Hydrobiologia 451: 145–176, 2001. 145 © 2001 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. The ctenophore Mnemiopsis in native and exotic habitats: U.S. estuaries versus the Black Sea basin Jennifer E. Purcell1,2, Tamara A. Shiganova3, Mary Beth Decker1,4 & Edward D. Houde5 1University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, Horn Point Laboratory, P.O. Box 775, Cambridge, MD 21613, U.S.A. 2Present address: Shannon Point Marine Center, 1900 Shannon Point Rd., Anacortes, WA 98221, U.S.A. E-mail:
[email protected] 3P.P. Shirshov Institute of Oceanology, Russian Academy of Sciences, 36 Nakhimovskiy Pr., Moscow 117851, Russia 4Present address: Dept. of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520, U.S.A. 5University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, Chesapeake Biological Laboratory, P.O. Box 38, Solomons, MD 20688-0038, U.S.A. Key words: Beroe, Chesapeake Bay, fish, jellyfish, predation, zooplankton Abstract The native habitats of the ctenophore, Mnemiopsis, are temperate to subtropical estuaries along the Atlantic coast of North and South America, where it is found in an extremely wide range of environmental conditions (winter low and summer high temperatures of 2 and 32 ◦C, respectively, and salinities of <2–38). In the early 1980s, it was accidentally introduced to the Black Sea, where it flourished and expanded into the Azov, Marmara, Mediterranean and Caspian Seas. We compile data showing that Mnemiopsis has high potentials of growth, reproduction and feeding that enable this species to be a predominant zooplanktivore in a wide variety of habitats; review the population distributions and dynamics of Mnemiopsis in U.S.