Environmental Impact of War: Donald the Dove Edition
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Studies of the environmental impact of war are quite interesting and there’s a whole literature in environmental history about militarized landscapes. So I was attracted to this piece coming out of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution about what all these idle ships might be doing to the Strait of Hormuz’s ecosystem.
New research from an international team of 24 marine scientists, led by the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science (UMCES), and including the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), cautions that thousands of commercial vessels stranded for months in the Persian/Arabian Gulf following the closure of the Strait of Hormuz could unintentionally trigger a massive marine invasive species event.
The study, “Closure of the Strait of Hormuz May Trigger a Bioinvasion Super-Spreader Event,” out today in Biological Invasions, highlights how prolonged periods at anchor allow ship hulls to accumulate dense communities of marine organisms, including algae, barnacles, mussels, and other invertebrates, which can be transported around the world when vessels resume normal trade routes. The authors describe the unprecedented lay-up of more than 1,500 ships as creating conditions for a potential global marine bioinvasion “super-spreader” event.
Carolyn Tepolt, a WHOI biologist whose research focuses on the evolution and spread of marine invasive species, contributed expertise on how globally distributed biofouling organisms can rapidly adapt to new environmental conditions.
“Marine invasive species have profound ecological and economic impacts on coastlines across the globe,” explained Tepolt, “and are extremely difficult, if not impossible, to eradicate once they become established. This disruption to global shipping has many repercussions and has also more quietly created ideal conditions to spread warm-water species to new ports.”
The authors note that modern shipping has long been recognized as one of the primary pathways for marine invasive species, but the scale and duration of the recent vessel lay-up is unlike anything previously documented, creating an unprecedented global biosecurity challenge.
Obviously you can read the whole study, etc.