Hull fouling is a risk factor for intercontinental species exchange in aquatic ecosystems
By John M. Drake, David M. Lodge. 2007
171 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Anthropogenic biological invasions are a leading threat to aquatic biodiversity in marine, estuarine, and freshwater ecosystems worldwide. Ballast water discharged from transoceanic ships is commonly believed to be the dominant pathway for species introduction and is therefore increasingly subject to domestic and international regulation. However, compared to species introductions from ballast, trans-location by biofouling of ships' exposed surfaces has been poorly quantified. We report translocation of species by a transoceanic bulk carrier intercepted in the North American Great Lakes in fall 2001. We collected 944 individuals of at least 74 distinct freshwater and marine taxa. Eight of 29 taxa identified to species have never been observed in the Great Lakes. Employing five different statistical techniques, we estimated that the biofouling community of this ship comprised from 100 to 200 species. These findings adjust upward by an order of magnitude the number of species collected from a single ship. Thus, overall invasion risk from biofouling may be comparable or exceed that of ballast water discharge.
Subfields: Ecology, Global and Planetary Change, Ocean Engineering
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6b3bdb3b7a760e2b5d169b14617341517421c15f
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In Ecology
- D. Richardson
- Petr Pyšek
- John R. U. Wilson
- P. Hulme
- Jan Pergl
- Jonathan M. Jeschke
- Martin A. Nuñez
- Jane A. Catford
In Global and Planetary Change
In Ocean Engineering
Citations in the corpus
- Review of Underwater Ship Hull Cleaning Technologies (2020, background): “Hull fouling on the vessels can also cause the spread of alien species that rapidlymultiply in local waters without natural enemies (Bax et al. 2003; Godwin 2003; Drake and Lodge 2007).”
- Invasive Species, Environmental Change and Management, and Health (2010, background): “, Reference 115), and shipping-related agents, such as ballast water (116) and hull fouling (117).”