Predators vs. Aliens: European Shrimps Win Predatory Battles With an American Invader

Link:
 http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/10/131011135336.htm

Published on: October 11, 2013

Author: ScienceDaily





Summary:

         Scientists looked for occurrences of where invasive species were and found that it only existed where native shrimp were not present or rare. They found that wherever there was a European shrimp population, American shrimp could not invade at all. Researchers came up with the idea that the native shrimps were eating the invasive shrimp to the point of extinction. They decided to test this by putting two native shrimps with an invading species of shrimp. Both types of native shrimp were effective at killing and eating the invader. However, one of the two, which never allowed invasive species to grow, proved to be more effective than the other because the other one sometimes co-existed with the invader. Invasion ecologists learned that sometimes native species will fight back and kill the invasive species to the point where the invasion is completely stopped.



Relevance:

               This relates to what we learned during our ecology unit about invasive species. We learned that invasive species can take over an entire ecosystem and out compete native species to the point where they stop growing. We also learned that if a native species were to die out, it could lead to other organisms that depended on that native species to die out also and lower the entire ecosystem's biodiversity. This is what happens in this article. The American shrimp tried to take over the European shrimp. However, something we did not learn was that sometimes the native species fight back and prevent the invader from taking over. This is called biotic resistance.