Northern Range Extensions for Caprella scaura Templeton, 1836 (Crustacea: Amphipoda: Caprellidae) on the Florida Gulf Coast and in South Carolina

Abstract

Previous northwestern Atlantic records for the caprellid amphipod Caprella scaura Templeton, 1836 were confined to St. Croix (US Virgin Islands), St. Barthélemy, and Puerto Rico, islands bordering the northern Caribbean Sea. Based on recent collections, C. scaura is now reported from the Gulf of Mexico (St. Andrew Bay, Florida) and the US east coast (Charleston Harbor, South Carolina). These constitute the first records for this apparently non-indigenous species in waters of the continental eastern United States, establishing considerable northern range extensions for C. scaura in the northwest Atlantic.

Seasonal fluctuations of some biological traits of the invader <i>Caprella scaura</i> (Crustacea: Amphipoda: Caprellidae) in the Mar Piccolo of Taranto (Ionian Sea, southern Italy)

“…Foster et al (2004) reported males and females collected in Charleston Harbour with a length of 18 mm and 8 mm, respectively, in winter and 10 and 5 mm, respectively, in summer and suggested that these size differences may be due to seasonal effects. For example, these authors reported that individuals, especially males, in winter populations reach much larger sizes than those observed during the summer months in coastal waters of Georgia.…”

The occurrence of Caprella scaura (Amphipoda: Caprellidae) in marinas in Lanzarote Island (Canary Archipelago, Macaronesia)

“…Males attain larger sizes in winter (Foster et al, 2004;Guerra-García et al, 2011) and this could explain the differences in size found.…”

Climate Change Implications for Tidal Marshes and Food Web Linkages to Estuarine and Coastal Nekton

“…Implications for food web dynamics in squeezed areas are (1) reduced marsh area for resident nekton and juvenile transient nekton but increased access for larger transient marine predators and (2) shifts in the relative contributions of food web pathways, represented here as a higher biomass of plankton (i.e., phytoplankton and zooplankton) due to expanding open water habitat are responding to warming temperatures (Sorte et al 2010;Burrows et al 2011;Morley et al 2020). Historical comparisons of bivalves (Berge et al 2005), gastropods (Mieszkowska et al 2006), amphipods (Foster et al 2004), crabs (Spivak and Luppi 2005;Hollebone and Hay 2007), and fishes (Fodrie et al 2010;Morson et al 2012) have all demonstrated poleward expansions. Species distributions within estuaries may expand or contract depending on changes in the spatial and temporal variability of environmental drivers and gradients (e.g., temperature, salinity, dissolved oxygen, pH; Lauchlan and Nagelkerken 2020).…”