I am new.

[adamanteus]

Just a question to all the UK/European members--are there garter species local to your region?

No. They're imports or decendants of imports. Thamnophis is only found in the Americas.

[Stefan-A]

No. They're imports or decendants of imports. Thamnophis is only found in the Americas.

Do we count populations decended from escapees as decendants of imports?

[enigma200316]

No. They're imports or decendants of imports. Thamnophis is only found in the Americas.

its a little ironic don't you think, there only here and you have to import them to get'em over there, but here we can't get tetra's or should I say have tetra's and over there you can........I'm going to go cry now thank you.................

[mycolorfulheart]

I read an article a lil while ago about how many species were transfered from old world to new to old. The america's didn't originally have honeybees! or earthworms. And tomatoes aren't native to italy.

[Serpentine99]

Earthworms were imported??? Talk about a successful colonization!

[anji1971]

Thank goodness for that.............a good portion of my snakes' diet would be missing without them!!

[Serpentine99]

One of the few good stories you hear about foreign animal colonization. Usually theres major loss of native species, famine, hybrids, etc...

[mycolorfulheart]

actually it was a national geo article from a year or so ago; it said that one of the reasons european colonizations worked was because they bascially destroyed the environment and agriculture the native americans needed to live. the earthworms destroyed a lot of underbrush, and livestock trampled all over their fields for which they had no fences for because there had never been livestock in the americas before. Interesting stuff, very different from what they teach in history class!

[Stefan-A]

Sorry to rain on your parade(s), but it's not entirely accurate. Earthworms weren't imported, not all of them. I'll just copypaste the rest from wikipedia.

A total of approximately 182 earthworm taxa in 12 families are reported from America north of Mexico, i.e., USA & Canada, of which 60 (ca. 33%) are exotic/introduced. Only two genera of Lumbricid earthworms are indigenous to North America while introduced genera have spread to areas where earthworms did not formerly exist, especially in the north where forest development relies on a large amount of undecayed leaf matter. When worms decompose that leaf layer, the ecology may shift making the habitat unsurvivable for certain species of trees, ferns and wildflowers. Currently there is no economically feasible method for controlling invasive earthworms in forests. Earthworms normally spread slowly, but can be quickly introduced by human activities such as construction earthmoving, or by fishermen releasing bait, or by plantings from other areas.

Earthworm - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia