Marine Pollution Bulletin 79 (2014) 1–2

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Editorial

Editorial q

In Australia the majority of taxonomists work in the seven state museums, which are funded by the relevant state government, there being no national museum for natural history. A similar pattern is found for the herbariums although in this case there is a national one in Canberra. Few taxonomists are associated with a University. A similar pattern occurs overseas and in my field of polychaetes most are associated with a natural history museum although some of these also associated with a University and increasingly joint appointments are being considered. I wish to focus on the loss of marine taxonomic expertise and the consequences of this here in Australia where so much of the marine fauna is still undescribed, especially in northern Australia where massive infrastructure developments are occurring or planned for the export of coal, gas and minerals. A similar paucity of knowledge exists offshore in deeper water within Australia’s extensive EEZ. Here in Australia, as overseas, the role of natural history museums is being questioned and with government funding to them failing to keep up with costs, museums are having to assess where there limited funds should be spent. Research is being targeted not just in terms of number of researchers (Hutchings, 2013) but their research budgets which then flows onto reduced field budgets, sequencing costs and travel opportunities to attend relevant conferences and workshops. Increasingly government departments funding these institutions tend to focus on the number of people coming through the doors to see exhibitions, often so called ‘‘blockbuster shows’’, rather than the critical research being undertaken behind the scenes documenting biodiversity and how this is being affected by climate change as well as the increasing urbanisation and coastal development in Australia. Governments fail to recognise that much of this research only occurs in museums and without it we cannot answer questions; such as how distribution patterns are changing associated with climate change and loss of habitats, critical in the development and management of marine parks, for example. Loss of this taxonomic expertise will lead to a loss of students as they can see no future in the discipline, and hence the loss of the next generation of taxonomists. People do not become taxonomists overnight, and it is critical that students are mentored by today’s practising taxonomists. As already mentioned, there is an amazing proliferation of coastal and offshore development, often associated with the mining industry, here in Australia. For example along the Queensland coast there are proposals for eight port developments, in some q This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

cases new ports, in others expansion of existing ports, to allow the export of minerals, primarily coal. All these developments include dredging and disposal of dredge spoils off shore and within the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area (Grech et al., 2013). Similar developments are occurring along the northwest Australian coast. Yet the composition of the benthic communities is poorly known in both these areas and increasingly it is difficult to find the experts able to identify the fauna or obtain funds to support these experts. This often this leads to studies where the fauna is just identified to major groups which means that only limited information can be extracted from the data and which certainly cannot be compared with other areas or allow time series analyses. In some cases the material is deposited in the relevant state museum but, increasingly, they are limited in their ability to incorporate this material into collections and make it available for research. Australian institutions continue to fund expensive offshore sampling programmes but fail to allocate funds to actually identify the material collected (Kenchington and Hutchings, 2012, and references therein) and with it support the remaining taxonomists. Often these taxonomists, who have spent a lifetime studying their groups, can provide useful information on the ecology and habitat requirements of the fauna which can add value to the data being analysed. Increasingly they are using molecular data to complement the morphological data, which may reveal cryptic species as well as contributing to phylogenetic studies. While I have concentrated on Australia and New Zealand – recent discussions with museum colleagues from around the world during the recent 11th International Polychaete Conference revealed similar stories about funding cuts to taxonomic research. How then are we going to actually manage our environments when we do not know its components? Or how these communities are changing as a result of climate change, for example. Another critical role which museums play is to provide rapid identification of introduced species, which, if detected early, have some hope of being eradicated. For example, goods being imported into Australia may be held up at Customs for ages, if they are found to include live animals, the identity of which needs to be rapidly determined before the authorities decide whether the goods should be released or destroyed. Such delays are expensive, and failure to detect such introduced invasive species may be costly. It is not only the goods being imported into Australia but the methods by which they are imported, be it by air or by shipping that needs to be considered. In the marine environment the hitchhiking of non native species by ballast water or by hull fouling is well documented, and in Australia we have a list of species regarded as pest species (http://www.marinepests.gov.au). There is a trigger list of species which, if found, need to be reported to

