Biological Dominoes Await Their Prime Mover
Sometime around 1995, a mutation occurred in someone's pet Florida crayfish in an aquarium in Germany.
The mutation enabled females to reproduce through parthenogenesis, eggs able to fertilize without requiring sperm from a male. This is known to occur rarely in some species such as reptiles if a mate is unavailable, but has never before been noted in crayfish.
A new species of crayfish was created, one in which all individuals share identical DNA. This clonal capability appears to be a to have emerged from two different crayfish species being placed in a tank together.
Presumably their human caretaker felt startled at the crayfish rapidly multiplying, and decided to dump them live into a waterway. They have since spread all over Europe, as a highly invasive species, eating everything in their path. A single member can rapidly produce an entire colony, and now they can be found as far as Japan and Madagascar. Soon they will colonise practically every corner of the world.
This was an exceedingly unlikely emergent phenomenon of hybridization in captivity. However, it would be relatively trivial for someone to perform similar edits to other, even more disruptive species, as a nuisance to society.
Why would someone do that? Well, people have been writing clever computer viruses for sociopathic ego validation for decades now. More recently, they've been doing it for profit, too.
Advances in Synthetic Biology now make the creation of nuisance species accessible to poorly-trained 'script kiddies'.
Today, hospitals and hotels are regularly locked down by cyber highwaymen, who demand a cryptocurrency ransom to decrypt files. Soon, bio highwaymen will create chaotic problems, and then sell a solution for it (a gene drive terminator), shaking down farmers and local governments.
Biological problems are uniquely self-perpetuating; regardless of any human intervention they will gather momentum on their own.
Tracking and mitigating such developments will be crucial to preserving our ecosystems. Failure in this task could even constitute an existential risk to humanity, not to mention so many other species.
We urgently need to develop capably resourced international biosecurity institutions to protect us from these emerging threats.