I don’t watch telly so although I imagine that this programme was meant to be watched in the comfort of your living room I only found about it on the PBS website. The programme I am referring to is called Animals behaving worse: America’s least wanted and shows some species that have (relatively) recently arrived to America and, in many cases, displaced the local populations.

People have already found parallelisms between species invading new ecosystems and tumour cells metastasing to different sites so this show will appeal to those of us that see tumour cells as constituents of a tissue ecosystem. For instance, the africanised honeybee has displaced the european kind from the south of the USA as they outcompete other pollinators. Other invading species might not have clear local competitors to displace but by consuming resources more aggressively they alter the ecosystem in significant ways, thus affecting the viability of other species. The reasons by which the invaders reach the new ecosystem are varied (and oftentimes due to us, careless humans) but all cases presented in the programme show them as quite capable to take advantage of the resources of their new home as well as free from predators (although in some cases, humans have introduced predators to gain control on their growth, sometimes successfully).