Professor James Carlton on Fingers on the Pulse of Biodiversity in the Sea: Is that a Shrimp with Orange Legs?

On Friday, November 7, Professor of Marine Sciences and Director of the Williams-Mystic Program James Carlton came to Log Lunch to discuss marine invasive species in the warmer climate change world. Professor Carlton is an expert on marine bioinvasions, holding multiple fellowships and having testified before Congress nine times about marine invasive policy. With this knowledge, he has led the Williams-Mystic program since 1989 and also teaches the Marine Ecology course.

Carlton’s talk focused on three current episodes of invasive marine species: seaweed in New York, shrimp in Cape Cod, and barnacles in Hawaii. In each of these instances, researchers discovered a species far away from its normal range and living in the region of a more commonly found type of that plant or animal. For example, after finding an unusual shrimp in New England with orange legs, marine biologists discovered that they had completely overlooked the invasion of nonnative shrimp along the eastern seaboard. A similar experience of a species unknown to biologists occurred in Hawaii; when a man sent a photo of a barnacle he could not identify to a barnacle expert, the expert responded that he must have taken the photo in the Caribbean, incredulous to the possibility of such a species living in Hawaii.

Carlton’s anecdotes of the shrimp, barnacles, and that of the seaweed in New York highlighted how biologists have found evidence of climate change altering the composition of ecosystems around the world. Specific to the Atlantic Coast, plants and animals are shifting northward with the warming sea temperatures, bringing previously southern and Caribbean species to northern latitudes and potential harm to the native marine denizens. The results of these marine studies generate the unsettling thought that beaches nationwide could soon resemble, at least in part, those from previously much warmer regions.

For more information about Carlton’s own recent work with marine invasive species, visit the following article: http://www.theday.com/article/20140721/NWS01/307219959.

By Sara Clark ‘15

 

Professor James Carlton
Professor James Carlton