Japanese dock washes up on Oregon beach
This article details an instance of invasive species hitchhiking on a dock, detached from the tsunami in Japan and landing on the west coast of North American. Many of the organisms were still alive.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2012/06/06/japan-tsunami-dock-oregon.html
More on the washed up dock and the costs of this invasion:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/story/2012/06/26/bc-tsunami-debris-no-cleanup-plans-canada.html
Thank you, Larry. This story has received a lot of attention. Given the invasives species that your surveys of Gulf of Maine docks and wharves uncovers and climate change including extreme storms, one can only imagine the potential for more of these pathways.
This is an interesting example of how easily organisms can move around on man-made structures. A few years back a dry dock was towed from China to Bath, Maine and it still had organisms living on it when it arrived. Lots of oil drilling platforms are towed from place to place without consideration for what is attached. The marine environment is not as visible to most people, but the bottom communities in many coastal zones are increasingly dominated by introduced species and we know little about the impacts of most of them. I for one feel like I am almost starting over in trying to understand the benthic communities that I have been observing for close to 40 years, because they have changed so much and so many of the dominant species are new. Hard to consider restoring or managing a system that has no resemblance to the historical communities of before.