Copyright

William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2019

Copyright © Dan Eatherley 2019

Nineteenth-century engravings on chapter title pages are © Shutterstock, with the exception of chapter 6, which is © ilbusca / Getty Images

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Source ISBN: 9780008262747

eBook Edition © June 2019 ISBN: 9780008262761

Version: 2019-05-28

Dedication

To Georgia

Epigraph

‘Turkeys, carps, hops, pickerel, and beer,

Came into England all in one year.’

Chronicle of the Kings of England

unto the Death of King James, Sir Richard Baker, 1643

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologue

1 Ecological Explosions

2 First Invaders

3 Romans and Normans

4 New Worlds, New Invaders

5 The Empire Strikes Back

6 The Plant Hunters

7 Unwanted Hitch-Hikers

8 Fur Farm

9 Freshwater Invaders

10 Underneath the Waves

11 Fighting Fire with Fire

12 The Future

Further Reading

Index of Species

General Index

Acknowledgements

About the Book

About the Author

About the Publisher

Prologue
A Hornet’s Nest

Tetbury, Gloucestershire. 2.30 pm. Wednesday 28 September 2016

The wind had strengthened again and was blowing in short, powerful flurries. Graham paced up and down, his attention focused on the boundary hedges. Drawn by reports of sightings in the area, the team had last week netted several specimens of the invader that had been hawking for prey on ivy clinging to the trunk of one of the garden’s cypresses. A reliable line of sight had been achieved and further samples dispatched for DNA analysis. But that had been all.

Graham approached the conifer once more. No activity here today. As he turned back though, something danced in his peripheral vision, something way up in the cypress closest to the house. Was it his imagination? He squinted for a better look. Sure enough, four, five, maybe six, large-ish insects were whirling about the highest branches.

What the heck were they doing? What on earth was interesting them up there?

Not yet daring to hope, he reached for his binoculars. Within moments Graham confirmed the target species and shouted over to his colleague.

‘Hey Gordon! This could be it!’

Confidence building, Graham scanned the canopy for a few seconds, but saw only thick evergreen branches whipping and twisting in the wind. Frustrating. He stepped back a pace.

In that instant, a gust lifted the foliage enough to reveal a tell-tale patch of light brown against the darker trunk. Had he been standing a foot to the left or right, he would have seen nothing. It was just a glimpse, but now he was certain and made the call to the command centre: ‘I think we’ve found the nest.’ All Graham could do now was wait. And pray he was right.

The National Bee Unit – a division of APHA, the British government’s Animal and Plant Health Agency – has long expected this unwelcome visitor from the far side of the planet. Back home the Asian hornet is on the move, pushing from its native range, on the border of northern India and China, into Indonesia and South Korea. Soon Japan, too, will succumb. The species was confirmed in Europe as early as 2004 when a nest was discovered close to Agen in southwest France. No one really knows how it got there. The best guess is that a year or two earlier some fertile queens had been inadvertently shipped to Bordeaux in a container-load of ceramic pottery from eastern China.

The hornet found the temperate European conditions, similar to those back home, to its liking. Competition from local hornets was minimal – the Asian variety is smaller than its native counterpart, more like a very large wasp; and far quieter. (Experts say the chug-chug-chug of an approaching European hornet calls to mind a lumbering Chinook helicopter. If so, the newcomer is a Stealth fighter.) And it relished the plentiful supply of food in the shape of other aerial insects. This is where the problem lies, for while the Asian hornet is partial to hoverflies, wasps and various types of wild bee, it really goes to town on the honeybee, swooping in on hives to pluck off its far smaller quarry. With a (compound) eye on efficiency, worker hornets behead their prey then dismember it, biting off the wings, legs and abdomen, before taking back to the nest only the thorax, stuffed with protein-rich flight muscles – perfect fodder for the developing hornet brood. It’s the entomological equivalent of a shopping trip for prime rump steak, except the hornets do their own butchery.

In the worst cases, mobs of hornets will linger at the hive entrance, decapitating the emerging bees one after the other until they can move into the colony unchallenged, stripping it of honey, eggs and larvae. The bees back in Asia cobble together a defence of sorts, carpeting the hive entrance and swamping the intruders in a mass of shimmering abdomens. The heat-ball produced by the friction is enough to cook the intruder. The European bees have a go at this too but seem far less effective.

With the deck stacked in its favour, the Asian hornet has a field day. Over the summer, a single queen produces up to 6,000 young, almost ten times as many as typically found in a European hornet’s nest. Most offspring develop into sterile worker females – the ones wreaking the damage to bee colonies – but around 900 turn into breeding males and 350 become reproductive females, known as gynes, which form the next generation of queens. While many gynes either fail to mate or perish over the winter, a few survive to start new nests themselves the following year. It needs but a handful of these foundresses to succeed for a population to take off, particularly if the new nests aren’t detected and destroyed fast enough.

And that’s what happened in France. When nests were discovered in built-up areas, local firefighters were called in to remove them, but otherwise the authorities ignored the hornet, perhaps reassured by its lack of obvious threat towards humans. The insect isn’t especially aggressive and its sting no worse than that of the native hornet; in Europe perhaps a half-dozen fatalities to date can be attributed to Asian hornets – a statistic which compares favourably to deaths from wasp stings.

