Coming and going - Historical distributions of the European oyster Ostrea edulis Linnaeus, 1758 and the introduced slipper limpet Crepidula fornicata Linnaeus, 1758 in the North Sea

PLoS One. 2019 Oct 24;14(10):e0224249. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0224249. eCollection 2019.

Abstract

Natural history collections are fundamental for biodiversity research as well as for any applied environment-related research. These collections can be seen as archives of earth´s life providing the basis to address highly relevant scientific questions such as how biodiversity changes in certain environments, either through evolutionary processes in a geological timescale, or by man-made transformation of habitats throughout the last decades and/or centuries. A prominent example is the decline of the European flat oyster Ostrea edulis Linneaus, 1758 in the North Sea and the concomitant invasion of the common limpet slipper Crepidula fornicata, which has been implicated to have negative effects on O. edulis. We used collections to analyse population changes in both species in the North Sea. In order to reconstruct the change in distribution and diversity over the past 200 years, we combined the temporal and spatial information recorded with the collected specimens contained in several European natural history collections. Our data recover the decline of O. edulis in the North Sea from the 19th century to the present and the process of invasion of C. fornicata. Importantly, the decline of O. edulis was nearly completed before C. fornicata appeared in the North Sea, suggesting that the latter had nothing to do with the local extinction of O. edulis in the North Sea.

Publication types

  • Historical Article
  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Animal Distribution / physiology*
  • Animals
  • Biodiversity*
  • Ecosystem*
  • History, 19th Century
  • History, 20th Century
  • History, 21st Century
  • Introduced Species / history*
  • North Sea
  • Ostrea / physiology*

Grants and funding

The present study was part of a PhD’s thesis by SH. Both SH and CEW were financially supported by a grant from the the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung, project number 01UQ1711). The funder had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.