Maresedu 2021

The agenda for today's session on biofouling

This week, I was invited to speak at an international session of the Marine Science and Education conference. The conference is held every year in Moscow, but the past two years have included a hybrid approach that allows for foreign participation over Zoom. 

I presented results of a recent experiment on biofouling organisms in the Arctic and listened to speakers from the UK, Belgium, and Russia discuss their own work. One thing that occurred to all of us was the striking similarities in our experience. Each of us had independently come up with a design for plastic panels to study recruitment of biofouling organisms. We had shared experiences interacting with industrial partners and gaining access to data. We even worked on some of the same species in environments as far apart as the North Sea and the Sea of Okhotsk. 

Fouling communities are fascinating to me because by definition, they are not supposed to exist. Human activities in the ocean create new hard-bottom habitats where there weren't any before - just sand, mud, or water. The organisms that end up there are opportunists taking advantage of a new environment or escaping from their normal predators. 

What's fascinating to me is that fouling organisms are the same all across the world - they don't just have the same characteristics; they're actually the same species. Some of them are species that I wouldn't expect to be very opportunistic, but yet, there they are, making a home for themselves on a scrap of metal in the middle of the mud. We obviously have a lot left to learn about biofouling, and I'm grateful to be connected with a group of like-minded researchers studying the problem.