A pan-Mediterranean extinction? Pinna nobilis mass mortality has reached the Turkish straits system
- PDF / 719,870 Bytes
- 2 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 90 Downloads / 150 Views
OCEANARIUM
A pan-Mediterranean extinction? Pinna nobilis mass mortality has reached the Turkish straits system H. Barış Özalp 1
&
Diego K. Kersting 2
Received: 19 May 2020 / Revised: 14 August 2020 / Accepted: 21 August 2020 # Senckenberg Gesellschaft für Naturforschung 2020
a
b
Fig. 1 A devastating seascape: a dozens of dead adult Pinna nobilis showing opened valves but still holding their life position; b many of the dead individuals appear scattered on the sandy substrata and
Cymodocea nodosa meadows. Notice the high density of individuals in the area and their sizes (> 50 cm)
Communicated by L. Menzel * H. Barış Özalp [email protected] 1
Underwater Technology Section, Vocational School of Ocean Engineering, Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University, 17100 Çanakkale, Turkey
2
Departament de Biologia Evolutiva, Ecologia i Ciències Ambientals, Facultat de Biologia, IRBIO, Universitat de Barcelona, 08028 Barcelona, Spain
81
Page 2 of 2
The Mediterranean endemic pen shell Pinna nobilis (Linnaeus, 1758) is suffering a widespread and unprecedented mass mortality event (MME) that started in 2016 in Spain and has rapidly spread eastwards (Vázquez-Luis et al. 2017; Kersting et al. 2019). This MME, very likely caused by the protozoan Haplosporidium pinnae along with other pathogens (Catanese et al. 2018), is pushing this emblematic bivalve to near extinction. The species has recently been listed as critically endangered in the IUCN Red List (Kersting et al. 2019). Information about the extent of the MME on the eastern and southern Mediterranean coasts is scarce and urgently needed to evaluate the status of the species at a full Mediterranean scale. Here we report the recent arrival of this catastrophic mass mortality to the Dardanelles, the strait connecting the Mediterranean and Marmara Seas. Exploratory underwater surveys undertaken by SCUBA in 2014 in this area revealed the occurrence of large, healthy P. nobilis populations thriving in very high densities (up to 9 indv/m2) in shallow waters (< 5 m). The area was revisited in April 2020 and a devastating seascape was found, showing many hundreds of recently dead P. nobilis individuals, some still in an upright position and many resting on their valves throughout the sandy substrata and patchy Cymodocea nodosa meadows (Fig. 1). The mortality of P. nobilis was assessed at two sites (Baykuşfener Lighthouse, 40° 06′ 11.41″ N, 26° 19′ 18.52″ E and Havuzlar, 40° 07′ 54.48″ N, 26° 21′ 21.44″ E), covering an area of 1380 m2 and 100 m2, respectively. The mortality rates found in both sites were extremely high (Baykuşfener Lighthouse: 99.68%, n = 317; Havuzlar: 85.71%, n = 42) and similar to the mortality rates reported for other sites impacted by the MME (Vázquez-Luis et al. 2017; Katsanevakis et al. 2019). This record confirms the expansion of this devastating mass mortality event in the Aegean Sea and into the Dardanelles after the report by Katsanevakis et al. (2019) in Lesvos Island, and shows how large and well-established but underexplored P. nobilis populati
Data Loading...
