ABSTRACT
References .......................................................................................................................................46
While many of these introductions have been innocuous, some have had signi¢cant environmental and economic effects. A clear picture of costs associated with these pests is not available in the literature, and there are few publications that have directly addressed exotic invasions in Australia. Of these, few have presented related costs involved, and medical pests are not usually included.1 The second known major wave of human colonization by Westerners in the late 1780s coincided with the introduction of a number of exotic invertebrate organisms. These pests colonized Australia via ship from various ports around the world. Outbreaks of disease caused by the importation of mosquitoes and other insects, such as lice, proliferated throughout tropical regions especially in prospecting townships where squalid conditions prevailed. Food stores and timbers contaminated with exotic insects added to the local insect population capable of signi¢cantly affecting future agricultural and forestry operations. But this is nothing compared to the vast sea of global traf¢c witnessed in this day and age in which exotic insects can regularly be found and via which many organisms have become well established in foreign countries.
