Invasions of Estuaries vs the Adjacent Open Coast: A Global Perspective

Invasions by alien species have been reported from every marine habitat where surveys have been conducted for them. Conspicuous examples from around the globe include the brown alga Sargassum mangarevense in tropical coral reef sys tems (Andréfouët et al. 2004), the bivalve Mytilus galloprovincialis along temperate rocky shores (Steffani and Branch 2003), and the reef-building polychaete, Ficopomatus enigmaticus in estuaries (Schwindt et al. 2004). Despite numerous examples of marine invaders from a variety of habitats, little is known about how invasion rates of entire assemblages of organisms compare between different marine habitat types. And indeed most marine habitats have not been thoroughly surveyed — the majority of our understanding of marine invasions comes from shallow near-shore environments.

Some studies have attempted to quantify habitat differences in marine invasions, examining assemblages (both natives and aliens) at different scales. Within estuarine ecosystems, focus has been on comparisons between different salinities and substrates. (In this chapter an estuary is considered to be a ‘partly enclosed body of water by the coast in which sea water and fresh water mix‘ (Little 2000).) Wolff (1973) examined the benthic macroinvertebrates of four major estuaries in the Netherlands. He found that in the high salinity parts of these estuaries about 2% of the species were alien, in the brackish part about 20%, and in the tidal freshwater part about 8%. In non-tidal brackish waters the share of alien species was about 28%. Wolff (1999) re-analyzed these data and included three more estuaries in the northern Netherlands and Germany. He found that tidal and stagnant low salinity habitats of seven Dutch and German estuaries harbored a higher proportion of alien species (about 20%) than estuarine high salinity habitats (about 6%). This pattern was not clearly related to propagule pressure (harbors and aquaculture were not focused in the middle salinity). Lee et al. (2003) found that patterns of invasion varied along an estuarine gradient in San Francisco Bay; soft-bottom benthic com munities at estuarine salinities were more invaded than communities at either brackish or marine salinities. Wasson et al. (2005) found hard substrates to be more invaded than soft substrates, and a site near the mouth of an estuary to be less invaded than a site nearer the head of an estuary in Central California, despite the harbors in this estuary being closer to the mouth.