When Mankind's intervention destabilizes an entire Ocean
In Physics, the "Law of Entropy" is that all else being equal, the degree of disorder in the universe inherently tends to increase. When a star, with specific sub-layers and serving as a functional "fusion engine" for energy for a few billion years, finally supernova's and explodes, it's components are blasted out a trillion miles across space, increasing "disorder". What was tightly geographically organized is now spread across the universe.
If you were to take a pile of well stacked bricks in the back of a pickup truck and throw them out periodically as someone drove you, they would transition from a well ordered stack to random bricks strewn across the road, spanning many miles and finishing configurations. Entropy wins again.
So what does this have to do with the lion fish invasion of the South Atlantic and Caribbean oceans ? Simple - mankind got involved, like the truck-borne bricklayer, and introduced a foreign species which had virtually ZERO predators in these waters.
With a resume that includes eating 80% of their body weight in prey per day, and with gestating females capable of laying 2 MILLION eggs per year, every year, when we add the "no predators" card, we have invited Entropy into these waters - just what they didn't need.
Imagine if man did something similar, and released 500 Bengal tigers into the middle of Manhattan. Other than humans with guns, no predators exist, and the death tolls in humans,pets and animals would be horrific, until a bunch of men with automatic weapons shot them down, and killed them all, as there would be no other pragmatic choice when dealing with 600-750 lb "killing machines" by breeding being left in an environment of zero predators (absent weapons).
So, back to lion fish, while some oppose the culling of this marauding, invasive species as being inhumane, I prefer to look at the "opportunity cost" of NOT mounting a manic drive to at least mitigate the invasion. Man made this mess, it's damn well appropriate that MAN get off his derriere and try his best to fix it, before the local fish species and coral reefs are a memory.
I am reminded of the philosophical challenge offered as a test of conscience. It goes like this: "If you could go back in time and locate Adolph Hitler as a youth, would it be worth suspending for one moment the ban on killing another human being in order to save 13 million souls later in life ?"
Well, on a metaphorical level, the decision on culling the lion fish invasion is perhaps not on that level, but it is not much behind. We need, as a human race, to emphatically decide to EAT more lion fish to create commercial fishing demand, HUNT more lion fish to reduce the population, and COMMUNICATE the urgency of our battle against them to better help recruit more "hands on deck" for this massive effort to undue mankind's blunder of increasing the entropy of the lion fish habitat on Earth.
