Cobra Effect

Biological Parallel

Bounties for invasive species often backfire spectacularly—pay people to kill nutria, they start breeding them for the reward. Australia's cane toad introduction to control beetles became an ecological catastrophe when toads ignored beetles and decimated native species instead. Well-intentioned interventions in complex ecosystems routinely produce opposite outcomes because second-order effects (what happens next?) dominate first-order logic (remove X, solve Y). The cobra effect is inevitable when you treat ecosystems like simple machines rather than complex adaptive systems.