Kudzu, your days of green tyranny are over!!

It looks like the "vegetable form of cancer" has finally met its match, but there's a slight problem:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44935459/ns/us_news-environment/

Considering that kudzu has made most of the south look like the picture on this wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kudzu_in_the_United_States

I'm not going to be sad to see it go. Then again, huge carpets of beetles might not be much of an improvement...

Also, anyone else notice that the college student in the picture looks a lot like Shino from Naruto, haha.

edited 17th Oct '11 8:39:22 PM by MyGodItsFullofStars

Haha, whoops!

Swarms of small bugs tend to freak me out, though. I wouldn't want to see a group of those in action.

Kudzu: The cancer that is destroying America.

The Kudzu Bug: Another cancer destroying America, and its cancer.

"Seiter is studying the invasive Asian bug, which is wreaking havoc on soybean crops."

Ouch. Probably not a good thing. Kudzu is a major problem, but can be addressed with herbicide and mowing without too much of a headache. Swarms of bugs are a significantly worse problem.

I know a better answer though some folks will not like it: Fire. There is not a single native plant species on the North American continent that does not know or require fire at some point in its ecosystem's cycle. A crown fire through heavily infested areas will burn out the kudzu and over time the original ecosystem will recolonize. In lightly infested areas herbicide and basic botanical measures are sufficient but in heavily infested areas, just torch it.

Depending on your climate and the nature of the kudzu, fire is either an easy solution or no solution at all. If you are trying to clear out old infestations or kudzu in drier climates, it's quite helpful. OTOH, where I live fire is incredibly ineffective in killing infestations.

Don't worry, I know a species of wasp that'll make short work of those stinkbugs.

I'm seeing an "Old Lady Who Swallowed A Fly" scenario in the near future.

Kudzu is edible(the flowers especially are delicious) and makes an incredibly nutritious fodder for grazing animals. Every time I see a farmer around where I live spraying it down with chemicals instead of tossing a few handfuls to his cows makes me Face Palm .

Hopefully the little beetle won't go down the path of the cane toad.

I can see this going very wrong very quickly.

Send the beetles to eat the kudzu. Now we're swarming with beetles. No problem! Send the spiders to eat the beetles.

Crap! Now we're covered in voracious spiders! I know! There are species of wasps that lay their eggs in the spiders! Release the wasps!

AAAAAAAAUGH! SO MANY WASPS! RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!

I know! Bats eat wasps! There, probelm solved!

WAAAAAAUGH! Get them off me! Bats everywhere!

OK now I've got it! Snakes! Snakes will eat the bats!

GAAAAAAAAAAH! WHY DID WE DO THIS?

You can see where this is going.

At least they backed down on the "use that one fungus that only targets kudzu, but whose spores are deadly toxic to mammals" idea.

Or, if the edible part is true, we could just skip all that and eat it.

Then they bring somethign even bigger to kill snakes, something bigger to kill the bigger that kills snakes... Untill they got very confused polar bears running around

The beauty of the plan is that when winter rolls around, the gorillas will die off naturally.

Nature does have a beautiful tendency to establish an equilibrium. But what some people don't understand is that the sudden introduction of an outside organism into an environment that hasn't evolved to handle it almost always leads to catastrophe. You can't just throw more critters into the crazy basket and expect it to work out on its own.

Frankly I'm not surprised that kudzu has grown as abundantly as it has. There aren't any wild animals that could eat the stuff to keep it in check. Sure, cattle may, but they are confined to ranches.

Either wait untill some (wild) herbivore realises that you can eat Kudzu(WTF is that stuff? Couldn't find it's name for finnish) and finds it to be plenty and easily accessible source of food.

Or use nukes. Because nukes are always an option when dealing with foreing threads

Wait, is this edible for humans or just for animals? (I would say that in some areas there's just too much to eat in either case. Though I would be extremely cautious about the "fiyah, suckas!" method. Very easy for that to go out of control.)

Both, as far as I know. Altough you may want to cook it before you eat it.

Sure, kudzu is edible, but the main dish that the Japanese make from it is basically a tofu-like "desert" pudding, and Americans can't stomach tofu.

Hey, I just had a great idea! Instead of these beetles, we should import swarms of Japanese and set them loose on the kudzu terror!

But then we'll have swarms of Japanese roaming the countryside, devouring all in their path. What do we do then? Who is going to eat the Japanese?

...Uh-oh.

Good point! I figured they'd just starve to death once they realized that Mc Donald's in the USA doesn't serve raw egg on hamburgers...What a fool I was!

edited 18th Oct '11 2:02:13 PM by MyGodItsFullofStars

genius. it might even deflect racism from mexicans onto the new immigrant population.

Taking all those kudzu removers jerbs.

Sure. The mongoose shall inherit the earth.

At this point its cheaper to just replace the ecosystem.