Giant Snails Invade Florida

It always amazes me that people worry so much about moving one or two genes around in plants in a thought out and carefully controlled manner yet they hardly worry about the introduction of whole functional genomes (i.e. invasive species) into ecosystems. Given the clear and deleterious impacts of introduced species (as opposed to those for GMOs which are debatable at best) you would think there would be large organizations of anti-introduced genome activists.

Why would you expect activists on an issue where there is virtually no counterpressure?

Accidental introductions still happen, reasonably frequently, and individual 'wildcat' introductions (usually of something that somebody thinks will be tasty and/or amusing to hunt/fish) do happen as well; but essentially nobody in anything resembling an authoritative role will even suggest a deliberate introduction in anything but the most cautious terms(and usually then only in an effort to control a prior introduction that got out of hand).

The sheer difficulty of the task, and the near-impossibility of eradicating established populations, works against the effort; but there is no activism because being against introduced species is already policy(and downright uncontroversial policy, at that).

GMOs, by contrast, have much more... effective... friends and allies, which provides their opponents with some incentive to try to push back.

Regardless of how good or bad their cause is, people rarely get worked up about things that are already going the way they want.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/azhiTxH784s/story01.htm

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