The treatment for most all horsetails seems to be the same from what I could research. It is difficult, because it will keep coming up if you pull it, from the fragments of the roots. You'll note from the reference of the Washington State Extension Service that one labor-intensive but effective way to control horsetail is to cover it with black plastic sheeting until it dies from lack of light. Everything else (that is not planted through a small hole in the plastic sheet) would also die. This is a method to inhibit weeds that sometimes used by commercial growers of strawberries, for example.

15. I'm trying to find data to prove what I've heard anecdotally, that weeds are worse this spring than last. Do you have that? (That is, are the weed counts xx% higher than last year? Is it a record year, or near record?) I'm interested in total weed counts, not in one particular type of weed. If this data isn't available nationally, can you give me some regional stats? I'd appreciate any help or advice you can give me.

I consulted with several colleagues in different government agencies who are specialists in this area, to find out the status of annual weed reports. They are members of FICMNEW, the Federal Interagency Committee for the Management of Noxious and Exotic Weeds.

As I suspected, there are no annual reports that summarize weed infestations nationwide at this time. Even regional reports often take several years to compile and digitize. Therefore, information for 2002 is only anecdotal at this time. I spoke with FICMNEW co-chair and Senior Weeds Specialist at the Bureau of Land Management, Gina Ramos. She feels that weed levels are not at record highs this year, simply because it has been so dry. However, in areas where there have been fires because of the drought, weed levels have increased dramatically.

Another anecdotal comment: this year in wetland areas there is a marked increase in weed infestations, according to Mike Ielmini, FICMNEW co-chair and National Invasive Species Coordinator from the US Fish and Wildlife Service.

16. How can I get a list of invasive species for Anniston, AL (Calhoun County)?

There appear to be no invasive species lists specifically for Calhoun County. In fact, there is very little in the way of invasive species regulations in all of Alabama. What is more, when one searches for invasive species lists in general, there are normally several different types of lists, generated by different agencies, depending upon the area of interest.

However, I was able to obtain a recent list of exotic plants for Calhoun County from the Biota of North America (BONAP) museum based dataset - download this list in Microsoft Excel format. Also, here are two URLs dealing with some aquatic invasives in Alabama, one from the Alabama Cooperative Extension Service and another from
Alabama Wildlife and Freshwater Fishes.

The Alabama Herp Atlas Project also llists 5 introduced amphibian and reptiles in Alabama. To go directly to each name, in your browser's edit menu (if you are using Explorer or Netscape), choose "find on this page" and type "exotic" then hit the enter key and you will jump to each introduced species' name.

There appear to be no official weed lists for Alabama, but there is a list of southeastern invasive pest plants generated by the Southeast Exotic Pest Plant Council.

For a list on non-indigenous aquatic species in Alabama, you can also visit the USGS Non-Indigenous Aquatic Database and search by state. The result is here.

One last suggestion for possibly finding a list of invasive species for Calhoun County: Often plant species information, including invasives, is collected by state botanists or ecologists on a regular basis (these are state or county officials), but then is not put on the Web or even digitized. I suggest you contact the Extension Service at a local college or university, and ask to speak to an expert in exotic species or pest species. They may be able to help you.

17. I am very interested in a job working with invasive species. Is there any organization that you know of that I could get in touch with to get some experience and contacts?

There are occasionally positions that are advertised on the different invasive species listservs. Visit
invasivespecies.gov for information on how to sign up for a lot of different invasive listservs.

18. What are the volatile components in cheat grass and other highly combustible invasive grasses?

I was unable to discover the answer to your question. The only references I could find vaguely refer to "volatile oils." A chemical analysis report I found only mentioned chlorophyll, protein, lignin (a plant connecting tissue), and ash, but did not include the analysis of any oils.

As you probably know, many plants contain different essential oils; some are even extracted and used as the basis of perfumes, for example. Plants with oils, such as cheatgrass, sagebrush, and pine trees, can catch fire more quickly and burn very hot.

Also, cheatgrass and other invasive herbs can cause wildfires to burn out of control simply because of their abundance.

19. I have been battling Garlic Mustard this year on some property my father owns and have been unable to find an answer to the following question: If a plant is pulled out of the ground before the seed pods have completely matured (turned brown) are the seeds going to be viable? In other words if I pull the plant out with green pods will those seeds be useless or can they still reproduce?

Are you familiar with the TNC's element stewardship abstracts? They contain a lot of really good material. Check out their website for ideas for controlling Alliaria petiolata.

