All for one and one for all: research from the 6th International Invasive Sea Squirt Conference and the 10th International Conference on Marine Bioinvasions

摘要

It has been 20 years since the foundation of a dedicated InternationalConference on Marine Bioinvasions in 1999 (ICMB-I, Massachusetts Instituteof Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA). Amongst the most prominentdriving factors behind this were the invasion of the Great Lakes by thezebra mussel Dreissena polymorpha Pallas, 1771 in the 1980s and reports ofan average of one new species invading San Francisco Bay every 14 weeksbetween 1961 to 1995 (Cohen and Carlton 1998). At this time, scientistswere becoming well aware of the growing number of introductionsworldwide and their impacts on marine communities (Minchin 1996; Reiseet al. 1998; Hewitt et al. 1999; Sliwa et al. 2009). Ascidians, commonlyknown as sea squirts, were quickly flagged as one of the most notoriousand diverse group of fouling species being transported and introducedaround the world (Shenkar and Swalla 2011). Indeed, in the late 1990s andearly 2000s, invasive ascidians were identified as important players causingsignificant ecological and economic impacts to marine systems (Coles et al.2002; Lambert 2002). As the twenty-first century enters its third decade,invasive ascidians continue to affect ecosystems (Carman et al. 2011; Shenkar2012; Zhan et al. 2015), create problems for aquaculture (Mu?oz andMcDonald 2014; McKenzie et al. 2017), and frequently dominate coastalfouling communities (López-Legentil et al. 2015).