The snapping turtle catches up with the Germans

Writing about invasive species could become a mainstay of this publication, if we believe climate change and globalization experts.

We'll do "bees and birds" first because the most successful recent invasive species on the planet, known as homo sapiens or simply "people", can be kind of boring and violent, and the general definition of invasive species does not include "people".

Bees: done in so many Hollywood movies. The real job these days is saving those we have.

Birds: The Ruddy Duck (Oxyura jamaicensis) is the biggest established bird we have found on the German government's invasive species web site Neobiota. A few random members of  Threskiornis aethiopicus (ibis) have been reported, but that's it.

No parrots! Yet. No Burmese pythons either.

You see where this is going. We do not want to belittle the effort of the German government to keep tabs on invaders, but geography and climate make for an easier job than in the U.S. so far. Racoons are here, though we have yet to see them outside of a zoo.

The latest scary species on which we have a headstart is the snapping turtle! This bane of young children in some areas of the U.S. arrived in Germany as pets and enough were released by some owners to be sufficient numbers to breed and form small but sustained colonies.

While some species listed on the Neobiota website have economic, ecological, and health impacts, many are outright harmless - their only qualification for the site being the fact that they are not native.

Why would anybody list the butterfly bush?

Like oleander, you can buy it at any garden store, and like oleander, it is very susceptible to sub freezing temperatures, making them easily controlled, at least until the next round of global warming hits these northern shores.
Potatoes and corn, just to mention two, are not listed as potential invasive species, by the way.

Can we say the following without appearing snotty? Maybe not, but here goes nothing.

The Neobiota website is a well intended undertaking and a complete waste of effort. 

Defining the audience of the site may not have been a priority. On the one hand, they try to write in a way that's understood by non-specialists, on the other hand, sentences get long and complicated, and the various taxonomy levels are a bitch for the average reader.

Red lists, grey lists, black lists with status names such as "observation", "action", "management" and listing the species by scientific name first and common name in parentheses make for hard reading.

E for effort...