The honeybee population is less immune: in the Gironde département almost a third of colonies have been weakened or destroyed in a single year, one beekeeper losing 80 per cent of his hives. Dispersing at up to 80 kilometres each year – much further if the foundresses happen to hitch a ride in a passing vehicle – the Asian hornets have advanced unchecked over France. Along the way they have acquired a weakness for seafood, buzzing up and down coastal fish markets in search of small shrimps. It seems that any protein will do. By 2014, they had spread to Belgium, Portugal and Italy. One million of them were estimated to be in Germany. Then, in the early summer of 2016, they were spotted on the Channel Islands of Jersey and Alderney. It was only a matter of time before they reached the British mainland.

Changing agricultural practices going back a century have devastated Britain’s native bee and wasp populations, wiping out dozens of wild species and putting paid to many a honeybee colony. In recent decades, the threat to these important pollinators has worsened as crops have been drenched in pesticides and diseases have spread. Throw into the mix an exquisitely proficient bee-killer, and things have gone from bad to catastrophic.

For this reason, the UK government has adopted a zero-tolerance approach. The overriding objective of the Asian hornet response plan, the first of its kind in Europe, is the rapid interception and destruction of the insects before they get established. Beekeepers throughout the land are now on high alert, a select few tasked with active surveillance for the hornet, their colonies designated ‘sentinel’ apiaries. Meanwhile, members of the public are being encouraged to report, including via a mobile phone app, potential sightings of the visually distinctive invader. Unlike the native hornet, which sports a lively pattern of yellows and chestnuts on a dark-brown background, the Asian species is mostly black, save for a band of gold across the fourth segment of its abdomen. Added to that, it looks as if it’s waded knee-high through a puddle of yellow paint. Until now, none of the thousand-plus sightings, routed to the National Bee Unit (located at Sand Hutton, just outside York) for confirmation, have proved positive. But vigilance is key and government-funded bee inspectors are on the front line. A contingency plan – regularly field-tested – is in place. But before it can be executed, a positive identification is needed. In other words, someone has to catch a specimen.

Tuesday 20 September 2016

‘KILLER ASIAN HORNET INVASION’

‘SWARMS OF VICIOUS HORNETS SET TO HEAD TO BRITAIN’

‘MILITARY-STYLE OPERATION SPARKED TO DESTROY NESTS’

‘BRITONS WARNED OF DEADLY ASIAN HORNETS THAT CAN KILL FIFTY BEES A DAY’

The newspaper headlines that morning were typically understated. But they raised public awareness, and that was the point. In a press release issued the night before, the government confirmed that an Asian hornet had been identified in the Gloucestershire market town of Tetbury, and detailed the urgent steps that would form its rapid response to the invader. These included setting up a three-mile surveillance zone around the town, establishing a command centre at an undisclosed location and deploying bee inspectors to find the Asian hornet nest and pest control teams to destroy it. Emphasising the minimal threat to public safety posed by the hornets, Nicola Spence – the government’s top official for bee and plant health – nevertheless promised ‘swift and robust action’.

Monday 26 September 2016

The initial days of the operation proved frustrating. Each morning the inspectors were briefed before heading off in pairs to local apiaries armed with compasses, mobile phones to record grid references, binoculars and purpose-built hornet traps. At each site, the bee suit-clad inspectors hung around for a couple of hours hoping to spot hornets. The team worked off a list – provided by the Gloucestershire Beekeepers Association – which included apiaries at Prince Charles’s Highgrove estate and the Westonbirt arboretum. Some sites were located up to 20 kilometres from Tetbury, the initial surveillance zone having been extended. Perhaps the first sighting had been just the tip of the iceberg. Perhaps multiple nests were out there. But it soon became apparent that the team was wasting time at distant apiaries – the real action was happening less than a kilometre from the original discovery. And not at beehives.

‘I’m outside the Tesco’s,’ said one caller. ‘I’ve just seen some of those wasp-things.’ Sure enough, Asian hornets were confirmed buzzing about the red foliage of berberis hedging in the supermarket car park. More were clocked taking aphids from a willow coppice in a private garden nearby. And then this morning St Mary’s Primary School, in the centre of Tetbury, reported them on ivy in the playground, the area in question rapidly cordoned off as the inspectors went to work.

In predation mode, the hornets seemed oblivious to the fuss. They were not afraid of humans. They just carried on hawking. Inspectors could walk right up to them and stick them in a net. Keeping an eye on the insects as they flew off was trickier. At first, in the hope of improving the hornets’ visibility, the inspectors netted the insects, taped feathers to their abdomens and released them. But the hornets didn’t cooperate; instead they stopped at nearby trees to remove the cumbersome tags and zoomed off. The inspectors got their eye in eventually and abandoned the approach. It was not worth the hassle, you could see a hornet flying without a feather and get a good feel for the direction. After much perseverance, lines of sight were collected. The team was closing in.

One o’clock. Wednesday 28 September 2016

Graham Royle, a Cheshire-based seasonal bee inspector, had arrived in Tetbury the night before. He was among those providing relief to the 20-strong task force. More than 100 sites had been visited over the previous week, 50 traps deployed and dozens of fresh hornet sightings authenticated. A total of 94 separate observations would eventually be documented. Graham himself recorded a decent line of sight from a hedge that very morning, having trapped and released a hornet close to some ivy. Just before lunchtime, word came through from the command centre: ‘We’ve got an intersect.’

