Invasive Species News

Exotic pets that grow to be big adults and are inexpensive to buy are more likely to end up in the wild, according to a recent study. “It is difficult…

More isolated oceanic islands harbor fewer native species due to the fact that plants and animals are less capable of naturally dispersing to and colonizing those islands. This is known…

Plant numbers have surged in a group of islands in the Pacific Ocean following the eradication of invasive rats that gobbled up seeds and gnawed away at vegetation, a new…

Madagascar is facing an invasion. Not military, but amphibian. Toxic Asian common toads (Duttaphrynus melanostictus) have spread rapidly around the port city of Toamasina on the country’s east coast. The…

TOULOUSE, France -- Rats exact a punishing toll on island seabird colonies, decimating their numbers as they eat the birds’ eggs and young. Research has shown that fewer birds, and…

TOAMASINA, Madagascar — Last January, when Tropical Cyclone Ava made landfall on Madagascar, wreaking havoc for 24 hours, people here knew they had more than usual to worry about. Ava…

The remote island of South Georgia in the southern Atlantic Ocean has finally been declared free of invasive rats and mice in the world’s largest-ever rodent eradication effort. A monitoring…

A new assessment of UNESCO Natural World Heritage Sites found 35 percent with significant conservation concerns, or worse. Most are in the Tropics.

LAKE LIMBOTO, Indonesia — Anton Kui has fished here since he was in fifth grade. He remembers he could quickly catch a day’s worth of fish close to his home.…

On the islands of Wallacea, one of the world’s hottest biodiversity hotspots, a quiet yet deadly invasion is underway. The poisonous Asian common toad’s (Duttaphrynus melanostictus) journey from island to…

Last week thousands of people in northwest Ethiopia marched to Abay River and Lake Tana as part of the “Save Lake Tana” movement to remove invasive water hyacinth by hand.…

Logged tropical forests have a bit of a bad reputation in the conservation community. They’re often seen as sub-standard habitats for animals, especially when compared with the robust and varied…

The slideshow in this story contains an image that some readers may find disturbing. Forbidding black cliffs relentlessly shuddered by massive Southern Ocean waves give way to a mountainous interior,…

A little plant can go a long way — so long it has earned the name “mile-a-minute weed.” This prodigious propagator is Mikania micrantha, a plant that reached Asia from…

Feral cats now inhabit virtually the entire Australian landscape, and have been implicated in multiple recent mammal extinctions by conservationists. Illuminating the urgency of controlling cat populations across the continent,…

A battle is brewing in southeastern U.S. waters, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Caribbean Sea: it’s the lionfish against all comers. With voracious appetites and virtually no predators, these…

A new study examines the impacts of invasive feral pigs, a favorite prey of vampire bats, on ecosystems in rural Brazil. The distribution of feral pigs — which are also…

If current trends persist, the population abundance of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish could decline an average of 67 percent by 2020. That’s one of several sobering findings detailed…

cientists have long known that invasive species possess “pesty traits” that benefit their spread. But what if similar, but latent, “pesty traits” could be triggered into action in endangered species…

The remote Caribbean island of Redonda, part of Antigua and Barbuda, is home to numerous species of plants and animals found nowhere else on earth. It is also home to…