186
Marine pill bug
Arctic Yearbook 2015
Sphaeroma walkeri
Invertebrate
Arthropod
Other
Beaufort Sea - continental coast and shelf
Source: (Molnar et al., 2008)
Questions to be answered about these species include the means through which, and the time at which,
they arrived at the aforementioned destinations either purposefully or accidentally. More importantly,
perhaps, questions include what ecological and economic damages should be expected from these
introductions if they spread, and what policy actions can and should be taken to minimize these
damages (Burnett et al. 2006; Fernandez & Sheriff 2013; Fernandez 2007, 2008, 2011, 2014; Kaiser
2006). It is worth mentioning that it is a viable hypothesis for all of them to have been transported
through hull fouling and ballast water discharge. What is highly likely though, as suggested by Ruiz &
Hewitt (2009), is that our limited taxonomic knowledge and respective capacity for biogeographic and
taxonomic resolution together with potential biases in search efforts may have resulted in limited
observed differences in nonnative species richness and thus in underestimation of nonnative species.
Here again, biases in our understanding of Arctic ecosystems limit our ability to answer these
questions. While observations of ecosystem behaviors by indigenous Arctic peoples have come to be
greatly appreciated for their astuteness and breadth (Krupnik & Jolly 2002; Lopez 1986), such
observations focus on direct food sources and/or threats to survival, and cannot be expected to
include comprehensive submarine surveillance that might allow specific identification of the details of
long run benthic habitat changes, instead of primarily the bio-economic consequences of such
changes.
The scale of concern for such diverse invasions and their potential consequences is very different but
still joint consideration and common prevention strategies focused on disruption of human-induced
introduction pathways (such as broad actions, like mitigating climate change impacts, or locally specific
requirements, such as ballast water exchange regulations, etc.) offer considerable economies of scope.
Fighting against more than one species at a time can be expedient towards developing common policy
channels that will enable effectively attacking the invasion threat at once.
Conclusions
The threats of invasive species’ introductions in the Arctic are increasing as economic and ecological
shifts increase opportunities for both introduction of new species and their establishment (Fernandez
et al. 2014). In the Arctic Ocean, intentional and unintentional invasions are already underway. The
invasions about which we have the greatest evidence are also directly profitable crustacean species.
Two of these species, the RKC and the SC, are introductions i