As it turned out, the flight lines – four or five good ones – which were plotted on a map didn’t converge neatly at one spot, but the criss-crossing did hint at a patch on the outskirts of Tetbury. Sixteen inspectors congregated in a car park. Teams of two, each provided with a map, started walking a section of this patch. It was not long afterwards that Graham, and fellow inspector Gordon Bull, found the nest. The garden with the cypress trees was a mere 600 metres from where the first hornet was spotted 23 days before.

Photos of the hornet’s nest were emailed for confirmation to Dr Quentin Rome at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris – he has studied the Asian hornet’s advance with grim fascination for more than a decade. The nest was treated with a pesticide called Ficam B, an odourless white dust which is relatively harmless to humans but lethal to insects. Within an hour the nest was a mass grave.

The pumpkin-sized ball of chewed wood fibre was shipped to Sand Hutton for full analysis. The entire European population of Asian hornets belongs to just one of 13 subtypes known from the native range, implying a single introduction event, and genetic analysis later confirmed that the Tetbury hornets were of this same subtype. This suggested that they had indeed crossed the English Channel, rather than arriving independently from Asia. Further nests remained a possibility. Residents were asked to remain vigilant and bee inspectors would stay on for a further two weeks until the Tetbury outbreak was declared over.

Woolacombe, North Devon. One year later

As he did every day at this time of the year, retired physics teacher Martyn Hocking headed up the valley to visit his bees. At his back the mid-afternoon sun was still high over the sea. It was best to visit the apiary while the occupants were out and about: there would be fewer to deal with. He heard the hum before he saw the hives; right now, they were drowning in late summer bracken and barely visible.

Giving the first hive a generous blast from his smoker, he lifted the lid and administered a dose of sugar syrup. A large dark insect flitted past. Too big for a honeybee drone. The thing hovered for a moment, offering an unmistakable view of a yellow-orange band on an otherwise black abdomen. One of Martyn’s bees writhed in the grip of the larger insect, which seconds later darted off, vanishing into the emerald background as quickly as it had arrived.

1
Ecological Explosions

‘Let it be remembered how powerful the influence of a single introduced tree or mammal has been shown to be.’

On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin, 1859

The 16 July 1898 edition of the Daily Mail devotes a single paragraph to the revelation that unusual creatures were on the loose in one of London’s better-heeled districts and defying all attempts at capture. According to the paper, ‘The wild animals on Hampstead Heath have just received an unexpected addition in the shape of two monkeys which have escaped from custody and are now enjoying a free and open life on the salubrious heights.’ A reward offered for the safe return of the simians – escaped pets from the nearby Bull and Bush tavern – proved unnecessary: a couple of days later the fugitives slunk back to the drinking house. Liberty hadn’t agreed with them. ‘They were in a deplorably dirty and woe-begone condition,’ as one account had it.

It turns out that Hampstead Heath, a windswept expanse on a sandy ridge to the north of the city, is no stranger to the exotic. In 1944, monkey business was again reported from the Heath, the arboreal frolics of a pair dubbed Jack and Jill causing disturbance on this occasion. Things didn’t end much better that time: Jill was shot and her dejected playmate handed himself in to the authorities. Then there was the young seal fished from a pond in 1926 having alarmed nocturnal anglers by ‘barking like a dog with a sore throat’. Other tales tell of a phantom gorilla, of giant spiders, of marauding bands of wild pigs.

For the people of London, the Heath is a little piece of countryside on their doorstep, an oasis in which to de-stress and reconnect with nature. Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth and Constable were among the many poets and artists in thrall to its bucolic charms, its wild and unspoilt landscapes. So precious is this place that the threat of quarrying and house-building prompted an 1871 Act of Parliament protecting for ever ‘the natural aspect and state of the Heath’.

But taking a stroll on the eastern end of the Heath one chilly autumnal morning in 2017, I was struck by just how much around me wasn’t ‘natural’ in the sense of representing native British fauna and flora. The most obvious example was the resident flock of a hundred or so ring-necked parakeets with their frequent shrill calls. With eyes closed, I could have been roaming a Darjeeling tea estate. The birds originate from sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia and the stories to explain their introduction are every bit as colourful as their plumage. The most enduring legend is that they flew off the set of The African Queen during filming of the 1951 movie at Isleworth studios. Others point the finger at Jimi Hendrix for releasing a pair on Carnaby Street at the height of the Swinging Sixties. More probable is that London’s parakeet population – the current estimate is 30,000 and growing – established itself after successive escapes from pet shops and aviaries. Perhaps not as numerous as in other parts of the capital, where parakeets are accused of beating woodpeckers and nuthatches to the choicest nesting sites, the Heath’s contingent has been around for decades and seems to coexist happily with the locals. Then there were the grey squirrels. Victorians were the first to take a shine to the bushy-tailed rodents from North America and did their darnedest to spread them around the countryside. Woodland managers and red squirrel lovers alike have been gnashing their teeth ever since.

