Exotic pets?

I like animals. I have two dogs, a cat and a yard full of chickens. I understand the appeal of keeping exotic animals as pets, whether its a giant snake or a money swinging from the rafters of your house. However, increasingly the animals used as exotic pets are becoming endangered or threatened in their own natural habitats because of illegal poaching fueled by the money involved in the buying and selling of exotic animals.

Read more about Parrot Poaching in Jamaica here.

Poaching can devastate entire ecosystems by removing or dramatically reducing the populations of key species from the food chain. Furthermore, it can actually have the opposite effect as people grow tired of caring for their exotic pets and release them into the wild in parts of the world where they are not native. These exotic pets, if the environment is suitable, can multiply and become a nuisance invasive species in thes areas.

One example of this is the growing population of wild Burmese pythons living in the Florida Everglades says National Geographic. These snaes are imported into the United States by the hundreds of thousands. Often, they grow too large for their owners to handle safely and are released or they may escape.

Burmese pythons are now sharing space at the top of the Everglades food chain with the alligator. In some cases, pythons are even killing alligators. These are very big, and very mean snakes. They also feed on birds and bird eggs putting many of the rare bird species in the everglades at risk from this newly introduced, but rapidly multiplying predator.

While it's easy to see the havoc that top predators can do when introduced to a new ecosystem, even seemingly harmless animals can have unintended consequences and be very harmful to local species when wrecklessly introduced.

If you want to see and learn about these exotic animals, visit a local zoo that aids in preserving rare species. During a recent trip to the York Zoo in Maine, I too some photos of the capybara. Click here to view photos that I took of the capybara, the world's largest rodent which is native to South and Central America. Upon retunring home, I was surprised to discover that even this animal is now being kept as pets in the United States.

Wild edibles: Japanese Knotweed



Japanese knotweed

Photo by KENPEI

Creative Commons Attribution, S-A 3.0

As I was driving along today between Rochester and Dover, I noticed many thick stands of Japanese knotweed beside the road. The plants are at the perfect stage for eating just now (early May) in New Hampshire. If I had time to stop, I could have harvested bushels of the stuff. I'm not a big fan of the taste when eaten raw although many are, but adding a sweet component to the sour knotweed in something like a knotweed-strawberry pie makes it quite good.

Japanese knotweed (Fallopia japonica or Polygonum cuspidatum) is a very common invasive plant in New England and throughout the United States. At first glance it looks something like bamboo, and is sometimes even called American bamboo even though it is not a member of the bamboo family. It grows very rapidly during the spring and summer, then dies off in winter. The roots survive, however, and even a small root fragment can produce a new plant.

Japanese Knotweed is often found along roadsides because of the way in which it propagates. Snow plows here in New England often catch a bit of the roadside dirt, including knotweed root fragments and push them further on down the road. In the spring these travelled roots produce plants in the new location, and eventually spread to form a new stand or thicket of knotweed.

Japanese knotweed is actually being harvested and used commercially now. If you look on the ingredients of a bottle of the health supplement resveratrol, you'll see that the reseveratrol is most likely extracted from Japanese knotweed.

The young shoots of Japanese knotweed can be eaten. They have a sour taste, not unlike rhubarb. That's because they contain some of the same chemical make-up as rhubarb. Those with a sensitivity to rhubarb should therefore avoid knotweed as well.

Anyway, the point of all this is that because Japanese knotweed is a virulent invasive species, it is one of the wild edibles that you can harvest with wild abandon. If you pull up all the available shoots from any given patch, that's ok with knotweed, but definitely not ok with native wild edible plants. Even though you are not likely to get all the roots to eradicate the knotweed patch, you'll still be slowing down its spread at the very least.

When knotweed gets larger it is more fibrous and woody like real bamboo. So it must be harvested young to be eaten. They are good up until they get about two feet tall, just peel off the thin stringy layer on the outside and chop off the leaves at the top. You can cook them up as a substitute for rhubarb in most recipes or eat them raw.