Kudzu, the vine that never ate the south (2015)
smithsonianmag.com>Still, along Southern roads, the blankets of untouched kudzu create famous spectacles. Bored children traveling rural highways insist their parents wake them when they near the green kudzu monsters stalking the roadside. “If you based it on what you saw on the road, you’d say, dang, this is everywhere,” said Nancy Loewenstein, an invasive plants specialist with Auburn University.
This was my experience as a child. We'd drive by groups of huge pines completely engulfed by kudzu and my mother would tell me it grew so fast you could see it grow with your own eyes. Scary stuff, I imagined the entire country overtaken by kudzu someday.
I grew up in Oxford, MS. circa 1980. Kudzu didn’t blanket the roadside landscape at that time. It does now. Every time I go back, it is the blanket over everything. I love the flowery language of the article (takes me back a bit), but it really has overtaken the landscape. If you grew up there, you know.
Here's some Kudzu that persisted for about 15 years until they recently widened the road. It killed a bunch of trees:
https://www.google.com/maps/@34.0630131,-84.6891383,3a,75y,3...
This stuff is all over Georgia.
Kudzu does well at forest edges, so you tend to see it by roads - it's not successful in the interior where seedlings don't get enough light.
>> As trees grew in the cleared lands near roadsides, kudzu rose with them. It appeared not to stop because there were no grazers to eat it back. But, in fact, it rarely penetrates deeply into a forest; it climbs well only in sunny areas on the forest edge and suffers in shade.
Last time this article came up, I realized how much of my impression of kudzu was visibility bias.
You see a ton of it from roads.
You see very little of it inside forests, where there are not roads.
We had a lot of it in Maryland.
I moved to New York, about 30 years ago, and stopped seeing it.
Until a couple of years ago. A house in our neighborhood had a backyard covered in it. Not sure if it was deliberately planted.
I reported it to the DEC, and it seems to be gone, now.
I love the DEC so much. They seem to actually give a shit, and NY's environmental recovery is astounding.
A parallel to that is the incredible research and work done by SUNY ESF. They've almost brought back the American Chestnut!
Is that the genetically engineered one? I just planted three of the Chinese Chestnut backcrossess (7 generations, so it's almost entirely American Chestnut).
Pines, telephone poles, tractors, abandoned cars. There was a hill in Pinson, AL covered with the stuff.
The kudzu bug invasion was unreal. I used to live about half an hour from the Atlanta airport where they came in. One summer there were suddenly swarms of them around my house. Anytime you went outside, you’d get a few on you.
The next year the swarms disappeared, but if you shake any given kudzu vine, several will fall off. It’s like they were buzzing around looking for the kudzu. Then once they found it they stayed put.
That was about a decade ago, wasn't it?
It was crazy. If you walked outside, you'd have two or three of them crawling on you by the time you walked back in. They'd find their way into your house, your car - you'd breathe them in if you weren't careful.
I still don't understand what happened. They were a brand new / invasive species, but their initial surge was biblical in proportions - a "swarms of locust"-like plague. In the years that followed, the population dropped to the point you would only see them if you looked.
Somehow an equilibrium was reached. I'm not exactly sure why the first year was so severe.
The only similar event I can recall were the swarms of Japanese beetles (false June Bugs) in the 90's. Those were so bad that if you shook any standing tree, a thousand of them would drop on your head. But that only happened every seven years or so.
Perhaps they're all periodic, like cicadas?
>Somehow an equilibrium was reached. I'm not exactly sure why the first year was so severe.
Isn't that obvious? It's a species specialized to feed on one plant, and it met a huge amount of that plant which was previously undisturbed by its preying. The result is explosive, actually exponential growth, until there are more beetles than the plant stock can support. Then the beetle population collapses, and after that an equilibrium develops. Cyclical variations can develop under certain circumstances, especially when there are strong seasons.
