Biological Invasions by Marine Jellyfish

Abstract

Comparatively little research has been conducted on the ecology of invasive organisms in marine ecosystems when balanced against their terrestrial counterparts (Carlton and Geller 1993). Perhaps rates of invasions in marine systems are simply lower than in other systems, but more likely lack of scrutiny, difficulty with taxonomic resolution, and unusual life-history characters of marine organisms cause the vast majority of invasions to go unreported. Regardless, those few well-studied marine invasions have resulted in tremendous ecological, economic, social, and health problems (e.g., Carlton et al. 1990; Hallegraeff and Bolch 1992; Kideys 1994; Grosholz and Ruiz 1995; Chaps. 4 and 5).Among marine communities that have been extensively studied (e.g., the Chesapeake Bay, San Francisco Bay, and the Black Sea), nonindigenous species are extremely common, and encompass a broad range of taxonomic and trophic groups (Ruiz et al. 1997). Moreover, many marine communities contain remarkably large numbers of `cryptogenic' species (i.e., species that have unknown origins) that are, in fact, likely to have been introduced.