Regional Ecosystem Impacted by Invasive Species

Story by Addison Smith, Riley Beihl and Blayne Thornton

PITTSBURG, Kansas—Invasive species are drastically, if gradually, changing the Southeast Kansas ecosystem.

Pittsburg has a history of coal and strip mining, but it is the impacts of this history that has shaped much of our surrounding environment and the species found in it. According to the National Invasive Species Information Center, 191 different invasive species have been reported in Crawford County. Invasive species are plants and animals that have been introduced to a new environment in which the species become harmful to its environment and the native species within it.

Dr. Andrew George and Dr. Christine Brodsky, professors of ecology at Pittsburg State, have spent a lot of time studying invasive species and their impacts.

“To be invasive, [the species] is overwhelming the ecosystem that it’s in,” Brodsky said. “Typically these species have no natural predators here because they did not evolve here—so there’s nothing keeping them in control.”

She said many of these invasive species can be found in Pittsburg. Two invasive species that have grown significantly in the community are Zebra Mussels and the European Starling.

European Starlings were intentionally released in New York in 1890 by Shakespeare enthusiasts. With over 200 million present in North America, it is now one of the largest bird populations in North America.

“If you go outside right now, they’re just all over town, they’re everywhere,” George said. “Probably half of all the birds in Pittsburg are European Starlings.”

“The Starlings that are here,” Brodsky said. “[have] been known to kick woodpeckers from their cavities. They’ll go in and rip them out and that ruin’s the woodpecker—which is a native species—their ability to reproduce.”

Wylie Degruson, a member of the region’s Sperry-Galligar Audubon Society, has witnessed these effects first hand.

“I don’t like [Starlings] at all,” he said. “They invade other bird’s nests, eat seeds planted for grains, and sometimes you have to replant if you get a few thousand to descend on a field right after it’s planted. It’s hard to get rid of them and deter them from coming back.”

Another species causing harm to Pittsburg’s bodies of water are the Zebra Mussels. These finger-sized mussels were unintentionally introduced into the United States after cargo ships discharged ballast water that contained the species into the Great Lakes in the 1980s. Their name comes from the dark, zig-zagged stripes on their shells.

“They filter out the water,” George said. “And if there’s enough of them in the lake or river, they filter out so much of the water in a system that’s not supposed to have clear water. They can clear the water out so much that sunlight can make it to the bottom and plants can start growing in it—and it changes the whole system.”

John Jameson, a PSU biology major with an emphasis in ecology and field biology, spends quite a bit of time fishing and has had negative experiences with the species.

“The main impacts I have had with zebra mussels are when they cut your feet and legs when traversing through the river,” he said. “But they also cause problems with equipment left in the body of water for any extended period of time.”

To prevent this species from growing, it’s important to know how humans can prevent the transport of these species across bodies of water.

“[Zebra Mussels] transmit really easily if you don’t wash out your boat and you take your boat to different ponds, rivers, or lakes,” Brodsky said. “So communicating these issues to the constituents and saying, ‘Hey, this is what you should look out for, this is how you should clean your boat’—kind of like a public service announcement—is the first step to prevention.”

One invasive species that could be making their way to Pittsburg soon is the Asian Carp. Asian Carp was originally brought over from Europe in the 1970s to control and clean aquatic farms, however it eventually made it into rivers, causing a massive increase in their population.

Currently they are more commonly found in the Kansas and Missouri rivers, but any bodies of water connecting to these rivers have potential for the species.

“They’re the cows of the fish world,” Brodsky said. “They eat up all of the plant matter on the floor of riverbeds, which then makes the rivers more cloudy and turbid.”

This “cloudy” effect has forced native fish species to find ways to adapt or ultimately relocate to new environments.

This species would also directly compete with Pittsburg’s native fish for food resources. The Asian Carp also proposes negative economic threats to those who fish.

“[The Asian Carp] causes native fishes to become less abundant, so if you’re a fisherman or angler, you have fewer fishing opportunities because of that,” George said. Asian Carp are one of many found on Kansas’s list of illegal species to import, possess, or release.

The list of invasive species extends beyond just animals, a significant problem many in Pittsburg have experienced is the overwhelming presence of invasive plants.

Bush-honeysuckle, Privet, Johnson Grass, and Sericea lespedeza are just a few. These plants grow in pastures and crop fields and eventually take over, and due to their fast growth, eliminating them can be a challenge.

“There’s never enough money—there’s never enough manpower to get rid of all of it,” George said. “The public land that the state and the wildlife and parks manage—they spend a lot of time and a lot of money spraying and burning it and trying to get rid of it, but it’s like a never ending thing.”

With some of these species being present in our community for quite some time now, it’s hard to imagine how the ecosystem can be saved—or if it’s even possible. If a species has already well-established themselves within the environment, it can be nearly impossible to completely eradicate them.

What can be done comes down to one simple idea: awareness.

“Do we just let nature take its course? Do we just get to the point where we’re going to be a cosmopolitan world and species will be everywhere and ‘who cares’ kind of thing?” Brodsky said. “We’re always going to be dealing with movement of species throughout the world—facilitated by us—but hopefully at this point it’s part of the conversation.”