It is not at all specialized on a single plant. It seems to like almost any leguminous plant. The reason it's considered invasive is because of the large variety of commercially important crops it also feeds on like cowpeas, soy beans, green beans, etc. Kudzu, wisteria, etc are not as commercially important but also are eaten
Ah, I assumed that it was specialized because it's called "kudzu bug" in the article. Still, the same logic applies: the species encountered a new habitat where its particular niche was probably not filled, enabling explosive growth.
I read up more and it's actually many many non-leguminous plants it attacks too. Seems like basically anything. There are native pests like that for pretty much every plant that grows in large populations so I highly doubt it found a new niche. It's success specifically seems to be due to just how much of a generalist it actually is
A more likely, though surely still incomplete, explanation may be due to the fact that the insecticides you need to repel it are broad spectrum and would kill beneficial insects just as well. Most other bugs that fulfill this ecological role have very targeted insecticidal sprays. So they end up at a comparative disadvantage to this generalist
A more likely explanation for their sudden decline imo is that there was probably some virus or other disease that evolved to pray on this now-ubiquitous bug. The bug also has a very particular relationship with its symbiotic gut microbes that seems really important. Such a virus/disease could also have targeted this symbiote. Either way I think the more likely explanation is that this generalist was countered with something that learned to specialize in it
That's certainly also a possibility. Could also be a combination of factors.
> Somehow an equilibrium was reached. I'm not exactly sure why the first year was so severe.
FTA: “The Japanese kudzu bug, first found in a garden near Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport six years ago, apparently hitched a plane ride and is now infesting vines throughout the South, sucking the plants’ vital juices.”
Looks like they have an enemy in the us that needed time to get to them.
> Kudzu has appeared larger than life because it’s most aggressive when planted along road cuts and railroad embankments
Here's a good example from the Hiwassee Loop where the Kudzu is all dead, making the actual vines easier to spot. Check out how it blankets the entire side of the mountain when the drone pulls out at 8m30s, still opaque even with zero leaves: https://youtu.be/5V3oHAtfh3M?t=411
Interesting, but the thing that bugs me about the article is the photo at the top - That ain't kudzu. It looks more like an invasive honeysuckle.
I don't think it's a photo.
It's by Laura Plageman: "Response to Print of Kudzu, Texas, 2010, archival pigment print, editions variable"
https://photolp.com/project/response-land
It's not exactly a photograph, but it's not a painting either.
It looks like these works are prints that have been crumpled and/or torn, then photographed? Some of these are very neat
> a natural complement to inscrutable words like Yazoo, gumbo and bayou.
Gumbo and jambalaya are hardly inscrutable, these dishes came straight out of West Africa. Bayou and Yazoo, like Ouachita, Natchez, Natchitoches, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee etc. are all from First Nations.
I believe this is referring to the sound of these words out of the mouth of a southerner. For example, have a southerner attempt to talk about kudzu to a group in Japan and they’ll have no idea what he is saying (I know this from first hand experience). Same with these other words—the vowels change and slide and are inscrutable (hard to understand) to those whom the words are native.
As a teenager I once had a summer job as a land surveyor in North Carolina. We saw this stuff all over the place, acre after acre on many jobsites that were deep in the woods or very rural areas. I think this article is underestimating how much kudzu actually has taken over.
Lantana, Cactus and Cats Claw in Australia. Everyone talks about the cane toads but ignores the weeds
Try telling people that Kookaburras are an introduced species gone feral and responsible for killing off large numbers of unique native birds, reptiles and insects.
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-20/kookaburra-cull-quest...
. . . and you wonder why we close our borders to easties .. :-)
The first time I had ever heard of kudzu was when I first installed Linux (maybe redhat 5 around '98), and it's installer tool was called Kudzu. Red Hat being out of North Carolina also has a ton of kudzu.
It wasn't until several years later when I took a job that relocated me to Alabama that I saw it first hand on the roadways and really understood it.
The whole concept of "invasive species" had always been a bit confusing to me.
When does a plant or animal brought here from overseas start being considered native? Kudzu has been growing in America since before my ancestors can't here, am I still considered invasive based on the history of Europeans invading this continent?
