Hidden introductions of freshwater red algae via the aquarium trade exposed by DNA barcodes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The global aquarium trade can introduce non‐native invasive freshwater organisms, which can impact local aquatic ecosystems and their biodiversity. It is unassessed whether the aquarium trade spreads freshwater red macroalgae that hitchhike on ornamental aquatic plants and animals. We investigated this via a broad biodiversity survey and genetic analysis of freshwater red algae in the field and aquarium shops in East Asia. Using rbc L‐based DNA barcoding, we surveyed 125 samples from 46 field sites and 88 samples from 53 aquarium shops (213 samples in total) mostly across Taiwan—a key hub in the global aquarium trade—as well as in Hong Kong, Okinawa (Japan), the Philippines, and Thailand. We augmented our rbc L sequences with GenBank rbc L sequences that represent 40 additional countries globally. We found 26 molecular operational taxonomic units (mOTUs), some of which are cryptic, in Taiwan. Phylogeographical analysis revealed three potential introduced mOTUs, which exhibit no local genetic variation in Taiwan and are distributed across continents. Also, we posit that aquaria may serve as an unintentional ex situ conservation site for freshwater red algae that are vulnerable to water pollution due to anthropogenic disturbances. Collectively, these data suggest that freshwater red algae have been hitchhiking and dispersed via the aquarium trade, an important and overlooked mechanism of introduction of the organisms across the globe.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".