> Planting seeds of rare plants sounds like a good-intentioned idea. But
> I wonder if there may be some problems with it. Barry told me that he
> knows a CP grower who has been trying to introduce CP to Arizona, without
> any success :-) A person could though, introduce some of the
> aquatic Utricularia to some of Arizona's mountain lakes, such as around
> Flagstaff, where U. macrorhiza already grows. I think U. gibba, U. minor,
> and perhaps U. geminiscapa, U. radiata, U. purpurea, and U. intermedia
> would stand a chance of naturalizing in these areas. None of these are
> native to the state, but all of them, especially the first two, could
> arrive natually as seeds stuck to waterfowl. Perhaps this is how
> U. macrorhiza arrived. (some say U. minor is already in AZ).
>
>
This is fraught with danger to extant, (we hope) stable ecosystems. There
is simply no way to predict the outcome of an introduction, way, way too
many examples of resultant disaster, much money spent on control that
wouldn't have been a problem had the introduction not happened. I cringe
to think what might happen to native cp if someone were to introduce D.
capensis into some of the bogs... ...maybe nothing, maybe total calamity.
For that matter, suppose D. binata were introduced into D. capensis
localities in Africa. Hard to believe that D. capensis could become
endangered, but this might be one way to do it. The facts (several
hundred years of them) support that introductions rarely "work" in the
sense that the introduced form becomes a well-controlled member "in good
standing" of an ecosystem. It usually either dies out or takes over--in
fact, the introductions that have done the least damage (and that's open
to interpretation) are those where the introductee changes habitat from
the expected. For example, the ringneck pheasant, hardly an unqualified
introduction success, occurs in meadows only in the US and Britain. In
its native Asia, it mostly occupies montane forests. Screwed up the
bobwhite quail when it switched to brushland and meadows, some say.
Sean Barry