There’s not much natural about the landscape either. Like every other part of Britain, Hampstead Heath has been managed and manipulated by people for centuries if not millennia. Cattle, sheep and goats – all first domesticated in the Middle East – have been raised here since the Neolithic period, suppressing forest regrowth and creating pasture. These days grazing duties fall to rabbits introduced from the Iberian Peninsula by the Normans. Or was it the Romans? Rabbits would give squirrels a run for their money for the title of ‘world’s worst pest’ – just ask an Aussie farmer – but on the Heath they get a pass because their incessant munching helps preserve the acid grassland, and in turn a community of rare heathland organisms. From the eighteenth century, what little was left of the Heath’s primeval woodland of pedunculate and sessile oaks, beech and birch – long exploited for timber and fuel – began to be ‘enhanced’ with Turkey oaks, horse-chestnuts, black locusts, rhododendrons, laurels and dozens more species from around the world. Early plantings were at the behest of aristocrats like Sir Thomas Maryon Wilson, Lord of Hampstead Manor, and the Mansfields of Kenwood House, whose estates constituted or bordered the Heath, but the ‘parkifying’, which included planting still more exotic trees and shrubs, continued long after the 1871 Act.

Meanwhile, the Heath’s mineral-rich springs, dribbling out where porous Bagshot Sands meet impermeable London Clay, were exploited for drinking, laundry and their therapeutic properties. In time, the water, which had once collected in mosquito-infested swamps and bogs, was corralled into a series of ponds, which would later become a playground for bathers and anglers. Here, too, the roll-call of introductions is impressive from mandarin ducks and Canada geese to alpine newts and marsh frogs, from carp and catfish to red-eared terrapins. Some got here under their own steam. Most received a helping hand.

Human agency is suspected in particular for the arrival of two types of crayfish, among the Heath’s more infamous aquatic denizens. The Turkish, or narrow-clawed, crayfish reached Britain in the 1930s, being joined in the 1990s by the red swamp crayfish from North America. Culinary motives are thought to have driven both introductions, with persons unknown considering Hampstead Heath the ideal place to rear them. They were spot on, for the two crayfish varieties multiplied, and are today well-entrenched in the ponds. This became painfully evident in 2012 when swimmers in the men’s pond complained of being nipped on the toes and, according to one report, ‘in altogether more sensitive places’. It gives ‘bottom-feeder’ a whole new meaning. Not long ago, the City of London Corporation, who manage the Heath, removed 500 red swamp crayfish from a single pond during routine maintenance over the course of just three days. With a single female producing up to 600 viable young in one go, total eradication is a tall order.

The point is that Hampstead Heath is populated by lots of living things from other parts of the world, many of them breeding and difficult to control. And I haven’t yet mentioned some of the more notorious: plants such as Himalayan balsam, Japanese knotweed and giant hogweed; insect pests like oak processionary moth and harlequin ladybird; and virulent pathogens, such as Dutch elm disease, ash dieback and Massaria disease, which attacks plane trees. But, in this respect, Hampstead Heath is nothing special. I could have gone to pretty much any park in London, or indeed anywhere in Britain, and seen the same things, and far more besides. And it’s not just parks: our rivers, lakes and streams; our forests and farmland; our estuaries and coastal waters; our homes and gardens; even our own bodies; all host a wealth of introduced species.

Many Brits pride themselves as stoic defenders of a green and pleasant land, boasting a record of resistance against aggressors dating back centuries, be it weathering the Spanish Armada or defying Hitler’s Blitzkrieg. This patriotic fervour, and its clarion call ‘to control borders’, may in part explain the 2016 Brexit vote. Yet, a cursory examination of the natural world reveals that while many interlopers of the human variety have been kept at bay, our islands have throughout history been colonised by a succession of animals, plants, fungi and other organisms that apparently belong elsewhere. Indeed, it’s often hard to sort out the native from foreign.

Philosophers and scientists have long noted the spread and impacts of introduced animals and plants around the world. In his Naturalis Historia, published around 78 CE, Pliny the Elder wrote of Spanish rabbits, whose ‘fertility is beyond counting’, bringing such famine to the Balearic islands by ravaging the crops that the inhabitants begged the Emperor Augustus for military aid. Charles Darwin likewise observed the rampant spread of a European thistle across several South American islands during his nineteenth-century voyage on the Beagle. And, closer to home, in 1920 the Scottish writer James Ritchie highlighted the challenge to ‘Nature’s order’ posed by ‘many thoughtless introductions’, arguing that ‘the alien stowaways which become established in a country include more economic pests than the native fauna they invade’. Yet, until the 1958 publication of The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants, the march of non-native species was largely invisible to the wider public.

Its author, the pioneering British ecologist Charles Elton, believed that we faced a decisive battle whose outcome would determine the fate of the world. The book was an expansion of his series of BBC radio lectures entitled ‘Balance and Barrier’ and opened with a warning of the existential threat presented not only by nuclear bombs – the Cold War was by then gearing up – but by ‘ecological explosions’. Elton defined these as ‘the enormous increase in numbers of some kind of living organism – it may be an infectious virus like influenza, or a bacterium like bubonic plague, or a fungus like that of the potato disease, a green plant like the prickly pear, or an animal like the grey squirrel’. He identified ‘the movement around the world by man of plants, especially those intentionally brought for crops or garden ornament or forestry’ as among the primary reasons for the spread and establishment of new organisms. ‘Just as trade followed the flag,’ added Elton, ‘so animals have followed the plants.’

