Best Homework Ever!

Those lucky enough to be enrolled in Duke University must be fighting to get into Dr. Sandra Cooke's excellently titled class, "The Billion Dollar Problem of Aquatic Invasive Species." As part of the coursework, students are required to participate in a blog about aquatic invasives, where they've been posting about everything from Asian swamp eels to the war metaphor for invasive species. Check it out!

The Sadlands

The Nature Conservancy has summarily dismantled what had to be one of the best and most prolific resources for invasive species information on the internet, the Global Invasive Species Team. That means no more newsletters, no new website updates, no support for the palmtop computer-based Weed Information Management System, and, most likely, no new Element Stewardship Abstracts. It also means that several people dedicated to making it just a little easier for everyone to deal with invasive species have lost their jobs. Hopefully the Weed Control Methods Handbook, the voluminous Management Library, Rod Randall's massive weed database, and other tools, housed on UC Davis servers, will remain live for the long term. Read the details here.

All Your Database Are Belong To Us

The Global Invasive Species Information Network (GISIN) just published a massive list of online databases related to non-native/invasive species. The list, covering all parts of the globe, currently contains over 250 entries, from the Marine Alien Species of Estonia to the Delaware Invasive Species Tracking System. If you feel like going meta and exploring the list of lists, you can also grab it in Word doc and plain text flavors.

Spider Web

Just came across a new Yahoo! Group called cocoonswapping. It seems full of people with a keen interest in spiders, and I cannot fault them for that. Unfortunately they also seem keen on swapping spider cocoons/egg sacs, and doing so on a global scale. The issue of invasive species has already arisen in the group, which was just created this past month (see this message), and obviously group members have good intentions and are not planning to release the spiders into the wild. However, I still am concerned about the concept of sharing species across continents, especially something very tiny that seems like it would be hard to keep contained. And according to this article from the American Tarantula Society, it's legal to import spiders into the USA - I'm not sure about regulations in other countries. Yikes.