"It's a rare, win-win treatment that addresses a serious environmental problem and offers a cost-savings for the shipping industry," says marine ecologist Mario N. Tamburri of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, who authored the study with Kerstin Wasson of the Elkhorn Slough National Estuarine Research Reserve, and Masayasu Matsuda, of Sumitomo Heavy Industries Ltd., of Japan.
Previous research has shown that the global shipping industry inadvertently transports huge numbers of aquatic organisms from one port to another.2 Invasive or non-native species have become a global problem, causing an estimated 70% of the native aquatic species extinctions in the last century. To date, however, little has been done to stop the flow of these illegal aliens.3
Tamburri and Wasson—on learning that a group of Japanese scientists and engineers at Sumitomo was studying deoxygenation as a treatment to resist corrosion in cargo vessels—joined with Matsuda and piggybacked in their biological study. ...
