This African bird species is being considered as a "native invader" in South Africa, and has the potential of causing serious ecological impacts.
For example: While writing my latest album [ Native Invader] my mother experienced a stroke.
While most other types of freshwater wetlands are highly invaded, bogs typically have few, or even zero, non-native invaders (Zedler and Kercher 2004; Rejmánek et al. 2013).
However, in terms of understory species establishment, it appears that V. americana is a good candidate species for establishing on low resource soils, such as PMM, and may be able to outcompete non-native invaders in these situations.
The biotic resistance hypothesis suggests that native species function as natural enemies (consumers, pathogens, competitors) of non-native invaders and suppress their establishment and spread in the new habitat [6], [8], [9].
The key pressure exerted by endolithic parasitation may, however, not result from catastrophic outbreaks but from sub-lethal effects, which, in an invasive scenario, can affect native-invader interactions and community structure.
By escaping their complex native communities, invaders may gain not just an immediate fitness benefit from reduced consumer loads, but also evolutionary benefits by escaping the conflicting selection pressure exerted by diverse consumers.
Linking all these pieces of the big puzzle to actual or predicted environmental changes and population dynamics may help us to understand the role of clonal plants, whether native or invader, in modulating impacts of global change and human activities on ecosystems.
In threatening native species, these invaders also reduce biodiversity, says Dora Passino-Reader, a USGS fishery research biologist.
