Ocean mooring panels contribute to our understanding of the interaction between marine debris and invasive species

Cathryn Murray1, Linsey Haram2, Cynthia Wright3, Gregory Ruiz2, James T Carlton4, Nikolai A Maximenko5, Andrey Shcherbina6, Luca Raffaele Centurioni7, Mary Crowley8 and Jan Hafner9, (1)Fisheries and Oceans Canada, Sidney, Canada, (2)Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, Edgewater, MD, United States, (3)Fisheries and Oceans Canada, Victoria, BC, Canada, (4)Williams College, Mystic Seaport Program, Mystic, CT, United States, (5)University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, HI, United States, (6)Applied Physics Laboratory University of Washington, Seattle, WA, United States, (7)Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, United States, (8)Ocean Voyages Institute, Sausalito, CA, United States, (9)IPRC/SOEST U. of Hawaii, Honolulu, HI, United States
Abstract:
Anthropogenic marine debris consists of 75% plastic material (Thompson & Maximenko, 2016), and at least 8 million tons of plastic, ranging from large pieces to micro-beads and fibers, are estimated to enter the ocean every year (Jambeck et al., 2015). The North Pacific garbage patch contains more debris than any other area of the oceans (Cozar et al. 2014; van Sebille et al., 2015;). Findings from the 2011 Japan tsunami show how such debris acts as habitats on which more than 300 species travelled thousands of kilometers to arrive on far-away coastlines (Carlton et al 2017). The movement of marine debris across ocean basins mimics in distance, but not in kind, the extremely rare natural rafting events that have populated islands over geological time scales (Kay and Palumbi, 1987). The greater longevity of plastic as a substrate in the ocean and its rapidly increasing amounts suggest that plastic debris will play a growing role as a vector of potentially invasive species, mediated by a "floating ecosystem" in the garbage patch (Barnes, 2002; Gregory, 2009). Here we describe our investigation into the developing fouling community associated with the marine debris, particularly in the open ocean. As a proxy for marine debris, we attached fouling panels to mooring structures in Canadian and US Pacific waters and monitored the developing species diversity and community. Fouling panels are a low technology passive experimental device to identify and monitor fouling species in an ecosystem and their deployment on mooring structures in the open ocean is a unique and innovative application. Using the data from the mooring panel research to complement a larger project sampling biodiversity on floating marine debris opportunistically in the garbage patch, as well as modeling marine debris movement in the North Pacific, we provide new insight into the marine debris phenomenon and the interaction between two emergent global stressors – marine debris and invasive species.
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