In general in my experience with seedpods, their maturation is a gradual process and there may be no precise answer to your question. It is usually a good bet that if the seeds within the still-green pods are not yet ripe looking, e.g. black, mature-looking and striated, they may not be viable. However, according to a study described at the above URL, under "CUTTING", even cut flower stems may form viable seed in garlic mustard, so "cut or pulled stems should be removed from the site whenever feasible."

I hope this information helps. Also be sure to look at the additional linked information at the bottom of the TNC Web page. If you require even more information, perhaps you could contact the author of the document, whose name and address is near the bottom of the abstract.

20. I am restoring an old farmhouse and garden in Northern VT that have been taken over by goutweed (not the variegated type). Do I have any choice besides herbicides? Which one will work and do the least damage? My well is nearby.

The best advice I can give you concerning your question on weed control is that you call your local extension service at a nearby university. Here are a few related Internet references:

University of Vermont Extension:
http://www.uvm.edu/extension/

Vermont Master Gardener:
http://pss.uvm.edu/mg/mg/

Gardener Resources from the University of Massachusetts Extension Program:
http://www.umassturf.org/resources/gardener_info.html

University of Vermont Extension links page:
http://www.uvm.edu/extension/links.htm

Also, the University of Massachusetts' extension service listed this email address for a "Master Gardener Hotline" questions@wmassmastergardeners.org

And if you are interested in pursuing an alternative treatment (with no guarantees!), there is also this reference
which describes weed control methods using ultra violet light.

21. Concerning Polygonum perfoliatum (mile a minute): I live in central Alabama and this vine growing here is a perennial. I have tried Roundup, brush killer, etc. Nothing seems to kill it.

The best fact sheet I could find on management/control of "mile a minute vine" is from the Alien Plant Working Group. It also has background information of how it is dispersed and descriptive info. I hope this helps.

22. Could you tell me the population of the nutria rat as of this year and the population growth within the last 10 years or just the population of the nutria each year for the past 20 years?

I could not find all the data to answer your question. The following fact sheet (in pdf format, which requires Acrobat Reader, available here.) states that Louisiana alone had about 20 million nutria in the late 1950's. A separate URL states that there may be an estimated (in 1996) 10,000 nutria in Jefferson Parish, and discusses methods of chemical control.

This URL has data about the nutria population in the Chesapeake (USFWS).

And finally, this URL states that the nutria population in Louisiana grew to 1 million between 1940 and 1950, from 6 pairs that escaped during a hurricane

23. I need information on Helianthus tuberosus and how to control it.

Might I suggest you visit this Web site of Purdue University for ideas on weed management:
http://www.ctic.purdue.edu/Core4/CT/Checklist/Page16.html. In case you were wondering, Jerusalem artichoke, in spite of its name, is an invasive weed that is considered native to the U.S.

24. I'm in search of a list of invasive species for Iowa or the midwestern states.

I suggest you query the PLANTS Database. Their advanced query page can be seen at the following URL. You may want to specify that the species be present in Iowa and introduced to the US, and you can click the option "display on report" for such information as images, fact sheets, and legal status at state and federal levels.

It was not clear in your request if you are interested in other species besides plants. There are currently very few invasive species lists for other taxa. The Non-indigenous Aquatic Species (NAS) database lists non-native species by state, and for Iowa the results are here. You must remember that these lists include invasives AND species that are not invasive (non-native, but not threatening other species).

25. Why poison the waterways in Maryland to remove the Northern Snakehead population? Why not instead reintroduce an indigenous apex predator to the waterways, something like a dozen or so adult chain pickerel and maybe some other indigenous predators to solve the problem before you jump to the use of rotenone. While there might not be any immediate dangers with the use of poisons, haven't we learned our lessons from DDT, and other poisons?

26. I came from Vietnam, and I recognize the snakehead fish from several pictures through the newspaper and Internet. According to my understanding, the snakehead fish is everywhere in Vietnam also and they are not as bad as I heard on the news. I do not believe that they can live on land for 3 days. They can move on land only when the rains come around. It is true that they can eat their own kind when food is not available. Best of all, it tastes lots better than catfish!

As I understand it, there are at least 28 different types of snakehead, some more aggressive than others. It is common for a species that is "well-behaved" in its native habitat to become a problem when it is introduced elsewhere, and be a threat to the local wildlife. This is part of the concern about the snakehead in the U.S.

Also, being an apex predator itself, it is unlikely that the northern snakehead Channa argus will be eaten or eliminated by chain pickerel.

At the Secretary of the Interior's request, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has now made bringing any and all snakeheads into the U.S. illegal, as of October 2002.

