Collie Ennis

Now in their local areas, they're controlled by species that are in there.

But the problem is you can release a species into Ireland and go, it's going to take over.

It's going to take care of the Japanese, not weed, but it won't.

It might kill everything else.

Yeah.

So you have to really, really look at it carefully.

I know in the UK they're doing a lot of work with certain fungal diseases that will affect certain plants.

But, you know, these invasive species, they're no joke.

I mean, we have the alpine newts in Ireland.

Ah, okay.

One of my brilliant students, Ian, back in the day, he was doing survey work in the Midlands.

And he took a photograph of a newt.

And he goes, I think this is a bit of an odd looking newt.

And it was an alpine newt in the middle of a bog, in the middle of nowhere, in the Midlands.

And I'm like, what the hell is that down there?

That's not good news.

So anyway, we went down in the Frogmobile to investigate and we discovered that the population of alpine newts were so dense in some areas.

So say if you had a puddle this size, the size of this table, right?

Just you know the way there's ponds like that in bogs that have been walked on and you dip your net in and you couldn't lift the net.

And I'm quite strong.