How Do They Do It? – Understanding the Success of Marine Invasive Species

Abstract

From the depths of the oceans to the shallow estuaries and wetlands of our coasts, organisms of the marine environment are teeming with unique adaptations to cope with a multitude of varying environmental conditions. With millions of years and a vast volume of water to call their home, they have become quite adept at developing specialized and unique techniques for survival and-given increasing human mediated transport-biological invasions. A growing world human population and a global economy drives the transportation of goods across the oceans and with them invasive species via ballast water and attached to ship hulls. In any given 24-hour period, there are about 10,000 species being transported across different biogeographic regions. If any of them manage to take hold and establish a range in an exotic habitat, the implications for local ecosystems can be costly. This review on marine invasions highlights trends among successful non-indigenous species (NIS), from vectors of transport to ecological and physiological plasticity. Apart from summarizing patterns of successful invasions, it discusses the implications of how successfully established NIS impact the local environment, economy and human health. Finally, it looks to the future and discusses what questions need to be addressed and what models can tell us about what the outlook on future marine invasions is.

Pseudodiaptomus marinus Sato, 1913 in the Black Sea: morphology, genetic analysis, and variability in seasonal and interannual abundance

“…The Black Sea had the lowest number of haplotypes of the studied localities ( Ohtsuka et al, 2018 ). The low haplotype diversity of Sevastopol Bay P. marinus was consistent with the general pattern of genetic depletion in a newly introduced population, which is usually associated with strong genetic drift or bottleneck effects ( Geburzi & McCarthy, 2018 ).…”

Status of Marine Biodiversity in the Anthropocene

“…As local habitat disturbance typically creates unoccupied niches, invasion by exotics is facilitated and, thus, local endemic species can be replaced with widespread species (Bando 2006;Altman and Whitlatch 2007;McGill et al 2015). Although only a small fraction of non-native species successfully disperse and invade new habitats, the ecological and economic impacts are often significant (Molnar et al 2008;Geburzi and McCarthy 2018). Secondly, similar types of habitat destruction or modification across space are leading to large-scale reductions in habitat diversity (McGill et al 2015).…”

The Mediterranean in check: Biological invasions in a changing sea

“…In this environment, newcomers seem to fit in with limited impacts on other species. (Geburzi & McCarthy, 2018; Giangrande, Licciano, et al, 2014; Gurevitch & Padilla, 2004; Yapici & Filiz, 2019). Therefore, as suggested by Thompson (2014), we should determine whether a species itself is the problem and not the consequence of other problems before considering the AS as harmful by definition.…”