international shipping all that hard, except as a consequence of diminished overall economic activity… fuel costs per ton are very low, they can go a lot higher and only knock out very low-value cargoes.

Like or Dislike: 0  0 (0)

Like or Dislike: 0  0 (0)

It would be catalogued as protectionism. “Free trade” includes absorbing a lot of subtle externalised costs.

Like or Dislike: 0  0 (0)

Like or Dislike: 0  0 (0)

With any luck we can keep the Fire Ants from making it here for more than a few years. They really do spoil the neighborhood. I suspect that they are a LITTLE easier than the algae and other things at the microbial level.

respectfully
BJ

Like or Dislike: 0  0 (0)

But if we continue to fly in all those planes, sail in all those ships and admit all those travellers (NZ and foreign) we will have Fire Ants here one day. It’s a certainty (though it may take a few decades or centuries). And if it’s not ants, it’s crabs or sea squirts or wheat virus or algae.

Biosecurity is at best a delaying mechanism. Faced with the massive number of pathways into the country, and the impossibility of closing them all off, there is no way we can prevent unwanted organisms reaching these shores. Some you can’t stop, such as the natural spread of microbes and invertebrates blown here on the wind from Australia.

Only when the jets stop flying and the ships stop sailing will this situation improve. One small benefit to Peak Oil.

Like or Dislike: 0  0 (0)

Biosecurity is one of those costs that the market so effectively manages to externalise. In this case the true cost of “millions of tourists and hundreds of thousands of shipping containers coming in every year” has come to include fowled rivers and spraying suburbs.

Is it inevitable that our environment will slowly and inevitably be compromised by our lifestyles? Or can we decide that those knick knacks from the Warehouse and a holiday in Enzed included the true cost of far more comprehensive biosecurity defences?

Like or Dislike: 0  0 (0)

The environmental impact is less that it could be; it’s not poisonous, or dangerous. Impacts on invertabrates and other river life are uncertain, though there will be some. Time will tell on this one.

It’s an ugly mess, and it’s tragic that it’s in some of our rivers. But this particular algae will not be the end of NZ trout fishing or any other water sports. The best we can do is control it, but the problem is developing and implementing some workable controls, while accepting that this thing is likely to spread.

When you have millions of tourists and hundreds of thousands of shipping containers coming in every year, these things will happen

Like or Dislike: 0  0 (0)

Since nobody else knows how to get rid of it.

It has few vulnerabilities. Needs fresh water… needs nutrients… probably goes into a dormant state if it is dried. How far upriver is it spread? Can you cut off the flow of water and dry it up? What about temperature?

More to the point. How did it get here and how can it be prevented from getting here again. Require all vessels to sterilize their bilgewater before entering NZ waters? There’s issues around this and we may need to consider the real possibility that we’re going to have to live with this stuff like the rest of the world does.

On what terms can it coexist with other organisms. What eats it? Something surely does, but do we want whatever that is in our waters as well?

Keeping NZ isolated, pristine and untouched by the evolution that occurs in the rest of the world is every bit as much a problem as the unchecked importation of every vile (to us) organism ever conceived by Mother Nature.

We need to ask some hard questions of ourselves before we try to sterilize a river…

respectfully
BJ

Like or Dislike: 0  0 (0)

In a democracy, you cannot shut off 200km of river. And even if this was ordered, there is no ’standing army’ in MAF to enforce such a rule. This could be broken any time, anywhere, and the perpertrators likely to get away.

Neither can we eradicate this algae. It can survive for periods in the water below the river bed, so the wild declarations that MAF should ‘nuke’ the Waiau and Mataroa are inaccurate and unlikely to work. And even if MAF did flush a few thousand tonnes of chlorine through that river system, and by some fluke eradicate didymo, everything else would be dead. Then what? MAF doubts that the river will recover in a pristine state, god knows what will colonize first.

The speed of the response was tied directly to a lack of knowledge about the organism and it’s characteristics. These needed to be studied first before MAF had any idea of what to do. Research takes time, but only with research can some effective control measures be developed.

And finally, what proof is there that didymo was introduced into the Waiau? It bloomed there first, but this is no guaranteed it did not arrive in the Clutha, the Buller or maybe some other river yet to be identified. How many rivers do we ‘nuke’, how many do we cut off?

For those who criticize MAF, and say it should ‘do something’, a bit more clarity would be appreciated, as well as a recognition that MAF does not have unlimited funds nor an unlimited pool of staff to draw on.

Like or Dislike: 0  0 (0)

Do we know how the snot got here?

More tourists. More kiwis flying out and in. People ordering plants over the internet (clearly the internet is the root of all evil…)

Biosecurity’s getting harder.

Like or Dislike: 0  0 (0)