| Mission Bay is a highly urbanized estuary located in San Diego, CA. Locations near the mouth are influenced by tidal exchange with the Pacific Ocean, while locations in the eastern reaches of Mission Bay are most influenced by seasonal freshwater inputs from Rose, Cudahy, and Tecolote creeks; gradients in environmental conditions include temperature, salinity and sediment characteristics. The many docks that harbor boats for recreational activities in the bay and nearby coastal ocean, also support diverse fouling communities.
Fouling communities are dominated by non-indigenous, or invasive, species, but diversity of these organisms varies by location within Mission Bay (Tracy 2013, Tracy and Reyns 2014). Additionally, some non-indigenous species such as the spaghetti bryozoan, Amathia verticillata, also serve as biogenic habitat for many other organisms, making their ecological role complicated (Zavacki et al. 2024, 2025). |
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Within Mission Bay, we have examined the settlement patterns of the non-indigenous (1) ascidians: Ascidia zara (Oka, 1935), Botrylloides violaceus (Oka, 1927), Botryllus schlosseri (Pallas, 1766), Ciona intestinalis (Linnaeus, 1758), Ciona savignyi (Herdman, 1882), Didemnum vexillum (Kott, 2002), Molgula ficus (Macdonald, 1859), Polyandrocarpa zorritensis (Van Name, 1931), Styela clava (Herdman, 1881), Styela plicata (Lesueur, 1823), Symplegma reptans (Oka, 1927), Ascidia ceratodes (Huntsman, 1912), Botrylloides diegensis (Ritter & Forsyth, 1917), and Diplosoma listerianum (Milne-Edwards, 1841); and (2) bryozoans: Amathia verticillata (delle Chiaje, 1822), and Watersipora spp.
More recently, we have extended our studies from the docks to the benthic environment, and have been quantifying the abundance and size-frequency distribution of the mussel, Arcuatula senhousia (Benson, 1842).
