Environment: Visas for Animals

The starling is not the only alien species that plagues the nation. There are European pigeons, which spread a form of meningitis and defile monuments and building ledges and the German carp, a "wonderfish" imported in the 1870s, which has displaced native game fish from lakes and rivers by eating their food and their spawn. New threats come from the exotic species that escaped from rare-animal or fish farms: the ill-tempered Asian walking catfish, the South American piranha and India's citrus fruit-eating red-whiskered bulbul —to mention just a few. They prove over and over again that most alien species can quickly...

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