27. Concerning the snakehead fish: I am from South Carolina and one night I was catfishing at lake Paul Wallace which is in Bennettsville. I was fishing with chicken liver and I caught one of these fish and never in my whole life as a fisherman have I seen one of these fish. When I caught this fish I killed it and left it beside the bank. It was a mature snakehead fish. I am positive it was.

28. I am writing about the Chinese Snake Fish found in Maryland. Virginia isn't on of the states listed to have the fish. I am stationed in Virginia Beach. I fish a lot and recently caught a snakehead. I didn't know what it was at the time so I just put it back in the water thinking it was some sort of trash fish like a gar, then I saw the news and thought I should at leased let some one know that the species is in an open water way in Virginia.

I have passed your comments along to a listserv of invasive species experts. One or more of them may contact you to request more information. I have also sent your comments to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services email hotline, snakeheads@fws.gov

Concerning the identification of the fish you caught: have you considered that it might be a bowfin or dogfish, which is native to the U.S., including Virginia and South Carolina? An image can be seen here and a description of its feeding habits and range can be found at this URL.

For assistance in identification of the fish you caught, I strongly suggest you contact your State Fish and Wildlife Service. Check out the South Carolina DNR:

South Carolina Department of Natural Resources
Rembert C. Dennis Building, 1000 Assembly Street
Columbia, SC 29201

For Virginia
Virginia Department of Game & Inland Fisheries
4010 W. Broad St.
Richmond, VA 23230; email: dgifweb@dgif.state.va.us

When you do, I suggest you provide them as much of the following information as possible: date caught, exact location, size of fish, type of fish, and your contact information.

For your information, as of October 2002, it is now illegal to import snakeheads to the United States and its territories. Please see this URL

30. I would like to know how to get a picture of the Vietnamese nuclear worm. My wife and I read about it in one of local papers, but I can't find a picture of it.

Your question led me to search on your behalf for more information on the "nuclear worm," and it was a bit difficult to find. Apparently that is a common name for Namalycastis abiuma, according to Maryland Marine Notes (Sea Grant)

I was then able to find, on the Web site of an environmental consulting firm, an image that was labeled as Namalycastis abiuma. Since I'm not familiar with this organism, I cannot verify that this information is correct. The URL (http://www.aecos.com/CPIE/inv_02.html) is the second image on the page. (The taxonomic name label appears when you hold your cursor over the image.)

31. I'm trying to figure out where in Massachusetts the snakehead fish were found.

Please visit the following URL: http://collections.oeb.harvard.edu/Fish/ma_fish/ma_chan.htm

32. I recently discovered a brown beetle inside a package that was shipped to me. The package contained a pressboard cabinet and was from China. The beetle is brown with long antennae similar to the Asian long-horn beetle, but has no spots and is about 1.25 inches long. What should I do with it? I have it in a bottle.

First and most important, please do not release it live into the environment. 

While I am an entomologist by training, our organization does not perform a regulatory function and most of us are information scientists. I am personally curious to see your beetle in a bottle, but sending it to me would not be the best solution.

Please contact your local biological extension program at a regional university, so that they might identify your problem. They may request that you take a photo of the beetle and send it to them or they may be able to tentatively identify it during a telephone conversation (depending upon its characteristics). Asian long-horn beetles are just one of many serious invasive threats in the United States.

They will also probably ask you to revise the wooden product you received and see if there are any insect-sized holes in it that might indicate there would be additional beetles emerging from it in the future. Alternatively, it could be that the beetle was only a "stowaway" in the shipping box (whether from China or within the U.S.)

33. I am setting up a booth related to invasive species for an exhibit at a fair and have been collecting live species for weed identification. Do you have any ideas to include in the exhibit?

Related to outreach and educating the public about invasive species, one idea I've found very useful in the past is to demonstrate the weed "look-alikes" along side the noxious weeds, in order to show people the differences between them. This way, they won't be pulling up natives, mistakenly thinking they are invasives.

34. We would like to link to your site and would also appreciate confirmation that you are able to include a link to ours.

Thank you for your interest in the National Biological Information Infrastructure and the services we offer. As you may know, the NBII serves as an electronic gateway to biological data and information products maintained by federal, state, and local government agencies, nongovernmental institutions, and private sector organizations in the United States and around the world.

We are delighted that you would like to link to our site and encourage you to do so. Once we have been able to visit your site and determine whether its information might be of interest to our users, we will include it on our pages as well and as per you request, let you know. Thank you for pointing your Web page out to us. We are always looking for new resources related to the invasive species issue to include on our site.

