A home away from home: a meiobenthic assemblage in a ships ballast water tank sediment

The world-wide research on ship-aided dispersal of marine organisms and invasions of non-indigenous species focuses primarily on the plankters, which show the greatest potential for invading new areas and establishing viable populations in them, either in the water column (holoplankton) or on the bottom (meroplanktonic larvae of benthic species settling on the sea floor). As meiobenthic animals usually lack a pelagic larval stage in their life cycle, no biological invasion study has, to our knowledge, ever specifically targeted marine transport as a means of meiofaunal dispersal. Here we present a set of data showing that the sediment deposited in a ship’s ballast water tank does support a viable meiobenthic assemblage. We examined 0.015-dm3 aliquots of a 1 dm3 sample from a c. 1.5-cm thick layer of sediment residue in the ballast tank of MS Donnington, brought to the ‘Gryfia’ Repair Shipyard in Szczecin (Poland). The samples were found to contain representatives of calcareous Foraminifera, hydrozoans, nematodes, turbellarians, harpacticoid copepods and their nauplii, and cladocerans, as well as meiobenthic-sized bivalves and gastropods. Nematodes proved to be the most constant and most numerous component of the assemblage. The sediment portions examined revealed the presence of 1–11 individuals representing 11 marine nematode genera. The viability of the meiobenthic assemblage was evidenced by the presence of ovigerous females of both nematodes and harpacticoids. Survival of the meiobenthos in shipborne ballast tank sediment residues may provide at least a partial explanation for the cosmopolitan distribution of meiobenthic taxa and may underlie the successful colonisation of new habitats by invasive meiofaunal species.