Welcome to the urban jungle: London

London has always had its share of creepy crawlies — but now it’s host to poisonous spiders, killer hornets and er, roving wallaby, says Nick Curtis
6 November 2013

London is the great melting pot, all the world in one city, and now it seems what is true for the city’s human population also holds for the animal and insect kingdoms. An explosion of biodiversity means the capital has become an urban jungle in a very real sense, and our daily commute may soon resemble a Tarzan-style running battle as species struggle for supremacy.

The latest Chinese visitors expected in the capital are not rich tourists but vicious 5cm hornets whose venom can dissolve eyeballs, who attack honeybees, and who have already killed several people in China and one in France, whence they are thought to be working their way to us.

Meanwhile a London family were evacuated from their home in Hampton while it was fumigated against an invasion of Brazilian wandering spiders, which have the most toxic venom on Earth and which had somehow meandered to these shores on a bunch of Sainsbury’s bananas. At the time of writing, these spiders were one of the most popular stories on the web (sorry). They’re muscling in on territory annexed by the less poisonous false widow spiders, who have been killing rabbits and pestering X Factor reject Rylan all summer, and who stem originally from Madeira and the Canaries.

And it’s not just arachnids and vespidae: a wallaby recently set up home in Highgate Cemetery amid the graves of Karl Marx and Jeremy Beadle. The BBC has a photo of a local fox giving the wallaby the evil eye, and no wonder. In future, we may see the urban fox — who has quit the dangerous countryside for an easier life rootling through bins for Tesco salad — as the equivalent of pioneers who gentrify unloved bits of London and are then forced out by waves of more powerful foreign blow-ins.

But it was, apparently, ever thus. Even the false widows, more numerous this year thanks to the mild summer, are thought to have first come to the UK — Torquay, specifically — before 1879. “For 200 years London has been the centre of the introduction of non-native species,” says Tony Wileman, conservation ecologist of the London Wildlife Trust. “Throughout the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, biologists, botanists, horticulturalists and others have been bringing exotic species from all over the globe to London for study and for our parks and gardens, and most remain here. London supports more non-native species than it does native ones.”

Wileman cites rabbits, pheasants, grey squirrels and ring-necked parakeets as examples of introduced species that we now take for granted as “locals”. Some creatures, like the wallaby, may be released or mislaid pets: others, like the false widows, arrived thanks to our status as a centre for global trade.

At the last Ice Age, Wileman adds, most of the flora and fauna we see around us now in the UK would have been found only in warmer Mediterranean regions: “Animals and plants have been spreading around the world naturally as climate changes and will continue to do so.” So we may not be wrestling alligators and puma anytime soon. But keep an eye on the thermometer and watch this space.

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