Documentation of the Fouling Community in Pearl Harbor and its Response to Novel Coatings

摘要

Our long-term research objective is to understand the processes that lead to settlement and fouling by marine species on surfaces immersed in the ocean. This understanding is crucial to the design of coatings that resist or release fouling in environmentally benign ways. To this end, we provided field testing in Pearl Harbor Naval Station for non-toxic antifouling or foul-release coatings under development in cooperating labs. We developed and implemented the first bioassays with tropical species for lab screenings and the new test procedure, the turbulent duct. We have implemented and published on the appropriate statistical analyses for fouling communities and characterization of the physical properties of coatings. All of this work was geared to take advantage of the real-world setting of our test site in Pearl Harbor that challenges coatings with high rates of year-round settlement by 10 distinct functional groups of tropical species, highlighting the common foulers, Hydroides elegans and Enteromorpha flexuosa and other model species of Balanus and Ulva. These efforts insure that coatings being developed will perform well in the tropical Pacific and other warm water regions.