It's not yet July, but the scaremongering has already begun. Ever since 2004, when the first one appeared in Essex, summer has been accompanied by stories of marauding hordes - of ladybirds. "Hungry little invader threatens 1,000
species," ran one headline this week. The harlequin ladybird was introduced into Europe from Asia as a natural pest-controller (it eats aphids). The trouble is that it has proved to be more efficient at this than native ladybirds, and has thrived: Britain will apparently be home to an estimated billion harlequins this year. Unlike, say, cockroaches, ladybirds are "nice" bugs - pace Ladybird
children's books, or the nursery rhyme "Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home" - so in some ways the heated reaction to harlequins is a surprise.Not if you look at the language in which it is being expressed. "The most genteel of bugs is being pushed aside by a ruthless overseas predator," shuddered the Sun. The operative word, of course, is "overseas". They're foreigners. How dare they, coming over here, taking our jobs ... except that it's possible to use much more intemperate language about insects from Asia than about Romanians (Oh yes, I forgot about the Express). Us and them, native good, foreign bad ... never mind that many foreign species have been introduced to Britain and have got on with the locals perfectly well. It isn't just ladybirds. We have worried about tropical mites (dubbed, with stunning inevitability, "supermites"), American grey squirrels, African clawed toads, Egyptian geese, Asiatic clams, Chinese mitten crabs; the Environment Agency apparently has a "most wanted" list of 10 foreign species. A veritable "army of foreign mammals, birds and amphibians is poised to invade Britain, changing the countryside and threatening our best-loved native
wildlife", concluded the Daily Mail last month. Of course, new species can, and do, alter ecosystems. But Roger Booth, a beetle curator at the Natural History Museum, urges t ...
Try our segmented RSS Feeds
