Basic Ecology Question

March 26, 2006 4:34 PM

FaunaFilter: Is Petco selling ecologically dangerous animals? If so why?

I recently purchased two American Bullfrog tadpoles for my wife's class (they'll be learning about metamorphasis/evolution-hee hee). That's cool, but today we were hiking at a near by lake and after hearing what I though were bullfrogs asked a Park Ranger about them.

She told me that the bullfrogs are not indigenous to the area and that they have mostly eliminated the indigenous species of frog, some of whom are actually endangered.

The ranger seemed to know what she was talking about, but after some searching, I was not able to confirm her statement.

If it is true, how bad is this? What are further dangers to the local ecology? And should I inform Petco of this?

Location: Inland San Diego County

posted by snsranch to Science & Nature (11 answers total)

Many common pets are ecologically destabilizing if released. I believe this is why ferrets are illegal to own as pets in some municipalities and/or states; similarly I recall being warned as a child about the danger of allowing hamsters, guinea pigs, etc. to escape where they would wreak havoc on the ecosystem.

Quaker parakeets live wild in some parts of America now, though they are not native; all feral colonies are the descendents of escaped pets. For ecological reasons ownership of these birds is also illegal in some places.
posted by IshmaelGraves at 4:46 PM on March 26, 2006

Yup, bullfrogs in California and other western states are considered bad, as in invasive and harmful, not just in the Global Invasive Species Database, but by various arms of the US government, including the USDA and US Geological Survey. That first GIS database link has a lot more information on bullfrogs as an invasive species if you click on different tabs of the bullfrog entry, including other references.
posted by mdevore at 5:22 PM on March 26, 2006

Just a quick aside: that's probably not true about the ferrets. However, the overall point about escaped species is accurate, and yeah, sometimes they come from pet stores.
posted by dilettante at 5:27 PM on March 26, 2006

The point here is that you should never buy an animal as a pet and then release it into the wild. That's where the problem comes in. If you keep it in its little (or big) tank in your house, there is no problem.

The same thing is true of eating an Apple when you're on Safari in Africa. Don't throw the apple core off the side of the road.
posted by alms at 6:27 PM on March 26, 2006

Response by poster: Yea, I know. The only experience I have that has effected local neighborhoods is the letting loose of domesticate (pet) rats, which didn't necesarilly harm the ecology, but did create havoc for residents.

I'll guess that Petco is unaware of this and will let them know. The damn things are only about a buck each, but when full grown eat small mammals. I can easily imagine people "letting them go" when they get to be a hand-full. But ofcourse, that shouldn't happen. And by no means did the sellers alert me to the fact that the animals could be an ecological burden.

There is a definate responsiblilty issue here, and I'm going to address it.
posted by snsranch at 7:03 PM on March 26, 2006

The local PetCo in my area sells goldfish with a warning that you're not supposed to release them. The problem is that the goldfish is particularly strong and is able to survive our winter months, happily reproducing until their numbers deplete the O2 levels of the water to levels that are fine for the goldfish, but lethal to other indigenous species (Bass, for example).

There have been more than a few instances where infested lakes had to be treated with poison to kill all the fish--a blank slate, so to speak--and then were repopulated with the native species.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 8:53 PM on March 26, 2006

That kind of thing has been going on for a long time, and it isn't just animals. Anyone from the south knows all about kudzu, which isn't native. Left alone, it will eventually completely take over an area.

There's a kind of fish called "tilapia" which has been causing all kinds of trouble in Florida, too. (It's one of some 32 non-native fish species which have gotten established there illegally.)
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 9:07 PM on March 26, 2006

By the way, wild horses in North America are not native. They're all descendants of horses brought to the New World by the Spanish, which escaped from captivity in Mexico.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 9:16 PM on March 26, 2006

Wild horses in the Us are the descendants of all kinds of excaped horses, mostly not of Spanish breeding. But that's another arguement!

Bullfrogs are a HUGE problem in CA. They are bad and pretty damn hard to eliminate. All kinds of species have been introduced there: pigs, cats, fallow deer, starlings, star thistle, water hyacinth that the govt or other bodies go to huge trouble and expense to try to control or erdicate.
posted by fshgrl at 10:40 PM on March 26, 2006

Petco and many of the other major pet stores are participants in the Habitattitude program, which is an outreach program intended to prevent, or at least decrease, the release of non-native species. I know that there are all sorts of signs with the Habitattitude logo and informational pamphlets all over our local Petco.

One of the primary vectors for invasive species that is controllable by the average citizen is the release of aquarium organisms "into the wild". The other is keeping boat propellers clean of pond weeds.
posted by nekton at 6:56 PM on March 27, 2006

Petco is most likely a far les serious threat to your lcoal ecology than your nursery, which probably sells a number of invasive weeds. Weeds from your garden are much more likely to escape than pets are.

Basically though, nobody in the general populace gives much of a rats about this issue, and it is left to the professional agencies to try and deal with the problem.
posted by wilful at 9:11 PM on March 27, 2006