Susceptibility of Chesapeake Bay to Invasions of Non-indigenous Species Associated with Ballast WaterThe release and proliferation of exotic, or nonindigenous, species to coastal waters in the United States has been linked to their international transport by way of ship ballast tanks. According to the recent National Biological Invasions Shipping Study – commissioned jointly by the National Sea Grant Program and the U.S. Coast Guard – big ships dump more than 2.4 million gallons of ballast water into U.S. waters every hour. Exotic species that arrive in U.S. waters can alter ecosystems and potentially change food webs, spread diseases, introduce biological toxins, and replace commercially important species with unharvestable varieties. For example, zebra mussels ferried into the Great Lakes from Europe have caused considerable economic damage, and have profoundly changed the ecosystem of lakes and rivers as they have spread through the nation's waterways. To determine the susceptibility of the Bay to new exotic organisms transported in ship ballast water, researchers are studying factors which promote or thwart biological invasions. Of the nearly 90 ships they have tested in the ports of Baltimore and Norfolk, 90 percent of the samples carried live organisms, among them, fish, crustaceans, barnacles, bivalve molluscs, copepods, diatoms, dinoflagellates, flatworms and polychaete worms. This project will determine whether these organisms are capable of surviving local conditions and invading Bay waters – the findings will provide a basis for developing management procedures to regulate ballast water discharge and to minimize the introduction of such species into the nation's waters. |
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Gregory M. Ruiz, Anson H. Hines, D. Wayne Coats and L. David Smith
Smithsonian Environmental Research Center Smithsonian Institution James T. Carlton Maritime Studies Program Williams College – Mystic Seaport |
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