While English Ivy may look beautiful as it grows and crawls up old buildings, it is one of the many foreign invasive plant species in B.C. that chokes out native plant species.
English Ivy, and many other plants that aren’t native to the area, are known as invasive species and have the ability to change entire landscapes. “With development and urbanization and things, we’ve really changed the landscape [of] what existed [on Vancouver Island] prior to colonization,” said Hunter Jarratt, also known as Invasive Species Guy . “There are a lot of evolutionary relationships that have formed over time.
” Jarratt has been sharing information about invasive species and local ecology on social media since 2021. He also recently completed his studies at Vancouver Island University in the Natural Resources Protection Program. Now, Jarratt is a full time restoration consultant at KiKi Nursery in Ladysmith, and is completing the Restoration of Natural Systems certificate program at the University of Victoria.
Jarratt said that if invasive plant species were left to take over native plants, other species — such as specialist species — would likely die out. Specialist species are those that require a certain plant to survive. Specialist bees, for example, are bees that require a specific plant to complete their life cycle.
“So if we don’t have those plants, we lose those species,” he said. An example of this is Andrena astragali — or the death camas mineor bee — the .