All roads lead to kudzu. That's the thing: from an evolutionary perspective, monoculture is pretty much the goal. Our bizarre insistence on biodiversity is outside of evolution. I'm a big fan, but I also recognize that it isn't rational behavior when viewed from a purely evolutionary standpoint.
First -I really enjoyed this, thanks for posting. Secondly, have you ever used Kudzu in cooking? It actually works really well as a thickening agent.FYI.
Indeed. The curious thing is that monoculture is the ostensible "goal" (to use a somewhat misleading analogy) of individuals in the short term, but it can only lead to ecosystem collapse in the long term, as there aren't any stable states that exist in such condition. There's a bio-mathematician, Josh Mittledorf, who has done some interesting work in this field, and he has hypothesized that aging itself is actually a target of selection that serves to control populations. Its hard to do his hypothesis justice in a paragraph, but the gist is that stability criteria says that the most efficient way to prevent ecosystem collapse is to have a somewhat defined lifespan for each creature, that the ecosystem itself is selected on, not just individuals. What is good for one species in the short run may be terrible for it in the long run, like a bacteria that kills its host. Kudzu is a sickness on the South.