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Editorial / Marine Pollution Bulletin 79 (2014) 1–2

the relevant state authority. However many of these recognised pests and other introduced species belong to genera with Australian natives. For example, the Pacific Starfish Asterias amurensis was originally identified as an Australian native species in 1986, and, because it was thought to be native, no eradication was undertaken. Several years later in 1992, when this starfish covered the subtidal areas around the port of Hobart, the species identification was confirmed to be A. amurensis (Byrne et al., 1997) but in plague numbers. Obviously we will never know whether, had it been correctly identified as an alien species and an eradication programme initiated early on, this invasion might have been eradicated. However, we do know the impact that this starfish has had both in the Derwent and other Tasmanian estuaries, and in Port Phillip Bay in Victoria (Parry and Cohen, 2001; Ross et al., 2002). Perhaps the correct identification of polychaete invasives is more problematic given the lack of keys, and often students graduating from Australia’s Universities have little or no knowledge of the group. So we decided to develop a digital guide to facilitate their identification. The guide was targeted towards consultants, fisheries and quarantine officers as well as oyster farmers, and assumed little or no knowledge of polychaetes. The nature of the digital guide is that you can enter at any level, and we have illustrated every species. We included not only those species listed as pests, but also introduced species about whose impact we have no information – they may well be benign – as well as Australian native species with which they can easily be confused. While we do not have a crystal ball we have also included species which are known to have been introduced elsewhere and could therefore potentially arrive in Australia too. We have concentrated on the polychaete families Spionidae, Sabellidae and Serpulidae and we are heavily indebted to overseas experts who helped in the development of the guide

Kupriyanova et al. (2013). This guide was beta tested during a two day workshop held prior to the 11th International Polychaete Conference, Sydney, August 2013 and then updated and released in December 2013 (http://www.polychaetes.australianmuseum.net. au). It is now available for sale. We hope to be able to update this guide over time and perhaps even to expand it to include other marine groups. References Byrne, M., Morrice, M.G., Wolf, B., 1997. Introductions of the northern Pacific asteroid Asterias amurensis to Tasmania: reproduction and current distribution. Mar. Biol. 127, 673–685. Grech, A., Bos, M., Brodie, J., Coles, R., Dale, A., Gilbert, R., Hamann, M., Marsh, H., Neil, K., Pressey, R.L., Rasheed, M.A., Sheaves, M., Smith, A., 2013. Guiding principles for the improved governance of port and shipping impacts in the Great Barrier Reef. Mar. Pollut. Bull. 75 (2013), 8–20. Hutchings, P., 2013. Why are taxonomists often regarded as second class citizens? A misclassification that threatens the basic infrastructure of biodiversity. In: Lunney, Dan, Hutchings, Pat, Recher, Harry F. (Eds.), Grumpy Scientists: the Ecological Conscience of a Nation. Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales, Mosman, NSW, Australia, pp. 26–30. Kenchington, R.A., Hutchings, P.A., 2012. Science, biodiversity and Australian management of marine ecosystems. Ocean Coastal Manage. 69, 194–198, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ocecoaman.2012.08.009. Kupriyanova, E.K., Wong, E., Hutchings, P.A. (Eds.), Invasive Polychaete Identifier. Version 1.1, 02 December 2013. . Parry, G.D., Cohen, B.F., 2001. The distribution, abundance and population dynamics of the exotic seastar Asterias amurensis during the first three years of its invasion of Port Phillip Bay. Report No. 33. Marine and Freshwater Research Institute, Queenscliffe. Ross, D.J., Johnson, C.R., Hewitt, C.L., 2002. Impact of introduced seastars Asterias amurensis on survivorship of juvenile commercial bivalves Fulvia tenuicostata. Mar. Ecol. Prog. Series 241, 99–112.

Pat Hutchings Australian Museum, Sydney, Australia E-mail address: [email protected]

Marine Pollution Bulletin. Editorial.

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