Little Miss Muffett

The Southland Times is reporting that a woman in New Zealand was recently alarmed to discover a redback spider (Latrodectus hasselti) crawling out of a decoration in her house. After she immobilized said spider with a pesticide and stored it for safekeeping, the NZ Ministry of Agriculture & Forestry came and picked it up, confirming the id and verifying that, luckily, there were not any additional spiders hanging about. The redback, which has a painful, venomous bite, is an Australian native that currently has some established populations in New Zealand.

Thanks to Andrew B. for sending in a link to this story.

Fun With YouTube

Recent YouTube videos with a fresh, crisp, invasive species theme:

• The Statesman Journal has an interesting report about the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife's search for non-native fish species in the wild. There's one about invasive American bullfrogs as well.
• Someone was nice enough to capture the lecture given David Orwig of Harvard Forest about the hemlock woolly adelgid and stick the whole thing on YouTube.
• The Florida Department of Agriculture has a creepy, crawly PSA about the Mexican red-rump tarantula.
• The Great Lakes Mayors hosted an hour-long panel on invasive species issues.
• The Zoological Society of London posted a video about surveys for invasive species in the Thames River, including the Asian clam and the zebra mussel.

Fungal Affection

New Zealanders might be happy to know that a graduate student is on his way to developing a biocontrol agent to deal with white-tailed spiders (Lampona murina and L. cylindrata). According to this story from stuff.co.nz, Nic Cummings discovered a fungus that kills the spiders, and is now attempting to grow it and hopefully tame it so that it can be placed in traps. White-tail spiders are originally from Australia, and were introduced to New Zealand over a century ago. While they are not venomous, their bite can transfer a bacteria that causes skin to erupt in a rash or even nasty blisters.

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.

Made in Japan

Last month Japan came out with the country's first official list of invasive species. Problem (for me anyway) was that although there were some English-language articles about the list, there were no sources that actually included the list itself. Thanks to the magic of email and the ugliness of HTML-rendered Excel, I now bring you the official list of invasive species in Japan:

Mammalia:	Mammals:
Macaca cyclopis	Formosan rock macaque
Macaca fascicularis	long-tailed macaque
Macaca mulatta	rhesus monkey
Procyon lotor	Northern raccoon
Procyon cancrivorus	crab-eating raccoon
Herpestes javanicus	Indian mongoose
Callosciurus erythraeus	Pallas squirrel
Sciurus carolinensis	Eastern grey squirrel
Myocastor coypus	nutria
Trichosurus vulpecula	brushtail possum
Muntiacus reevesi	Muntjac deer
Aves:	Birds:
Garrulax canorus	hwamei
Garrulax perspicillatus	masked laughingthrush
Garrulax sannio	white-browed laughingthrush
Leiothrix lutea	red-billed leiothrix
Reptilia:	Reptiles:
Chelydra serpentina	snapping turtle
Anolis carolinensis	green anole
Anolis sagrei	brown anole
Boiga irregularis	brown tree snake
Elaphe taeniura friesi	Taiwan beauty snake
Protobothrops mucrosquamatus	Taiwan habu snake
Amphibia:	Amphibians:
Bufo marinus	cane toad
Pisces:	Fish:
Micropterus dolomieu	smallmouth bass
Lepomis macrochirus	bluegill
Ictalurus punctatus	channel catfish
Insecta:	Insects:
Solenopsis invicta	red imported fire ant
Solenopsis geminata	fire ant
Linepithema humile	Argentine ant
Invertebrata:	Arachnids:
Latrodectus hasseltii	redback spider
Latrodectus geometricus	brown widow spider
Latrodectus tredecimguttatus	black widow spider
Latrodectus mactans	black widow spider
Loxosceles - 2 species	recluse/violin spiders
Dipluridae - 2 genera	giant spiders
Buthidae - all species	scorpions
Tracheophyta:	Aquatic plants:
Alternanthera philoxeroides	alligator weed
Hydrocotyle ranunculoides	floating pennywort
Gymnocoronis spilanthoides	Senegal tea

(Thanks to T. Yoshioka for being so kind as to provide me with the list of scientific names.)