Taxi folia

I saw a documentary on this killer alga. It is very interesting to know how they concluded that this came from a plant to decorate aquarium used in a oceanographic museum... located very close to Mediterranean sea. The scientists are still figuring out a way to destroy this one... rest of world uses technique using passing chlorine gas on the alga bed and destroying them completely, some of them are manually removing them...

Caulerpa taxifolia

In 1984, a low temperature resistant strain of C. taxifolia (Fig. 1) was observed for the first time in the Mediterranean Sea along the coast of Monaco (Meinesz and Hesse 1991, Meinesz and Boudouresque 1996; Meinesz et al. 1998). Since then the alga spread rapidly by vegetative reproduction and covered more than 4600 ha of sea-bed in 1997 (Meinesz 1992; Meinesz et al. 1998). With its potential to overgrow natural biotopes, it represents a major risk for the Mediterranean sublittoral ecosystems (Boudouresque et al. 1995; Romero 1997).
Two hypotheses on the origin of the Mediterranean strain of C. taxifolia have been put forward in the literature: one assumes a migration of Caulerpa mexicana from the Red Sea and a metamorphosis into C. taxifolia (Chisholm et al. 1995), the other an introduction of C. taxifolia via a public aquarium (Meinesz and Hesse 1991, Meinesz and Boudouresque 1996). Knowledge of the origin of this invasive strain of C. taxifolia and on the structure of population are fundamental to understand the dynamics of the invasion.
We used DNA fingerprinting to characterize strains of C. taxifolia as this technique has an exceedingly high power for differentiating and identifying individual genotypes (Epplen et al. 1992; Housman 1995; Coffroth 1998).
The study provided evidence for the introduction of an aquarium strain into the Mediterranean Sea and its close relationsship to an Australian population (Wiedenmann et al. 2001).