If you drink tea or coffee with sugar or you have flavoured syrups in your coffee shop drinks, you could be unwittingly damaging your teeth and adding unhelpful calories to your diet. A wide variety of tablet or granular artificial sweeteners are available and are safe to consume in your hot drinks.
Beech bark disease is the result of a complex interaction between three non-native pests (a tiny scale insect and two species of Nectria fungus) and a native Nectria fungus. The beech scale insect wounds the tree by piercing the bark with sharp mouth parts and sucking out the sap.
Native parasites. Although there are several native parasitic fungi, their impact on native plants and animals is largely in balance as they have co-existed for millions of years. The fungus known as beech strawberry (Cyttaria species) causes cancerous galls on beech trees. few native fungi have become parasitic on introduced crops. Harore, the bootlace mushroom (Armillaria novaezelandiae), usually decomposes dead logs and roots, but it can become parasitic on crop plants such as radiata pine and kiwifruit if it is already present in the soil where they are planted.