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Are invasives bad? Not always, say Brown researchers
Date:5/17/2010

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] In 1988, a mysterious invader washed upon the New Jersey shore. The Asian shore crab likely arrived in ballast from commercial ships, and it found its new home to be quite agreeable. More than two decades later, the crab, Hemigrapsus sanguineus, has expanded its range along the Atlantic coast northward to Maine and southward to North Carolina. Its numbers continue to expand, and wildlife biologists have found them in greater densities along New England's cobbled shores.

Another tale of an invasive species conquering a native ecosystem? Not so fast, says Andrew Altieri, a marine ecologist at Brown University and the author of a new paper in Ecology that scrutinizes the crabs' success. Altieri and colleagues have found that the Asian shore crab has found a hospitable niche in its new environs and in fact gets along just fine with native species. While the crab has exploited the conditions set up by the native cordgrass and ribbed mussels that dominate the cobbled beach ecosystem, it does not appear to do so at the expense of other species that call the shoreline home.

"Usually, when you think of invasions," Altieri said, "you think it will be bad. Yet we found here a situation where that doesn't occur. We've found a place where the natives and invasives get along quite well."

Altieri and team members Bregje van Wesenbeeck, a visiting scholar at Brown from the Dutch environmental research institute Deltares, and Mark Bertness, chair of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Brown and Altieri's adviser, counted crabs, which measure about 1 1/2 inches wide, at four sites on Narragansett and Mount Hope bays in Rhode Island in summer 2003-2004. They found crab density (an indicator of their numbers) to be highest where cordgrass and ribbed mussels proliferated. Crab density was more than 100 times higher in those areas compared to spots along the beaches where cordgrass or mus
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Contact: Richard Lewis
Richard_Lewis@brown.edu
401-863-3766
Brown University
Source:Eurekalert  

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