35. I recently viewed a television show on Comedy Central which featured law enforcement officers were shooting Nutrias in New Orleans. This was seriously offensive having first hand experience with how kind and interactive these animals can be. I will alert PETA to this destructive and cruel behavior.

Nutrias are a highly invasive vertebrate species whose voracious appetite for the roots of freshwater marsh plants has caused the death of marsh birds, mammals, and other organisms due to habitat destruction and the resulting influx of salt water from the sea once the protective root system has been eaten.  More information about the serious loss of habitat nutrias cause can be seen here.

While Comedy Central may have spoofed the situation of nutria control in New Orleans, to the protectors of freshwater marshes in Louisiana and around the Chesapeake, exploding nutria populations are a serious problem that must be dealt with immediately in order to protect native species.

36. I am looking for GIS data to download on Invasive species for the U.S., to use in writing a lesson for grades 6-12 on invasives.  

There's a shapefile of zebra mussels at the U.S. National Atlas download site suitable for reading into GIS viewers.

37. What start-up private invasive plant herbicide control business opportunities may be available in New Orleans to clear the historic architecture of enveloping vines, such as Macfadeyena unguis-cati, etc. (to enhance preservation of our unique homes). Any list-servers to get on to keep track of developments?  

Contact the LSU Ag Center for ideas on plant herbicide control in New Orleans. They may know what opportunities are coming up and about any effort to eliminate plant invaders on historic New Orleans properties. And a search of the resources they have to offer resulted in several links you may wish to investigate. Concerning pest control listservs, an excellent listserv of global and general scope is the Aliens-L list serve. You can search its archive to see whether it might interest you, and also find details on how to subscribe. Here are subscription details for pest management listserv from the Florida IPM. And finally, you should check invasivespecies.gov for more information on many different invasive species listservs

38. I was just wondering if there is such a thing as a southern snakehead found in the south like the northern snakeheads in Maryland? Are there restrictions on them?  

There is no fish that has the common name "southern snakehead." There are several of the 28 kinds of snakehead (non-native fish of the genus Channa) that could survive in the southern U.S. As of July 2003 however, only the northern snakehead (Channa argus) and the Bullseye snakehead (Channa maurulius) have established populations in the mainland U.S. waterways (and two others have populations in Hawaii). See the Non-Indigenous Aquatic Species Database for details. Channa argus is believed to have been extirpated from Maryland. The bullseye is less agressive than the northern snakehead fish, but does have an established population in Florida. There is also a Fish and Wildlife Web site with more snakehead stories. Answers to common questions, as well as how to tell an introduced snakehead from a native bowfin, can be found at the Web site of the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission. Concerning your question as to whether or not snakeheads are restricted by law, according to this Chicago Tribune article, they have been banned in 13 states, and the Secretary of the Interior announced that snakeheads will be subject to import and trade restrictions. Also, federal legislation is in the works to further control invasive species.

39. How is the commitment to invasive species programs changing under the Bush Administration - particularly zebra mussel eradication in the Great Lakes and ballast rules and regulations with Canada?  

If you have Acrobat Reader, brief fact sheets about how pending legislation would affect different aquatic invasive species can be found at the Web site of the Northeast Midwest Institute. A news story detailing briefly the main points of the pending legislation can be found on the Environmental News Network. The legislation being considered is bipartisan and would strengthen the existing Nonindigenous Aquatic Nuisance Prevention and Control Act (NANPCA) of 1990 that was re-authorized by the National Invasive Species Act (NISA) of 1996. There are also abundant additional aquatic invasives resources available on the Northeast Midwest Institute's Web page on biological pollution. The Great Lakes Commission has a press release concerning the importance of passing the new the National Aquatic Invasive Species Act (NAISA) of 2002. The NAISA seems to have sufficient bipartisan support to be seriously considered for passage in 2003.

---Most recently submitted FAQs---

40. What is the difference between the Invasive Species Information Node and invasivespecies.gov?  

The Invasive Species Information Node (this Web site) was created in 2002 as the data arm of the National Institute of Invasive Species Science. It involves many partners from federal, academic, and international sectors in an invasive species data consortium that, when fully operational, will provide:
-summaries of and links to regional efforts of the other NBII nodes
-identification tools to help distinguish invasives from their look-alikes
-invasive species distribution maps with links to actual species occurrence data
-models predicting future spread of invasives
-the Global Invasive Species Database with printable profiles for hundreds of invasive species
-a mapping and reporting system for scientists and citizens to report the occurrence of invasive species
-a search interface providing information from several invasive species databases simultaneously
-a platform to promote data collection standards and database interoperability.