Native species are part of the ecosystem. All coevolved in the same place for ten thousands of years at least, maybe millions, eventually creating a structure where each piece is connected with the other and fine tuned to produce the maximum value and extract the most products from our machine.
"Non native species" is not the same term as "invasive". Lets imagine that the letter H in your black keyboard falls off. If you replace it by a blue key from other keyboard you end basically with a functional keyboard. Sometimes non native species fill a empty spot and restore a lost system functionality without affecting the other species. Sometimes they even boost the whole machine. A good example would be a native tree from the forests of Kazakhstan that is everywhere, the domestic apple tree.
Invasive species would be like replacing all the keys in your keyboard with the letter H. They turn the machine basically useless. Instead to work with the ecosystem, they destroy it, eliminate most species, and replace it by a much cheaper version. A worse system that is more simple, less stable, and has barely the minimum functionality for us to survive
Thanks for the details examples here! So would that mean the"when" for a non-native species to be considered native is on the scale of when it noticeably evolved to adapt to its new environment?
> Invasive species would be like replacing all the keys in your keyboard with the letter H. They turn the machine basically useless. Instead to work with the ecosystem, they destroy it, eliminate most species, and replace it by a much cheaper version. A worse system that is more simple, less stable, and has barely the minimum functionality for us to survive
I guess this would also put humans at the top of the list of invasive species? That sure did sound a lot like what we have done over or history, unfortunately
Or it replace it with a handful character you don’t use in your language.
Often non native species are just sitting there. Not being leveraged by the ecosystem because it don’t know what to do with it.
I find it is generally used to describe things that are getting out of hand. Often invasive species thrive because there's no natural predation or check and balance for some reason.
Most of the species in my garden are non-native (another term that is often used for less virulent invasives), but they don't colonize the native landscape. The term "invasive" is sometimes used for plants that could otherwise be fine, but will get out of hand in some cases. Bamboo, for instance.
Source: none, but I used to take care of shrubbery for one of my first jobs and I learned a lot about invasives. I hated Brazilian pepper trees the most ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schinus_terebinthifolia ), mainly because they're quite difficult to remove.
To be considered an invasive species requires that the species is introduced to an area, become overpopulated and harm the ecosystem.
Which honestly describes humans pretty much everywhere…
Yes. Certainly the First Nations have generally agreed on this.
Have the Zeroth Nations weighed in or did none of them survive the First Nations' arrival?
From a country freaking out about its borders a handful of centuries after completed the largest land grab in history…
From a country freaking out about it's borders while holding onto the symbol of the Statue of Liberty...
> Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
A poem attached to the pedestal is neither a legal document nor a statement from the creator of the statue nor was the country asked if that poem was in line with their values. It's one person's personal viewpoint that got amplified by a small group of people with its placement. Not sure why you think it's some kind of "Gotcha!" or founding statement of the country's mission.
> don’t be evil
You know it’s not really a well defined concept. A friend recently pointed out that whitetail deer can be considered invasive in most of North America. While the Eastern woodlands are certainly their original habit, we have eliminated the wolves that would predate upon them. In the absence of predators their populations have exploded - sometimes causing serious ecological issues in the exact same way we see with invasive species which lack predators to keep them in check.
Oh that's really ingesting, we have plenty of whitetail deer in my area and never thought about whatever they night technically be invasive.
We also have a species of tree called the princess tree. Most consider it invasive because it grows and propogates so quickly, it's originally from Asia if I'm not mistaken. Personally I really like it and have transplanted a few into our posture for fast shade growth and hope to harvest it for wood in 8-10 years.
(2015)
Remember the snakehead, the introduced fish that would decimate native fish populations here in the US? That, uh, turned out to be not true as well. They’re coexisting quite peacefully with native fish.
There are places in Washington, DC, and its suburbs where the kudzu can be quite dense.
Is this the same Kudzu as the supposed anti-alcohol-binge herb?
tl;dr: an invasive beetle began infesting kudzu in 2009 and has set it back. It's no longer a major invasive thread.