Humans have built ports on all the coasts of the world, allowing people to travel, exploit the sea, and develop trade. The proliferation of these artificial habitats and the associated maritime traffic is not predicted to fade in the coming decades. Ports share common characteristics: Species find themselves in novel singular environments, with particular abiotic properties—e.g., pollutants, shading, protection from wave action—within novel communities in a melting pot of invasive and native taxa. Here, we discuss how this drives evolution, including setting up of new connectivity hubs and gateways, adaptive responses to exposure to new chemicals or new biotic communities, and hybridization between lineages that would have never come into contact naturally. There are still important knowledge gaps, however, such as the lack of experimental tests to distinguish adaptation from acclimation processes, the lack of studies to understand the putative threats of port lineages to natural populations or to better understand the outcomes and fitness effects of anthropogenic hybridization. We thus call for further research examining “biological portuarization,” defined as the repeated evolution of marine species in port ecosystems under human-altered selective pressures. Furthermore, we argue that ports act as giant mesocosms often isolated from the open sea by seawalls and locks and so provide replicated life-size evolutionary experiments essential to support predictive evolutionary sciences.

If you’re an author on this paper or just found it really interesting, consider writing a post telling us more about it! Contact Kristin for more details and to become a contributor.

Featured Image: Box 1 from Touchard et al. (2022)

Catch up on recent urban eco-evo literature in the Literature section