In the decades since, international commerce has continued to grow and the ecological explosions have kept on detonating. In 2016 – the year Asian hornets were discovered in Britain for the first time, sparking a military-style response to make Elton proud – the first specimen of the Obama flatworm slithered into Britain. Native to South America, the species reaches seven centimetres in length and devours earthworms and other important soil invertebrates. This one turned up in an Oxfordshire garden centre courtesy of a pot plant from the Netherlands. The flatworm wasn’t christened in honour of the former American President but instead derives its name from the Brazilian Tupi for ‘leaf animal’. That same year, three new infestations of the ‘Asian super ant’ were discovered. Hailing from Turkey and Uzbekistan, this social insect forms supercolonies numbering in the millions and is also nicknamed the ‘electricity ant’ for its inclination to congregate in power sockets and light switches, chewing cables and threatening black-outs. Recent years have also seen harlequin ladybirds from Asia kill off our home-grown varieties; Pacific sea squirts carpet our marinas; and buddleia and Japanese knotweed move down the rail network more efficiently than most trains.

Public awareness of the issue is higher than ever before, with sensational news headlines stoking our fears. Giant hogweed, introduced as a horticultural curiosity from the Caucasus mountains in the 1820s, has been recast as Britain’s ‘most dangerous plant’ with sap that ‘melts’ a child’s skin. ‘Monster goldfish’ are on the prowl. ‘Sex mad Spanish slugs’ are terrorising our gardens. Emotive terminology isn’t just the preserve of tabloids: even serious scientists will talk about ‘demon shrimps’ and ‘killer algae’ with a straight face. Some of the language has a xenophobic flavour: introduced plants and animals are ‘ex-pats’ or ‘immigrants’, which ‘pollute’ our pristine environment and need to be ‘bashed’ and ‘sent home’. Perhaps it’s telling that the Nazis were among the first to take against non-natives, drafting a ‘Reich Landscape Law’ in 1941 banishing exotic plants from pure German landscapes. Some argue that the current fixation with non-indigenous wildlife is bound up with subliminal, and not so subliminal, antipathy to arrivals of the human kind. Concerns about non-natives and immigration to our small, overcrowded island are, they say, all of a piece. Even the term ‘invasive species’ has its drawbacks, perpetuating Elton’s notion that we are somehow under assault, as if rhododendrons, grey squirrels and Asian hornets were working to a strict battle plan. The word ‘alien’, which remains in wide use, particularly among botanists, can have similarly unfortunate connotations. Worries about many non-natives can be whipped up unnecessarily, and sometimes for unsavoury political ends. But we shouldn’t avoid talking about them: new organisms are arriving all the time, the pace of arrivals is rising and, yes, a handful of them do appear to cause problems.

There are other issues to consider. An invasive species is commonly thought of as a non-native organism whose population is increasing and spreading, and which causes, or may in the future cause, negative environmental, economic or social impacts. But what do we mean by ‘non-native’? The usual understanding is that it’s an organism introduced into a new country by people – on purpose or by accident – rather than getting there ‘naturally’ by walking, flying, swimming or wafting on the wind. In Britain, this often means anything brought here after rising sea levels cut us off from the European continent sometime between 7,000 and 9,500 years ago at the end of the last Ice Age. But what then do we call extinct fauna and flora that we have since reintroduced? The western capercaillie and European beaver, both around long before we became an island, were wiped out less than 300 years ago by hunting. According to the above interpretation, we couldn’t treat them as ‘non-native’, yet both occur in twenty-first-century Britain thanks to human intervention. (The capercaillie was reintroduced to Scotland in the late 1830s, and successful releases of beaver have occurred at several locations across the UK over the last decade or so.)

At least with our current population of capercaillies and beavers we are sure how and why they’re here. But, with many other species, it can be tricky to know when they first arrived, and whether people were involved. The sycamore, first recorded growing in the wild in Britain in 1632, is often regarded as introduced. Some say it was brought over in the fifteenth or sixteenth century, others suggest an earlier, possibly Roman, introduction, but either way we’re looking at a non-native. Or are we? The problem is that sycamores, indigenous to central Europe, are fast-growing, fast-spreading trees well suited to Britain’s temperate climate. While people have planted most of our sycamore stands, we can’t exclude the possibility that sycamore seeds may have also taken root naturally from time to time having been blown across from the continent. If true, our sycamore population might comprise both natives and non-natives.

A question mark also hangs over the white-clawed crayfish. Considered our sole indigenous freshwater crayfish, and the focus of intensive conservation activity, some experts now suspect the crustacean was introduced for food in the thirteenth century. Even with things that we’re 100 per cent sure are foreign, pinning how and when they arrived is a challenge.

