Do you remember from the biological recording video how keeping a note of where species are appearing helped to track the horse chestnut leaf miner moth? Well that’s not the only time biological recording helps. Records like yours can help to in detecting and tracking all sorts of alien invaders!
Some species are in the wrong place at the wrong time! If a species comes over from another country but starts to do really well in our natural environment and starts to have a negative impact on our local wildlife we call this an invasive species!
One example of this is the harlequin ladybird. Very pretty but actually bad for our native 7 spot ladybird. This graphic from Helen Roy of @UK Ladybirds shows how fast it spread. The first sighting was in 2003. By 2016 it was almost everywhere.
We wouldn’t know where invasive species have got to if we didn’t have nature detectives looking for clues and finding out where they’ve got to! This means we can work out the best way to work with these pesky invaders!