Climate Cast: As ships sit in Strait of Hormuz, invasive species hitch a ride

Invasive species play the long game. They travel well, dig in to survive wherever they’re dropped off and then start multiplying, making it nearly impossible to root them out.

Scientists looking now at the current state of the Strait of Hormuz see a recipe for invasive species spread. Giant ships are stuck in the warm waters there amid the Iran War and they’re collecting critters in the ballast water and on their hulls.

Those invasive creatures will end up in ports around the world once the ships start moving again, likely creating a global superspreader event, Mario Tamburri, a marine ecologist with the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, told MPR News.

“What makes a good invasive species is one that's sort of very tolerant to extremes and robust, and that's why the the organisms we have in the Persian, Arabian Gulf are particularly concerning because they they live in really hot water, really salty conditions,” he said.

“That might make them more invasive, more able to to withstand new conditions,” he added, “but what it also means is that they can bring those traits of being tolerant to higher temperature to the new environments.”

In the case of freshwater Lake Superior, it would take a longer time to see impacts from the Strait of Hormuz. Many of the big boats on Superior travel domestically, but don’t head out into saltwater. Plus, the Strait of Hormuz is much warmer than the Duluth harbor.

Lake Superior has seen invasives take hold, including lampreys and zebra mussels.

The bloody red shrimp is the latest local example. Twenty years after reaching the Great Lakes in the ballast water of cargo ships, the crustacean native to Europe and Asia has now colonized Lake Superior, despite years of effort by ecologists to keep it away from Duluth.

That pattern is unlikely to change anytime soon. New research from scientists at Toronto’s York University found Lake Superior is one of the fastest-warming big lakes in the world.

Research led by a biologist at the State University of New York-New Paltz found Lake Superior has lost more than two months of ice coverage per year since 1857.

And when there’s less ice coverage in winter, we also see faster winter warming on land, perpetuating the cycle a University of Minnesota research team found.

Creatures living in the saline waters off the coast of Iran are incredibly resilient to climate change and able to survive in extremely tough conditions, and that could keep them alive in places like the Great Lakes one day, Tamburri said.

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