Tolerance towards abiotic stress in marine benthic species -Comparing native and invasive populations of Crassostrea gigas, Ciona intestinalis and Codium fragile

• Main Author: Pansch, Andreas
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: 2011
• Subjects: Crassostrea gigas
• Online Access: https://oceanrep.geomar.de/id/eprint/12087/; https://oceanrep.geomar.de/id/eprint/12087/1/Andreas_Pansch.pdf

Marine biological invasions can have alarming and devastating ecological and economic, impacts on biodiversity, ecosystem balance, fisheries and tourism. Due to global change, the number of bioinvasions has severely increased over the last decades. Although, range expansion and the invasion of non-native habitats by marine and terrestrial species have occurred naturally since the existence of life, the rate of human-mediated translocations of species as a consequence of expanded worldwide trade, shipping and aquaculture activities has, however, never been larger and will further massively increase in the near future. For the marine environment, it is estimated that, only in ballast water of ships, approximately 10,000 species per day are transported around the globe. Most of these potential invaders fail, but a few survive, establish and spread in their new environment. To control and prevent invasions, it is of high importance to understand the mechanisms and traits determining the success of invasive species. One of the crucial factors, especially in the early stages of an invasion process, is stress tolerance i.e. the ability to maintain fitness under adverse conditions. Studies comparing the performance of invasive species in their invasive range to native species showed that the invasive species performed better in the majority of cases. In this case, stress tolerance can be considered a species-specific trait. Additionally, some studies comparing the performance of native and invasive populations of the same species were conducted with terrestrial plants and revealed higher competiveness in the invasive plant populations. The marine environment however seems to be nearly unexplored with regard to worldwide intraspecific comparisons of stress tolerance. The aim of this study is to compare the performance of native and invasive populations of successful marine invaders under different abiotic stressors. Laboratory experiments with three marine benthic cosmopolitan invaders in four different biogeographic ...