Advances in DNA sequencing and analysis techniques are now shedding light on these mysteries. For instance, the presence on the Orkney Islands, off the north coast of Scotland, of a vole found nowhere else in Britain is something of a conundrum. The Orkney vole, as it’s known, is an endemic subspecies of the common vole, a variety found on the European continent. So, did the Orkney vole scamper there naturally on a temporary land bridge from Europe before the last Ice Age, 20,000 years ago, and somehow manage to weather the chill while its British mainland relatives died out? Or, as seems more probable and has long been suspected, is the vole a far more recent introduction by people? Genetic studies seem to support the latter hypothesis, with Orkney voles shown to be more related to those in southwest France and Spain than to geographically closer populations. The voles are now thought to have arrived with humans on Orkney during the Neolithic period some 5,000 years ago in ships directly from the continent. The rodents may have stowed away in consignments of livestock fodder, or were intentionally brought as food items, pets or even for religious reasons.

Another difficulty with the notion of an invasive species as currently defined are those organisms, unarguably native, which behave in a manner that can only be described as, well, ‘invasive’. Take hedgehogs. On the British mainland they couldn’t be more popular; and faced by a catalogue of threats including habitat loss and agricultural pesticides, not to mention the risk of being flattened by motor vehicles, they’re the focus of a nationwide preservation society. Yet on islands, Mrs Tiggy-Winkle goes berserk.

In 1974, someone on South Uist in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides released half a dozen hedgehogs into their garden to keep down the slugs and snails. Within a couple of decades, the introduced mammal’s population had swollen to 5,000 individuals, and had spread across causeways to the nearby islands of Benbecula and North Uist. The Hebridean hedgehogs eschewed garden pests in favour of the chicks and eggs of dunlins, ringed plovers, redshanks, lapwings and other shoreline birds, and are implicated in a 50 per cent decline in their numbers. Since 2001, nearly £3 million has been spent on removing the invaders. At first, they were culled with lethal injection, but tactics changed when animal rights groups kicked up a stink, so right now the hedgehogs are trapped alive and released on the mainland. In New Zealand, where introduced European hedgehogs have also run riot, the authorities have been less squeamish, eradicating them from the 86-hectare Quail Island.

Natives don’t just act up on islands. Foxes and carrion crows, both indigenous to the UK, can obliterate nesting bird colonies. Red and roe deer can be every bit as destructive to woodlands and agricultural crops as their introduced counterparts: muntjac, fallow and sika deer. Common ragwort, bracken, brambles and nettles – natives all – often spread out of control, suppressing other plants, and are sometimes regarded as weeds. Even beech trees, indigenous to England, upset Scottish conservationists when their seedlings throw shade north of the border. A further complication is that a non-native might misbehave in one location but elsewhere – typically back home – cause no trouble at all, indeed may even be endangered. So, it’s seldom fair to tar the entire species with the invasive brush. The hedgehog was one example but there are plenty more, such as the rhododendron, which spreads aggressively here but not in New Zealand, or the Japanese knotweed, whose penetrating roots are blamed for weakening buildings across Europe but which in Asia is surprisingly scarce.

Professor Helen Roy, a leading British expert on biological invasions based at the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Oxfordshire, suggests that perhaps the only time when an understanding of whether a troublesome organism is native or not truly matters is when an incursion is still recent, or hasn’t yet occurred, since it offers a possibility of intercepting it. Most of the time, though, the focus might be better spent on understanding, managing and, where practical, reducing any negative impacts of the troublemaker in question.

Despite these complexities, the term ‘invasive species’, as a label for fast-spreading, harmful non-native organisms, seems embedded in the common psyche. So how many do we have now in Britain? This is difficult to answer but thinking about it in terms of the invasion process can help. Scientists recognise several key hurdles any aspiring invader must clear. First, the organism needs an ‘invasion pathway’; in other words it must get itself transported to a new region by humans. We may intentionally facilitate this, as with organisms brought for agriculture, hunting, horticulture, aquaculture, as biological control agents and for countless other reasons. But plenty of things use us to move around without our consent; think of plankton suspended in the ballast water of ocean-going vessels, the legions of wood-boring beetles holed up in internationally traded furniture, the seeds and spores peppering the mud of a tourist’s hiking boots, the soil-borne invertebrates hitching a ride in plant pots. Crucially, the globetrotter must survive transit. This is no mean feat; the journey might take weeks during which the stowaway may be subjected to extremes of temperature, lack of food or moisture, and other privations. And that’s even before the prospective invader has to contend with strict quarantine measures imposed by vigilant customs officials.

Before moving on, an important clarification is perhaps required. Should a new species reach our shores from its region of origin with no direct human intervention – be it by flying, rafting on an ocean current, blowing in the wind, catching a ride on a (non-human) animal, or in some other fashion – then this organism is classed as a ‘natural colonist’, and not counted in the statistics. A classic example would be the Eurasian collared dove, which started spreading west from Asia in the nineteenth century and was first recorded breeding in Norfolk in 1955. The distinction between natural colonist and human-mediated invader is not always as clear-cut. For instance, how to treat all those weird and wonderful new species set to colonise Britain – both on land and off our coasts – as the climate begins to warm? We may not directly be involved in their spread, but since human activities are driving global climate change, we are not innocent of this process. We might be happy to welcome recent natural colonists such as the tree bumblebee and small red-eyed damselfly, but are liable to baulk at accepting a malarial mosquito.

