The Adirondack Park Invasive Plant Program hosted a webinar Thursday morning that looked at how and why aquatic invasive species are so adaptable to new habitats.
Once established in an ecosystem, invasive species can be extremely difficult to eradicate and their rate of spread often pushes out native plants and animals. The webinar asked “Why Aquatic Invasive Species are so Good at Being Bad.” Researchers are studying what special characteristics lead to and promote adaptation or, in some cases, hybridization.
Adirondack Park Invasive Plant Program Aquatic Invasive Species Manager Anna Hardiman began the webinar defining invasive species adaptation.
“Adaptation is something that occurs when species change to become better suited to their environment. It’s a process driven by natural selection.”
Hardiman provided examples of invasives adapting to the region’s ecosystem, including the spiny waterflea, Chinese Mystery Snail, water chestnut and zebra mussels.
“In the case of zebra mussels, these species often find themselves thriving. As we’re seeing here in this image native mussels have become covered in zebra mussels. So, the success of the invasive species often comes at a pretty high cost to the native species. It can disrupt the food web enormously and overall just a loss of biodiversity. When that one species becomes the dominant species it really changes how the system works and that can have a lot of cascading negative impacts.”
Not only do some invasives dominate the ecosystem, in some cases they are cross-breeding.
The Lake Champlain Basin Program provided a $240,000 grant in 2024 for researchers at SUNY Oneonta to determine if invasive milfoil plants are cross-breeding with native milfoils. Oneonta biology professor Alex Sotola provided a technical presentation on native and invasive milfoil genealogy, evolution and reproduction methods.
“Generic sequencing can help us determine not only species identification but also if any hybridization is occurring.”
Sotola says one of the most intriguing things they are studying is why some milfoil are not interbreeding.
“We want to know why aren’t Eurasian and Northern water milfoil hybridizing in Lake George, Schroon Lake or Upper Chateaugay Lake. What’s going on there? Are there reproductive barriers between populations? Are there effective treatment plans? Getting at why hybridization isn’t occurring could be just as useful and informative as why it is occurring. So even without hybrids everywhere within our waterbodies there’s still some issues. It’s hard to tell these two apart without genetic sequencing. There’s a lot of overlap and especially when you bring in those hybrids.”
Lilly Frantz asked Hardiman about the viability of harvesting the invasives for a specific use.
“The zebra mussels and the Curly Leaf Pondweed and water chestnuts and all that jazz, are any of them edible?”
“They are pretty limited in terms of food source," Hardiman replied. "Chinese Mystery Snails they bioaccumulate heavy metals, so that makes them not a great food source. Zebra mussels also are filter feeders so they’re not necessarily the cleanest of food sources. The aquatic invasive species, particularly the plants, they tend to grow in places that the water quality is pretty poor. So you may not want to consume the plant.”
The Adirondack Park Invasive Plant Program studies all forms of invasives from terrestrial to aquatic.
