OctopusErik Charlton / CC BY 2.0

A team of researchers has mapped the movements of cargo ships around the world to work out where invasive marine species may attack.

In Ecology Letters, the team describeshow animals are sucked into ballast water on ships and then expelled in other parts of the world, sometimes dramatically disrupting local ecosystems.

To track the unwelcome visitors, ecologists from the UK and Germany analysed three million ship logs from 2007 and 2008. Those were used to create a computer model of how species move around the globe, which was then tweaked to match real-world observations.

"Our model combines information such as shipping routes, ship sizes, temperatures and biogeography to come up with local forecasts of invasion probabilities," said Bernd Blasius from the University of Oldenburg.

The model identifies Singapore, Hong Kong, and the Panama and Suez canals are the most vulnerable to marine invasion, especially from shorter routes. Cooler climates aren't so likely to offer as welcoming a home for new species.

Michael Gastner from the University of Bristol said: "The probability of winning from the perspective of the invader is really tiny, but because the number of attempts are now growing with more and bigger ships, you play this roulette so often that you become a likely winner sooner or later."


Latest on wired.co.uk