" To me, this suggests that our thinking around 'invasive species' needs to be fine-tuned. Instead of a paradigm where we see all 'foreign' species as malevolent invaders that should be considered threats to ecological integrity unless proven otherwise, maybe we should instead see islands species as particularly vulnerable to newly arriving species.

Indeed, the over concept of the 'native' has some fundamental problems. It derives from precisely that frozen-in-time idea of 'ecosystem integrity' that, as we've seen, is riddled with conceptual shortcomings. Ecologists have spent decades assigning 'native ranges' to species, usually based on where they were when the first white scientist showed up to take notes. These ranges are pegged to an arbitrary point in time, a moment in the long evolutionary and geographical journey of a particular lineage. "

― Emma Marris