September 14, 2014 — In a way, ecosystems are like markets—ones with perfect competition, where the struggle to eat and avoid being eaten long enough to breed is so intense that no market participant can dominate. Evolution, in other words, makes “disruptive innovation” impossible.
Until the rise of global trade, that is. Transporting a given species to an alien ecosystem that had never adapted to its traits is similar to what tech writers might call “creating new markets,” by changing how technology—i.e. those traits—could be applied.
Sometimes this disruption has been so stark that it created a monopoly—placing a species in an ecosystem with plentiful food and no natural predators. Without any competitive threats, the species takes over.
If that sounds a touch apocalyptic, consider the lionfish. Native to Indo-Pacific coral reefs, these venomous creatures have long been admired by aquarium fanatics for their toffee coloring and frilly halo of fins and quills. The global explosion of the aquarium made them common in living room seascapes everywhere. Then in 1985, someone released 10 or so female lionfish in south Florida waters. DNA analysis traces the entire Atlantic population back to those females.
And it’s an extensive lineage. In less than three decades, lionfish have colonized a swath of the Atlantic Ocean that’s roughly the size of the US.
How have they spread so far, so fast? Their focused savagery explains a lot. Recent research shows that instead of moving on to more fish-abundant waters, they will continue to hunt target prey until they’ve eaten every last one of them, pushing the species to local extinction.