Educational Media Reviews Online

This video deals with the problem of non-native opportunistic plants and animals entering ecosystems unable to absorb them because of a lack of natural predators. It does this in an entertaining way: it imagines a young woman of the twenty-sixth century, living in a world biologically impoverished by the deaths of uncounted plant and animal species as a result of pollution and loss of natural habitat, but most significantly by the introduction, either knowing or unknowing, of invading species by humans. The woman, Number Seven, goes back in time to the late twentieth century and meets a young scientist, Jeffrey Miflin, who is attacking the problem of the loss of natural habitats and species through the takeover by nonnative plants and animals. The setting is coastal Oregon, an ecologically sensitive region much affected by "animal invaders," among them purple loosestrife, puncture vine, bullfrogs, and European starlings. Entire estuaries and seaside sand dune zones have been decimated by the introduction of exotic plants and animals, some of them brought for economic gain and then abandoned when their original purpose was fulfilled or not achieved according to their introducers' plans.

The science fictional setting is engaging and an easy introduction to this enormous problem in modern ecology. The video is visually beautiful and introduces its concepts through artful interviews with unnamed scientists who explain how alien invaders may be overcome through careful attention to keeping natural balance in our ecosystem, nontoxic use of natural enemies, and sometimes a lot of human elbow grease to get invaders out of threatened regions. The video is appropriate to a high school or lower division college biology curriculum. Recommended.