False Lament

My buddy goes on a run and when hes done there is a bar near a creek. So he wades into the creek because the day is hot and the water is cold.

Tourists ask what hes up to, with his running stuff he didn't want wet piled on the shore and him very obviously cooling off in the water. He says he's fishing.

But now here is why I am telling you this story. The universe occasionally aligns in such a way that we get to really really fuck with people and their perception of said universe. The opportunities do not come often and when they come you must seize the day. This is what my buddy did.

So this Creek runs through town and as a result of the highway and neighborhoods and culverts and roads it does not have a great salmon run. It's a short Creek the headwaters are only a few miles from the ocean it never had a great salmon run to begin with. But there are salmon.

One such fish brushes past my buddy's leg. Immediately he knees the fish like he is juggling a soccer ball and pops it out of the water, then slaps it out of the air on to the shore.

This is dumb luck. He could not do this again if he spent years training. Noodling (catching fish with your hands) is a thing that is legal to do with salmon but it is so much harder than literally every other way to catch salmon, including grabbing them with a garbage can. What he just managed is the kind of thing that should make you want to grab the fish and swing it around your head like a stripper with her panties off.

But,

He has an audience.

This is the opportunity offered by the universe.

He plays it cool.

There is a Japanese water beetle called Regimbartia attenuata. It has developed an incredible adaptation to be being eaten by pond frogs.

It walks out the frog’s butt.

The beetles get swallowed whole, and usually that would be considered Kinda Fatal, but this particular species is just like “DID YOU THINK A FROG’S DIGESTIVE TRACT COULD HOLD ME?!” and proceeds to walk through the frog’s intestines, then presumably stimulate the frog’s hind gut with its legs so that the frog poops. The beetles emerge headfirst and 93% of them survive and live on for weeks afterward.

Apparently some beetles can do this obstacle course in six minutes! (Usually takes a few hours, but some people will speedrun ANYTHING.)

Isn’t that COOL?!

I was on the tram (crowded tram) (just after 11 AM) on my way home full of adrenaline still, and saw my dad eating a banana on the platform. I could get out of the tram to say hi, but then i'd miss the tram, or worse, hold it up. What i COULD do, however, is sprint out of the tram as soon as the door opens, take a bite from the banana my dad is holding, and SPRINT back into the tram before the doors close. So That Is What I Did.

unfortunately now roughly half of the passengers of the tram were looking at me like I was suddenly some sort of feral spirit of hunger or perhaps a strange insect of some sort.* Fortunately, the truth was also the ONE sequence of words that could make what they had just witnessed okay. I went "das ist mein papa!!!" which is german for "thats my dad!!!!!"

So I thought to myself

Huh, a lot of our invasive species come from China and Japan

And then I thought, huh, I should look up what Kudzu is like in its natural habitat

And I found this article by a team of scientists investigating the history of Kudzu in China

And ohhhhh my goddddd. I'm vibrating with excitement over how cool this is.

The first bombshell that turned my brain inside out:

KUDZU IS NOT WILD. IT IS SEMI-DOMESTICATED.

In China, Kudzu has been a fundamentally important plant for food and textiles throughout history. We have Kudzu cloth that is 6,000 years old!

THIS PLANT CLOTHED AND FED ONE OF THE MOST POPULOUS AND MOST ENDURING HUMAN CULTURES ON EARTH

and in turn

HUMANS SHAPED AND SELECTED FOR ITS TRAITS

*AND*

in its natural range, humans are the main "predator" of kudzu

"Harvest by humans appears to be the major control mechanism in its native areas."

Kudzu is like that because it co-evolved with humans.

This means

That Kudzu is so highly invasive because—just like most plants evolved to be grazed by herbivores and/or eaten by caterpillars, keeping them in balance with everything else—Kudzu basically evolved to be harvested by humans

There are a lot of reasons why Kudzu is considered invasive outside its natural habitat, not just its lack of adequate environmental moderators. And introducing human intervention doesn't actually make it non-invasive either.

Also, the paper doesn't say that kudzu evolved alongside humans to be controlled by them. It merely points out that humans may have had a hand in sustaining the high degree of genetic diversity within kudzu variations that we see as part of variable members of the same species. This variation does mean that it is more likely one is able to find a kudzu plant than another, less varied species, that is able to thrive in areas significantly different from its native lands, but this is not "kudzu evolving to be more invasive because humans are its main predator" unfortunately.

That said, this absolutely does indicate that effective commercial and personal use of kudzu plants could support control efforts! If people think of them as useful plants rather than nuisance ones, they might be more willing to put in the work to contain, cultivate, and harvest them properly.

On the other hand, this also poses an invasive risk. Introducing the plant to new regions for functional use risks its escape into the wild, at which point it is no longer guaranteed to be adequately controlled or curtailed any longer. This is how most invasives arrive in their invasive lands after all, so it should be no surprise that the idea of kudzu being a useful plant people cultivate on purpose isn't necessarily a wholly comfortable one.

But if you've been to the Southeastern United States—there's no shortage of the stuff.

Apart from that—humans continuously using the plant for 6,000 years or more is a selective pressure, even if no intentional artificial selection happened—and it appears that some artificial selection DID happen, so kudzu is definitely tailored for coexistence with humans to some extent.

This isn't an explanation for its invasiveness. But this paper hit me hard because almost all information about Kudzu that's out there deals with its invasiveness in the Southern USA, and there is barely any curiosity about how it behaves in its natural home.

Typically, a big reason for invasiveness is the absence of pathogens and herbivorous insects that eat the plant. But Kudzu, as discussed in the paper, has relatively few specialist insects that use it—its herbivores are mostly generalists, and they don't do much to limit its growth.

Instead, the paper argues that the main ecological force keeping Kudzu in balance with other organisms is humans.

Pokeweed, Goldenrod, Amaranth, and Common Evening-Primrose are virulently invasive over there!

This seems to reflect a structural difference in the respective habitats of the two regions.

Most of the USA is fire dependent ecosystem and historically full of large grazers like wapiti and bison. The pre-colonization environment had tons of canebrake and open woodland with relatively little woody undergrowth, but a huge variety of small plants that grew in the diffuse sunlight (including some of the most unique carnivorous plants on earth—the Venus flytrap is only found in the Carolinas, and nothing else like it has ever evolved!)

Honestly, most of our invasive species could never exist in a place that was subject to regular controlled burning as the Native Americans did.

The guy was an institution all on his own; look at this.

The “A” profile in his soil is now 47 inches deep compared to less than 6 inches in 1971 and acts like a giant sponge for water infiltration and retention.

From 1971 through 1989 David used an average of 150-250 pounds of nitrogen fertilizer per acre to grow his corn crops. After adding peas and radishes as a cover crop mix, he cut his nitrogen needs in half and was able to get it down to 125 pounds per acre.

When he added multiple species and became more aggressive with his cover crop mixes, he was able to achieve an additional drop in applied fertility. His starter fertilizer is now just 2 lbs of N, 4 lbs of P, and 5 lbs of K. His corn crop now only requires 20-30 lbs of N throughout the entire growing season. He requires no fertility for his soybeans, relying on fertility gained solely through his cover crops. He uses only 40 lbs of 10 N – 10 P – 10 K for his small grains.

Ten years ago (source study published 2019) David stopped using any fungicides and insecticides. This occurred at a time when fungicide and insecticide use has increased significantly with the average commodity farmer.

Four years ago he stopped using any seed treatment, including neonicotinoids.

His cash crop yields have been increasing by an average of 5% annually for the past 5-6 years, with far less fertilizer and no fungicides, insecticides or seed treatment.