👾 The Problem

Although invasive species usually make silent encroachments into new habitats, their impact is anything but quiet: 

1. They can spread disease.

Example: Mosquitos, which have reached almost every corner of the globe, spreading yellow fever, malaria, and dengue associated with nearly half of all deaths over the last 200,000 years). 

2. They can also decimate native prey populations that have never been able to evolve defence mechanisms.

Example: The European red fox in Australia. With no natural enemies, it is a known threat to 48 species of mammals, 14 species of birds, and 12 species of reptiles - many of them endemic.

3. And they can outcompete native species for resources like food & habitat.

Example: the Zebra Mussels in North America, whose females release up to 1M eggs per year, and that can attach to native mussel species, preventing the natives from moving, feeding, reproducing, or regulating water properly. 

Adding insult to injury, the economic cost of these invaders has been astronomical—exceeding $1.288 trillion globally between 1970 and 2017, alarming costs that are projected to triple every decade.

Understanding the profound impacts these species have on our ecosystems is more urgent than ever. Given that 3,500 harmful species have been recorded by the IPBES (speaking nothing of the 37,000 invasive species that scientists estimate have actually occurred).

In this two-part series, Silverstrand Capital and Nature Tech Memos have teamed up to dive deep into the invasive species problem. 

But first: What is an invasive species, anyway?
(Invasive species - a biological concept, or a social one?)

According to the IUCN, an "invasive species" is one that is:

In other words, “invasive species” are not equal to all non-native species - for a species to be considered invasive, it must not only be non-native.

It must also cause harm. Apple orchards, for example, might be found where apples did not originally evolve, but those apple trees would not technically be considered invasive, because they arguably lead to economic good for the orchard business, and did not cause ecological harm (depending on who’s asked). 

TLDR; the invasive species concept includes both a biological and social component and is actually more fluid than most people realize, based on how society perceives harm. 

How should we think about this, and why does it matter? Well, some ecologists, such as the author of this op-ed in Scientific American, have argued that non-native species can become a critical part of the new sites they inhabit, taking up the historical ecological function of now-extinct species. 

When managing ecosystems, it’s crucial to consider the complex roles that non-native species might take. Rather than assuming all non-natives are harmful - nature, after all, is hardly that straightforward, and our management approach should respect its inherent complexity. 

💬 The curve of a spread

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s talk about some of the dynamics of how invasive species come to inhabit an ecosystem.

The invasive species curve, often referred to as the “invasion curve,” is a visual representation that tracks the spread of an invasive species over time and highlights the most effective management actions at each stage.

The curve shows how an invasive species starts with a small number of individuals (or even none, in the prevention phase) and then grows in population as it spreads throughout an area. 

The curve is divided into several stages:

Although prevention provides the best return on investment, it is tragically underfunded. As in medicine, we tend to prescribe painkillers, not vitamins; One study found that in general, we spend about 10x more in mitigating damage than in management, with damage costs doubling in recent decades. 

If we had to wager a guess, it’s probably because it’s difficult to act early because the benefits of prevention aren’t always visible, and it’s hard to measure the success of stopping something before it becomes a problem.

🗺️ Five start-ups to watch

If there’s one thing we’ve learned as we looked at the landscape of startups in this space, it’s this: there is a clear, and perhaps unsurprising concentration of solutions built for agriculture, and especially invasive insect pests.

Here, we’ve done our best to provide an illustrative look at companies working across industries, and across the curve of the spread. (Stay tuned for part two, where we’ll be sharing a wider map of invasive species startups!)

🌬️ Conclusions

Despite the fact that invasive species can cause massive damage in other industries like infrastructure (Fire ants, for example, damage infrastructure by digging near and undermining roads and structures, with projected annual costs of over $500M in Australia alone), our search yielded few obvious startups that we could dig deeper into.

Are you working on under addressed industries that still face huge damages and impacts from invasive species, or have some insights into what market barriers exist in these spaces?

We’d love to hear from you!

Thanks for reading, and to Rachel Lim from the Silverstrand capital team team for collaborating with us on this piece.

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