Historical and contemporary range expansion of an invasive mussel, Semimytlius algosus, in Angola and Namibia despite data scarcity in an infrequently surveyed region

Abstract

Understanding the spread of invasive species in many regions is difficult because surveys are rare. Here, historical records of the invasive marine mussel, Semimytilus algosus, on the shores of Angola and Namibia are synthesised to re-construct its invasive history. Since this mussel was first discovered in Namibia about 90 years ago, it has spread throughout the western coast of southern Africa. By the late 1960s, the species was well established across a range of 1005 km of coastline in southern Angola and northern Namibia. Although only coarse spatial resolution data are available since the 1990s, the distribution of S. algosus clearly increased substantially over the subsequent decades. Today, the species is distributed over 2785 km of coastline, appearing in southern Namibia in 2014, whence it spread across the border to northern South Africa in 2017, and in northern Angola in 2015. Conspicuously, its current range appears to be relatively contiguous across at least 810 km of shore in southern Angola and throughout Namibia, with isolated, spatially disjunct occurrences towards the southern and northern limits of its distribution. Despite there being few occurrence records that are unevenly distributed spatially and temporally, data for the distributional patterns of S. algosus in Angola and Namibia provide invaluable insights into how marine invasive species spread in developing regions that are infrequently monitored.