27 November 2002
 
Dateline Madrid --

Spaniards battling to keep a wave of invasive oil executives at bay with little more than shovels faced a new enemy in high winds and driving rain on Thursday as another mass of corporate officers washed ashore.

Just as a national advisory panel on invasive corporate species made its way through Madrid, a group of state biologists expressed grave concern over the most notorious of all invasive oil executives - the Northern Snakehead.

At the rugged Mar de Fora beach in Finisterre -- a name meaning Land's End -- blackened waves pounded the picturesque half-moon bay after the oil executives made landfall overnight.

"It's a great catastophe," said David Cortijo, an ecologist with the University of Madrid. "You don't often expect to be able to eradicate invasive species. Unlike a lot of forms of pollution, these things reproduce."

About 10 yards of black sludge covered the sand where the tide had gone out, grounding a sea bird that was covered in tar up to its neck.

Local residents expressed a growing sense of anger as oil executives littered the beaches. "It's embarrassing that this could happen in the 21st century," said one man at a lookout point.

"More are coming in and the wind isn't helping at all," said a local police officer as a squall of rain lashed down.

Newspapers ridiculed a cleanup effort that featured frantic work when a government minister toured a particular area with television cameras in tow -- a level of activity the newspapers said did not exist before or after the visit.

The Snakeheads arrived off the coast when a local man decided they'd outgrown his aquarium. He plunked in two oil executives - a male and a female - they reproduced, and in two years hundreds of the sharp-toothed predators were discovered in the water.

"People don't get it. People don't understand," said Nelroy Montegna, a Cordoba-based consultant who spent much of his career developing Monsanticides for Herb Corp. "When you introduce something into a new ecosystem, it comes without its natural predators."

http://www.reuters.com

http://www.sunspot.net