The kudzu bug invasion was unreal. I used to live about half an hour from the Atlanta airport where they came in. One summer there were suddenly swarms of them around my house. Anytime you went outside, you’d get a few on you.
The next year the swarms disappeared, but if you shake any given kudzu vine, several will fall off. It’s like they were buzzing around looking for the kudzu. Then once they found it they stayed put.
> Kudzu has appeared larger than life because it’s most aggressive when planted along road cuts and railroad embankments
Here's a good example from the Hiwassee Loop where the Kudzu is all dead, making the actual vines easier to spot. Check out how it blankets the entire side of the mountain when the drone pulls out at 8m30s, still opaque even with zero leaves: https://youtu.be/5V3oHAtfh3M?t=411
Interesting, but the thing that bugs me about the article is the photo at the top - That ain't kudzu. It looks more like an invasive honeysuckle.
> a natural complement to inscrutable words like Yazoo, gumbo and bayou.
Gumbo and jambalaya are hardly inscrutable, these dishes came straight out of West Africa. Bayou and Yazoo, like Ouachita, Natchez, Natchitoches, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee etc. are all from First Nations.
As a teenager I once had a summer job as a land surveyor in North Carolina. We saw this stuff all over the place, acre after acre on many jobsites that were deep in the woods or very rural areas. I think this article is underestimating how much kudzu actually has taken over.
Lantana, Cactus and Cats Claw in Australia. Everyone talks about the cane toads but ignores the weeds
The first time I had ever heard of kudzu was when I first installed Linux (maybe redhat 5 around '98), and it's installer tool was called Kudzu. Red Hat being out of North Carolina also has a ton of kudzu.
It wasn't until several years later when I took a job that relocated me to Alabama that I saw it first hand on the roadways and really understood it.
The whole concept of "invasive species" had always been a bit confusing to me.
When does a plant or animal brought here from overseas start being considered native? Kudzu has been growing in America since before my ancestors can't here, am I still considered invasive based on the history of Europeans invading this continent?
(2015)
Remember the snakehead, the introduced fish that would decimate native fish populations here in the US? That, uh, turned out to be not true as well. They’re coexisting quite peacefully with native fish.
There are places in Washington, DC, and its suburbs where the kudzu can be quite dense.
Is this the same Kudzu as the supposed anti-alcohol-binge herb?
tl;dr: an invasive beetle began infesting kudzu in 2009 and has set it back. It's no longer a major invasive thread.
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>Still, along Southern roads, the blankets of untouched kudzu create famous spectacles. Bored children traveling rural highways insist their parents wake them when they near the green kudzu monsters stalking the roadside. “If you based it on what you saw on the road, you’d say, dang, this is everywhere,” said Nancy Loewenstein, an invasive plants specialist with Auburn University.
This was my experience as a child. We'd drive by groups of huge pines completely engulfed by kudzu and my mother would tell me it grew so fast you could see it grow with your own eyes. Scary stuff, I imagined the entire country overtaken by kudzu someday.