The value of an ecological study is dependent on the taxonomic standards employed in specimen identification. Museum Victoria staff from the Marine Biology section include internationally recognised senior taxonomists with expertise in fish, crustaceans, echinoderms and polychaete worms. An active network of postgraduate students, recently-qualified junior scientists and Honorary Associates complement the expertise of Museum of Victoria staff and enable accurate identification of molluscs, hydroids, bryozoans, pycnogonids and other taxa encountered in marine surveys. Extensive collections of marine invertebrates and fishes document the southern Australian fauna and include voucher specimens from most earlier marine environmental surveys, for example the Port Phillip Bay Environmental Surveys of 1969-1973 and 1992-1996, in which marine scientists from Museum Victoria were closely involved. Another recent ecological investigation was a project using marine invertebrates to investigate the health of estuaries in south-eastern Australia.
Current ecological projects which are drawing directly on taxonomic expertise and collection strengths of the Marine Biology section include:
Bioregionalisation of the South-East Marine Region (Dr Martin Gomon, Dianne Bray, Dr Gary Poore and Dr Tim O'Hara; with colleagues from CSIRO Marine Research and the Australian Museum). Two studies aimed at assisting environmental managers by using fish and benthic invertebrate distribution data to detect distinct regions in the marine environment of south-eastern Australia.
Correlation between marine plant and animals communities (Dr Tim O'Hara). This project is examining whether marine plant and animal communities differ along the coast of Victoria and is assisting the development of marine national parks policy in Victoria.
Spatial and temporal changes in small coastal rivers (Dr John Moverley and Environmental Protection Authority, Freshwater Sciences Unit.) Most of Victoria's estuaries are small, unusual physico-chemical environments. The aim of this project is to gain an understand of the ecology and variation of these systems in order to develop objectives for the protection of the sesystems in the State's environmental protection policies.
Impact of deep-sea mine tailing placement on benthic communities (Dr John Moverley). Assessment of the impact of deep-sea placement of mine tailings on marine benthic communities in Papua New Guinea.
Jervis Bay polychaetes and molluscs (Dr John Moverley and Dr Pat Hutchings of the Australian Museum). Data collected in Jervis Bay by The Australian Museum and CSIRO in 1989-1991 is being reanalysed to develop more efficient sampling methods for marine environmental impact studies.
The Marine Biology section is also supporting a number of students who are undertaking ecological research projects. These include studies of introduced Japanese gobies, by Matthew Lockett; the ecology of introduced and native gobies in disturbed habitats, by Anthony Ellis; the conservation biology of the Mountain Galaxias, by Taarmo Raadik; and the role of harpacticoid copepods in the diet of Juvenile King George whiting, by Genefor Walker-Smith.
The first Port Phillip Bay Environmental Study, in 1968-1971, was a landmark study - it was one by the first large-scale multidisciplinary studies of such a body of water anywhere in the world. This study by the then Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works (now Melbourne Water) and Fisheries and Wildlife Department of Victoria (now Department of Natural Resources and Environment) provided baseline data on the physical and biological environment of Port Phillip Bay. Most of the biological collections and the ecological database from that study are now archived at Museum Victoria.
A second Port Phillip Bay Environmental Study was completed in 1992-1996 by a multidisciplinary team brought together by CSIRO and funded by Melbourne Water. This study was able to compare Port Phillip Bay with environmental records from the 1968-1971 study and the overall finding was that the Bay is presently in good condition. Almost 50 projects were undertaken by different research groups, one of which was a study by Museum Victoria marine biologists who investigated changes in benthic communities between 1969 and 1995. Benthic communities are those organisms that live on and in sea floor sediments, and the major findings of the benthic study was that the relative proportion of deposit feeding invertebrates in the Bay has decreased. These invertebrates ingest food buried in sediments and a decrease in their abundance is consistent with decreased nutrient input to Port Phillip Bay as Melbourne's sewage treatment system has improved.
However, the 1992-1996 study also showed that the most abundant benthic invertebrates are now three species accidentally introduced to Port Phillip Bay - two bivalve molluscs and a polychaete worm. More recently, these have been joined in the Bay by the North Pacific Sea Star which is now spreading alarmingly. The likely long term ecological impacts of these introductions is unknown.