Case of the Vanishing Oaks

sea-maid submitted, created time 2 months 3 weeks (sciencenow.sciencemag.org)

When Lewis and Clark crossed America's heartland, they tramped through wide swaths of oak forests. But today, the oaks are in decline, and as they vanish so too does a whole coterie of native herbaceous plants critical to forest ecosystems, according to a unique analysis, which lays the blame on efforts to suppress fires. "We're losing the plants that characterized a rich and diverse ecosystem that existed here for thousands of years," says Thomas Rooney, an ecologist at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, and one of the study's authors

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Local birds starve as foreign shrubs escape!

Darkfrog submitted, created time 8 months 3 weeks (www.nytimes.com)

People worry their heads off about genetically engineered crop plants, but these are often the same people who plant off-continent shrubs in their gardens. They escape. The bugs can't eat 'em. The birds go hungry. The end.

This quote in particular struck me:

"Although gardeners might believe that when they plant a butterfly bush, native to China, they are helping butterflies, they are merely attracting the adults who sip the nectar. The plant cannot be eaten by the butterfly larvae."

Now, ordinarily, I don't care to feed larvae. I want them to die because they're horrid

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