Invaders-Group4

“Alien species of plants and animals have invaded every continent. They have enormous powers; they spread disease; they devour our buildings. Some are destroying the very land under our feet. Think of them as the first wave of an assault that could drive the greatest mass extinction since the end of the dinosaurs. What is causing this invasion, and what can we do to stop the rising tide?”

//**Group 4: Impact Biosphere**// What happened in your section of the video? Explain: · The “Impact” or what was happening in the area. · What was the invader and where did it come from? · What are they doing to control or fix the situation? · What else does your team think can be done to control the situation?

What do you mean by our area? Where is that? Explain your second point in more details.
In our section of the video we learned about how most of the life in our waters are from different areas. The only place that you can find native species in the water is if it has been untouched by humans. Even so, some water invaders can still reach these untouched areas.

The impact on our area was polluted water, which caused hundreds of dollars in medical bills to pay for water poisoning treatment.

Our invader was species of seaweed, slugs, oysters, sponges, and "common" bottom feeding animals. They came from other areas of the lake from ships carrying supplies.

To fix the problem, scientists are catching the invaders and putting them elsewhere to live so as they don't harm our water. Each day they do tests to check the water health.

We think that to control the problem:

Leanne: I think that to control the problem we should check the bottoms of the boats before we send them off to their destination. Danae: i think that to control the problem, we should put the boats through a specialized cleaning system. As this will take away all diseases and foreign organisms encased on the boat. Alec: I believe that we should apply repellents to the bottom of the boats, we should make make the repellents strong enough to make the organism stay away but not to strong to harm or kill it. Brandon: I think that to control this problem we should apply chemicals to the bottom of the boats to destroy the diseases. we should do this at least twice every two weeks.

You guys could have summarized the video better. Here is a summary of the video from the Strange Days Website http://www.pbs.org/strangedays/episodes/invaders/experts/aquaticinvaders.html
=== "On the New England coast and in San Francisco Bay, marine ecologist [|Jim Carlton] is tracking the rising rate of destructive aquatic invasive species. He and his colleagues are conducting what is known as a Rapid Assessment Survey Rapid Assessment Surveys (RAS) are conducted by teams of marine species experts whose job it is to identify both native and introduced species at selected sites. === === According to Carlton, "Around the world, we've seen tremendous numbers of invasions in the last quarter of the twentieth century and these appear to be unabated as we move into the twenty-first century." Our global system transports plants and animals along with other cargo. Every year brings more volume, more speed and more arrivals. With the relentless growth of global transportation, Carlton believes we may be pushing our luck. "The arrival of every new species is very much like Russian roulette. We spin a new species into the environment and the potential for catastrophic impact to society, to the economy, to the environment is always there." === === Jeff McNeeley, chief scientist of the World Conservation Union and one of our Strange Days material sources for invasives, agrees that the rise in global trade has greatly increased the spread of invasives. The value of total imports increased from US$192 billion in 1965 to $3.3 trillion in 1990, a 17-fold increase in 25 years (World Resource Institute, 2003). Imports of agricultural products and industrial raw materials — those that have the greatest potential to contribute to the problem of invasive species — amounted to $482 billion in 1990, up from $55 billion in 1965. While this economic performance is impressive it carries with it great hidden costs. === === In the words of one of our Strange Days Science Advisors [|Hal Mooney], a foremost global authority on invasive species: "The biota of the Earth is undergoing a dramatic transformation... Since the beginnings of the Age of Exploration, humans have purposefully and inadvertently moved biological material across barriers that, for recent evolutionary time, have separated the unique biotic realms of the continental land masses. We are now developing a whole new cosmopolitan assemblage of organisms across the surface of the Earth with large consequences not only for the functioning of ecosystems but also for the future evolutionary trajectory of life." === 58/75 points