Read The Attack of the Killer Rhododendrons for Free Online Page B

much of an oyster fishery left in the region, but native blue mussels are still harvested. In places, oysters have overgrown blue mussel beds, creating difficulties for that fishery. Oyster numbers are up and mussel numbers are down, but it has proved difficult to draw a direct line from cause to effect and rule out coincidence. Blue mussel beds are fundamental for biodiversity in the region, providing a home for myriad marine life. It is not yet clear if oyster beds will provide the same foundation. The Pacific oyster is now a dominating species on Wadden Sea tidal mud flats and may, in the future, profoundly alter the ecology of the region.
    France harvests about 150,000 tonnes of Pacific oysters annually. However, this is a fishery based on cultured oysters that are harvested when they are small. Wild Pacific oysters are not attractive to the consumer. They develop in huge clumps, grow so large as to be unpalatable, and come to the table covered with barnacles and other encrusted sea life.
    A MONG THE COUNTLESS PROBLEMS associated with cellular telephones is the fact that I don’t have one. Moreover, when you try to call a cellphone from a payphone, you need to shovel in coins at a furious rate. So when Lisa and I discovered that some feebleminded city planner had put the end of the rail line in Den Helder on the opposite side of town from the ferry that would take us to Texel, we had to call my contact, Norbert Dankers, on his cellphone to tell him about the delay.
    Almost as soon as the call was connected, the payphone started to beep to tell me that my 50 cents had been used up. As Norbert began to give me instructions to the ferry terminal, I dug out a €1 coin, and stuffed it into the hungry slot. “Look for a big town square then BEEP BEEP BEEP.” Another euro. “… Go straight ahead until you see BEEP BEEP BEEP.” By this point, I was out of€1 coins, and the box then proceeded to ignore the parade of other coins I stuck into it, choosing instead to beep at me until I hung up.
    The ferry to Texel was big and zoomy, and decorated in all the latest designer colours. After a twenty-minute ride, we found Norbert waiting for us with a van from the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research. Norbert explained that the ferry was a little more crowded than normal because the region had been visited by its first humpback whale in 300 years, and folks were flocking to the region to see it.
    With a grey beard and wire-rimmed glasses, Norbert is a classic example of a field biologist. Three years from retirement, he had a face that showed the effects of many mornings spent in a bracing wind. However, as a resident of the Land of the Super-fit Citizen, he cycles ten kilometres to and from work every day. Not satisfied with this, he trains once a week with a cycling group to improve his speed. That is before his training to run half-marathons.
    In Norbert’s office at the Institute, we were joined by Rob Dekker and Gerhard Cadée, both with an interest in introduced species and the way that these creatures fit themselves into the local food web. They began filling us in.
    When considering the potential impact of introduced species, they explained, it is important to assess whether or not local species are suffering from the intrusion. The intruder might be finding its own little niche and simply fitting in. Are Pacific oysters messing things up for the local fauna? Mussels are generally between 30 and 40 percent meat, and the rest is shell. In some regions where Pacific oysters have become very abundant, the meat of mussels has fallen to 18 percent.
    Not all the mussel beds in the Wadden Sea have been taken over by oysters. However, as with all such things, it is hard to predict what the eventual outcome might be. In other regions, attempts to remove them have cost €30,000 per hectare. If an effort were made to try to control oysters in the Wadden Sea, we were told, it would probably require ten full-time ships.
    Lisa