Importantly, though, an element of the natural about part of a new organism’s journey movement won’t earn it a pass as a natural colonist, if humans are known to have played a key role somewhere along the line. Take the Asian hornet and harlequin ladybird. Both insects are thought to have made incursions from the continent as a result of individuals blowing across the English Channel, but both only reached Europe in the first place as a result of human activities: the shipping of pottery from China, in the case of the hornet, and introduction as an agent of biological control, in the case of the ladybird.

On arrival, the introduced organism then has to escape and reproduce. Those that maintain a viable population, without further human intervention, are regarded as ‘established’ or ‘naturalised’, the rest dismissed as ‘casuals’. (Incidentally, the term ‘feral’, according to Sir Christopher Lever, a British author of several well-known books on introduced animals, should be reserved for creatures that have ‘lapsed into the wild from a domesticated condition’, not simply escaped from captivity. Noting that populations of the American mink established in the British countryside are often referred to as ‘feral’, Lever insists that to regard the non-native mammal as ‘domesticated’ is ‘preposterous and wrong’.)

Only around 10 per cent of organisms brought to a new country persist unaided in the wild. Disagreements over what constitutes non-native flora and fauna, along with the patchiness of data, have led to varying estimates of the number in Britain. The most recent figures, for 2017, suggest that 3,163 species were present in England, Scotland and Wales, of which 1,980 – mostly plants – had established and were reproducing in the wild. In Ireland, there are at least 1,266 non-native species, of which two-thirds are plants.

Finally, for something to be regarded as truly invasive, it needs to spread and expand its population enough to cause measurable negative impacts. On average, a minority of established non-natives register as a problem, although the likelihood of invasiveness varies: just 4 per cent of introduced insects in Britain are classed as invasive, compared with 32 per cent of non-native fish and 85 per cent of exotic plants.

This is all a long-winded way of saying that a tiny proportion of introduced species will ever earn the title ‘invasive’. According to Helen Roy’s team, which keeps a running score, in 2017 at least 275 (about 9 per cent) of the non-natives established in England, Scotland and Wales cause negative impacts. While around 5 per cent of the 1,266 introduced species recorded in Ireland are classed as invasive. These numbers will almost certainly climb.

So, let’s turn to those impacts which can be classed as environmental, economic or social. Again, there is much debate, but the number one ‘environmental’ charge against invasives is that they harm natives, through predation, competition or, perhaps, by spreading disease. Invasive species are increasingly listed alongside habitat destruction, pollution and overhunting as key threats to wildlife. The 2005 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment says they’re a major driver of biodiversity loss. A recent review of 247 kinds of plants and animals around the world that had vanished since 1500 found invasives to be the second most common cause of extinction (hunting, fishing or harvesting came first). For the amphibians, mammals and reptiles on this list of the disappeared, invasives were the number one culprit. Among the most frequent offenders were rats, cats and goats, along with diseases, such as avian malaria and chytridiomycosis, a fungal condition that is wiping out amphibians around the world.

Many of the most often cited cases of extinctions caused, or at least hastened, by introduced species come from islands. Famous examples include a near-flightless wren wiped out by the lighthouse-keeper’s cat on New Zealand’s Stephen Island; the dozen sorts of birds thought to have been extirpated by the brown tree snakes on Guam in the Pacific; or the eight varieties of endemic rodent dispatched on the Galapagos Islands by ship rats. A well-known non-island case comes from Lake Victoria in East Africa where the Nile perch was released by colonial Brits for sport-fishing in the late 1950s. This fast-growing predator has since been blamed for the loss of two-thirds of the lake’s 300 types of endemic cichlid fish, although the introduction may merely have delivered the coup de grâce to dwindling populations already threatened by decades of over-harvesting and pollution.

Back here in Britain, concrete evidence for extinction is scarce, but we can’t ignore two examples where introductions have threatened other species and could lead to their demise. While grey squirrels don’t directly interfere with native red squirrels, they outcompete them for food, especially in deciduous woodland, and also pass on a lethal virus. The red’s population crashed in the wake of the grey’s arrival, so it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that grey squirrels are a big part of the problem. Disease is also a reason that signal crayfish, brought from North America in the 1970s for aquaculture, are displacing Britain’s white-clawed crayfish (which, as mentioned, may or may not be a true native). In this case, the signals pass on a fungal-like pathogen to the white-claws, which die within weeks of being infected. To be fair, ‘crayfish plague’ was already expunging the white-clawed population before signals came on the scene. Indeed, it was the signal’s resistance to the plague that had recommended the crustacean to fish farmers in the first place.

There’s no doubting, however, that even where an introduced species doesn’t kill off a native, it can contribute to significant population declines. And if the impacts are only felt locally, it’s still a concern. For instance, pirri-pirri burr, an Antipodean plant invader which reached Britain at the beginning of the twentieth century, probably as a hitch-hiker in sheep fleeces, will never trigger a national emergency, but in certain places – notably, Minsmere in Suffolk, and Lindisfarne island off the Northumberland coast – it threatens local wildlife.

