2007), but in the Bothnian Bay it was present primarily

in sheltered bays with muddy bottoms ( Leppäkoski et al. 2002). The mollusc M. arenaria, a component of the Baltic macrofauna for several hundred years, was present in all habitats, though somewhat more frequently and more numerously on vegetated bottoms. These animals were mainly small individuals no larger than 10 mm. Young M. arenaria develop on a variety of substrates; they were one of the components of the associations forming on settlement panels deployed in the Gulf of Gdańsk ( Dziubińska & Janas 2007). The adult animals, which grow to a size of 53 mm, live buried in the sediments of Puck Bay, to depths even in excess of 10 cm. The barnacle A. improvisus occurred on vascular plants and Chara spp., but being a fouling organism, it prefers a hard bottom and Mytilus edulis beds as a substrate selleck compound for settling on. The least propitious as regards colonisation, especially by native fauna, were bottom sediments covered with mats of filamentous algae. Seven of the native species and one non-indigenous species

(A. improvisus) recorded in all the other habitats were not found here. The abundance of native species was also somewhat lower here than in the other habitats. Drifting algae turning up on a sandy bottom may induce increased species diversity of benthic fauna by enhancing habitat complexity; on the other hand, they may induce hypoxia or even anoxia events in the shallow sandy bottom ( Norkko and Bonsdorff, 1996 and Norkko et al., 2000). The unstable habitat formed by algal mats is more suitable for opportunistic species, a group to which belong only a few Akt inhibitor native benthic species from the littoral zone but practically all the alien ones. Floating mats of filamentous green algae in the Curonian Lagoon were very numerously colonised by alien gammarids of Ponto-Caspian origin ( Leppäkoski et al. 2002). In summary, alien species in the Puck Lagoon,

like the native ones, prefer regions with favourable environmental conditions, e.g. a broad habitat diversity, an abundance of food and good oxygen conditions. This is in agreement with Levine (2000), who concluded that it is the Ketotifen most diverse communities that might be at the greatest risk of invasion, a situation that could have important implications for coastal ecosystem management. In the benthic associations of these habitats the greatest changes may occur as a result of the appearance of new species. In the case of Puck Bay such habitats are the vegetated and unvegetated areas of the sea bed lying just offshore. Other areas susceptible to the expansion of new species are hydroengineering structures, but these require separate study. Some authors perceive alien species as additional elements of the biota, enhancing the diversity of continually changing ecosystems. This is particularly so in the case of the geologically young Baltic Sea (Bonsdorff 2006).