I don't know about you, but growing up I watched a lot of The Simpsons, and there's an episode that lately I can't get out of my head.

What happens is Bart releases a pair of invasive Bolivian tree lizards into the town of Springfield.

Well, I hope you're happy Bart. You have no idea what kind of plague you've unleashed

upon this town. The local bird club is horrified at first but then delighted when it turns out the

lizards preferred food is pigeon meat.

Also known as a feathered rat. Well, I was wrong. The lizards are a godsend.

But isn't that a bit short-sighted?

What happens when we're overrun by lizards?

No problem. We simply unleash wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes.

I'll wipe out the lizards.

But aren't the snakes even worse?

Yes, but we're prepared for that.

We've lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat.

But then we're stuck with gorillas.

No, that's the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorilla simply freeze to death.

This idea... the gorilla simply freeze to death.

This idea, intentionally bringing in a species from somewhere else to combat another species accidentally introduced from somewhere else, using nature to fight nature, it has a name.

It's called Biocontrol.

And you might have heard of some of the Biocontrol horror stories that this Simpson's episode is kind of hinting at.

Sugar cane farmers released mong goose in Hawaii hoping they would kill the rats that were infesting

their fields, but rats are nocturnal and mongese are not, and so instead they quickly

started eating all of Hawaii's native rare birds.

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