Another problem, as some see it, wrought by invasive species is hybridisation. Even if non-natives seldom exterminate our home-grown wildlife, the tendency of many to interbreed with them is beyond the pale. Perhaps the best outcome is when the offspring prove sterile, although this represents, for the native, a waste of valuable breeding effort. More serious are cases where viable progeny arise and in turn back-cross with the indigenous species; this sort of thing can erode the gene pool, reducing the population’s genetic variation and leaving it vulnerable to extinction. Hybridisation between native red deer and smaller introduced sika deer – an Asian variety – in parts of Scotland is a well-known example. Over time as the genes mix, red deer are starting to get smaller and sikas larger. As the two deer approach each other in size, this facilitates further hybridisation and risks accelerating negative impacts. Occasionally, hybridisation results in a more vigorous strain, as seems to be happening with the bluebell. Half the entire global population of this much-loved wildflower is found in this country, but a fertile hybrid has also established here, the result of a cross between the native bluebell and a Spanish variety introduced by horticulturists in the late nineteenth century. Many bluebells in Britain’s gardens and urban areas turn out to be this hybrid, although even experts struggle to tell the difference and, for now at least, the hybrid bluebell does not seem to be invading woodlands. Indeed, recent research suggests that the Spanish bluebell is less fertile, and sets fewer seeds, than its British counterpart.

Ecologists also fear that invasive organisms could alter ecosystems in far more profound ways. These could include anything from changing water quality or soil nutrient levels to disrupting food webs, reducing pollination rates and generally messing about with the ‘balance of nature’. Examples at random from around the world include the Mediterranean tamarisk tree, blamed for drying up marshes and salinising the soil in California, or zebra mussels altering nitrogen and phosphorus levels in freshwater habitats. One school of thought suggests that since ecosystems are dynamic and ever-changing, perhaps we shouldn’t be too bothered. Such an attitude is simplistic and defeatist. Much of what humans – the most ‘invasive’ species of all – have done, from cutting down rainforests to spilling oil into the sea, from landfilling toxic waste to pumping out carbon dioxide, has upset ecosystems, and we need to understand and combat those negative effects however subtle. Right now – not for want of research – our understanding of how ecosystems function, how different organisms interact, and what makes these complex systems more resilient, or less, remains limited, with plenty of knowledge gaps left to fill. We are instinctively concerned each time a species is lost from a natural system through our actions (or negligence); we should also perhaps feel a similar disquiet whenever we cause a new one to be added.

If the invaders left people alone and restricted their impacts to the degrading of natural ecosystems, that would be bad enough – not least as we ultimately depend upon these systems for our survival and wellbeing. But some non-natives harm us directly. Notwithstanding the odd pinch on the privates from a crayfish, the obvious threat is their role as agents of disease. The most notorious example in history is offered by the Black Death, inflicted by a strain of bacteria originating in Asia which, from the fourteenth century onwards, has killed tens of millions across Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. While nothing on that scale has recently been visited upon us here in Britain, new parasites and pathogens are on the radar, many transmitted by mosquitoes and other biting insects. At the moment, it’s a bit chilly for these to get a foothold here, but with climate change all bets are off.

Judging by the growing scientific literature devoted to the economic impacts of biological invaders, these species hurt our pockets too. Much of the cost arises from direct impacts such as insect pests reducing yields from agriculture and forestry, fish stocks wiped out by disease or the erosion caused when signal crayfish or Chinese mitten crabs tunnel into river banks. To the ledger we must add the eye-watering sums spent on preventing, monitoring and eradicating invasives. In excess of £5 million is spent every year in Britain removing Japanese knotweed alone. Various indirect impacts, trickier to calculate but just as real, and many times greater than the direct costs, can also be attributed to invasives. This is a complex area, but it boils down to the loss of valuable ecosystem services like nutrient cycling, pollination or flood prevention.

Overall costs incurred by invasive non-native organisms are estimated to amount to 5 per cent of the global economy. Across Europe, invasives inflict some £9-billion worth of damage every year. In the UK alone, the figure has been put at about £1.7 billion annually. Although these are ballpark estimates, resting on plenty of assumptions and subject to much debate, governments the world over are taking notice as never before. Invasive species are fast becoming public enemy number one. In 2016, the European Union banned 37 of the most problematic plants and animals from being kept or traded without a permit. These include signal crayfish, raccoons and American skunk cabbage. On this side of the Channel, the Great Britain Non-Native Species Secretariat was set up a decade ago and tasked with detecting and containing invaders, as well as helping to predict and prevent future incursions. Tackling troublesome non-natives is complex: the measures taken can be extraordinary and sometimes cause more problems than they solve, even hurting the very ecosystems they’re intended to protect.

An emerging school of thought is suggesting that the threat of invasive species has been exaggerated, that we should stop worrying about non-natives and even welcome them for the benefits they can bring. At the other extreme, a growing band of conservationists is going beyond simple calls for the eradication of non-natives to campaign for the deliberate reintroduction of a menagerie of native British plants and animals which have become extinct at the hands of humans. To its critics, the ‘re-wilding’ movement is pure eco-nostalgia.

For me though, most fascinating of all is that non-native organisms, invasive or otherwise, from rabbits to rhododendrons, mink to muntjac, hold up a mirror to our own species. Yes, the pace of invasion is higher than ever before but problematic non-natives aren’t a modern phenomenon: they’ve been with us from the outset, as unavoidable a corollary of the human way of life as cleared forests and piles of garbage. From the earliest settlement of our islands and first experiments with farming, through the Roman and medieval times, and the age of exploration by Europeans, to the current period of globalised free-for-all, the story of invasive species is the story of our own past, present and future.

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