As I look up more and more wild plants I come across, I find more and more of them are introduced (and plenty are actively invasive). It's started feeling like a blow each time, like ANOTHER Eurasian one? I keep wondering what should exist in that niche instead, what native plants are missing.
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Similarly I saw my first wild mantis last week and got excited because that's a cool bug, but then looked it up and it was a European mantis. There are smaller native mantises here, I hope I see some eventually...
Edit: it looks like there actually aren't any native mantids in Quebec, only introduced ones!
@idzie These mantises are really hard to ID, at least in my area. I'm not saying you misidentified this one, but I've been convinced something was invasive and then become less sure.
For example, here's a research grade observation for a (native) Carolina Mantis: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/183437842
And then a research grade observation for a Chinese mantis, which I'm 80% sure is the same individual: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/185304517
So don't give up hope, maybe it's native and you're looking at it wrong :-/
@skyfaller I am reading more, I thought we had at least one native species in my province (Quebec) but we do not! So any mantis I find is either the European or Chinese mantis 😭
@idzie Philadelphia is ground zero for introduced plants and insects, because it's always been a gardening capital since the Europeans settled here, and rich people wanted plants that didn't exist here to show off their international contacts and money.
Sadly, just as middle class Americans copied the intentional waste of rich people's lawns, they also copied the invasive plants that rich people introduced. Garden centers still sell almost zero native plants, and most of the weeds are invasive.