All Plants are "Exotic Invasives"

Abstract

www.ethnobotanyjournal.org/vol6/i1547-3465-06-117.pdf Ethnobotany Research & Applications 6:117-119 (2008) Daniel E. Moerman, University of Michigan-Dearborn, 6515 Cherry Hill Rd., Ypsilalanti, MI 48198, U.S.A. dmoerman@umd.umich.edu Why? First, the Hawaiian islands are the remains of massive volcanoes which arose atop a hot spot in the Pacific plate. They were formed of sterile molten rock. My understanding is that the endemic higher plant flora of Hawai`i, preceding human occupation, is descended from approximately 40 original plants, seeds, roots, or whatever, deposited after storms, or from lost birds, or the like. The first of those 40 landed on one of the islands which existed at the time (they come and go in what is apparently something like a 15 million year cycle) and somehow “took root,” so to speak. An omniscient observer would have to consider this first plant on a totally sterile island as mighty exotic, and surely invasive. This first species spread as far as it could, and, as did the following 39, diversified into different niches (or something like that). Each species moved forward, and probably backward, with newly evolved species probably invading the landscapes of their ancestors (one count shows some 1500 species evolved from the 40 originals). Some of them managed somehow to float or be carried to other islands. While there are “island endemics,” others seem to have moved throughout the island chain. The youngest islands are to the east, the oldest to the west (a number of them totally submerged by now). But the point here is that each and every one of those species moved somewhere from somewhere else. A particular individual new species of the adaptive radiation may have emerged in one of those All Plants are “Exotic Invasives”