Tackling the challenge of limiting ballast water-mediated species introductions is a complex issue to wrap you head around. It involves multi-interest groups, each with its own technical expertise they can wield to understand and solve the problem, each with a greater or lesser stake in accomplishing the task. It involves many different types of species from environments all around the world. Some are well studied and understood, others undescribed. It involves large technical systems – including massive bulk carriers and container ships. The enormous investment in these ships means any technical changes must fight against significant institutional inertia. From the perspective of state management, ballast water and species introductions intersect with a dizzying array of institutional interests (agriculture, fisheries, shipping, state science, conservation, etc.), which in the case of Australia in the 1980s and 90s, existed in relative isolation. This is just scratching the surface. Multiply this eco-political-technical complexity to the scale of the planet and it should come as no surprise that the time it took to move from a recognition of the problem to national regulations, to a binding international set of guidelines. Change was measured in decades rather than years.

Without belaboring the point, this subject of complexity has been on my mind a lot lately as I’ve learned more about the research process that Australian scientists, engineers, and policymakers undertook to tackle this issue. Combing through the technical reports, conference proceedings, published and unpublished papers, and chatting with several participants in scientific working groups, the overwhelming complexity of the problem is readily apparent. With so much on the line, how do you negotiate a path forward?

There appear to be two primary ways that I’ve uncovered so far, which can roughly be divided into a vertical and lateral approach. Each came with their own benefits, and also consequences.

By “vertical”, I mean the logical reduction of a complex situation down to its barest essential parts. An example of this from the 1990s was Australia’s initial focus on toxic dinoflagellates as a model organism. By the mid 1990s, Australia contended with several charismatic invasions, of which algae was only one. A benthic fanworm (polycheate) was crowding out sea flood habitats in New South Wales, a seaweed (Undaria) was affecting mollusk harvesting in Tasmania, and an imported seastar (Asterias) was being dubbed a “plague” in the Australian media. Each species occupied its own niche and habitat, responded (or often didn’t) to different potential management strategies, and had wildly varying consequences, real or potential. Rather than tailoring a solution to all, Australia initially focused its efforts on controlling dinoflagellates. The rationale being, if we can tackle this microscopic organism, we’ll catch almost everything else.

The vertical approach was beneficial because it freed technical expertise to focus on essentially one problem. This has knock-on benefits in policymaking too. Speaking with Dr. Hallegraeff, he related a story of attending an early meeting of the International Maritime Organization (IMO) as they were trying to agree on draft ballast standards that would apply everywhere. For two days, they went nowhere. Multiply the complexity of challenges faced in Australia to every known aquatic invasive the world over and it would seem daunting indeed. When he and his colleagues presented the idea of using a model organism, he related, “we could talk again!” If a management strategy could limit or reduce the risk of introducing something that small – the largest share of the challenge would be solved.

“Lateral thinking”, meanwhile, provided a different set of opportunities. This was the descriptor Dr. Pat Hutchings used when I asked her to describe the work she took part in as a member of a scientific working group on ballast water in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The Scientific Working Group on Ballast Water was, once again, prompted by the discovery of “toxic dinoflagellates” in Tasmania by Gustaaf Hallegraeff in 1985 (although Hutchings and others had begun publishing on the subject years earlier). Pressure from the aquaculture industry motivated the Bureau of Rural Resources to establish this working group to 1. Understand the nature and scale of the problem and 2. Investigate methods to counteract it. The composition of the working group reflected the nature of the challenge. It included state officials, including the department of Rural Resources and the Australian Quarantine and Inspection Service (AQIS), as well as representatives from other state and federal agencies. In also included representatives from the shipping industries, in particular scientists and engineers from one of Australia’s largest shipowners, Broken Hill Proprietary Company (BHP). Finally, it included scientists, including Hallegraeff and Hutchings.

The composition of this group required a creative approach that forced participants to think outside their wheelhouse of expertise. “You had to think literally”, Hutching told me during our conversation in April 2023. Beyond their varying incentives to participate, each viewed the problem through their particular skillsets. Some members’ chief concern was being able to measure the efficacy of any potential solution. Introduced species were appearing in ecosystems with few or no baseline studies – in other words, it wasn’t clear exactly which species were “invasive” or not.

Others focused on management options, especially open ocean exchange. Ships could, in principle, just exchange ballast water at sea, either diluting or exchanging coastal waters with ocean waters less likely to harbor problematic species. Some ships had been doing this as a result of regulations about dumping in coastal watesr since at least the 1950s. The problem was that “ballast water exchange” was imperfect (it didn’t remove all ballast and thus continued to harbor potential exotics) and ships captains generally preferred not to exchange ballast water at all. It’s costly (in time) and potentially dangerous in rough waters. This point was brought home to me when I spoke to Alan Taylor, a naval architect and engineer for BHP and member of the SWG. The danger of exchanging ballast improperly, he and other emphasized through throughout the Scientific Working Group process, could be extreme, jeopardizing the safety of the ship and crew. The nuance of this understandably complex issue could be difficult to convey to other working group members. “They knew nothing about ships”, Taylor recalled (referring to AQIS). Similarly, from the perspective of Hutchings, the lack of taxonomic expertise meant that even identifying species was potentially problematic. Everyone needed to find translate their varied expertise to arrive at a potential solution. “It was a very interesting committee to be on,” Hutchings concluded, “demanding” she added.

The combined benefit of both approaches was rather obvious. In the end, the SWG produced a remarkable set of studies in a relatively short period of time. Their findings informed the refinement of Voluntary Ballast Water Guidelines in the early 1990s, which themselves formed the basis of international guidelines developed by the IMO. They were also able to develop a process for conducting port surveys to better understand the nature of ecosystems being invaded. It would be adopted and refined over the next decade.

There were also consequences to both approaches, however. Hallegraeff readily recognized that his vertical, reductionist, approach to ballast water standards didn’t account for ALL species. Cholera, for instance, was one of the most feared potential exotics in ballast water, and screening for dinoflagellates would not capture bacteria. Naturally, any solution that focused on ballast water would not limit fouling (attached to exterior of hull) species. It is highly likely (though likely impossible to tell for certain), that at least some of the species at first suspected to be introduced via ballast were in fact the result of hull fouling. Similarly, the lateral approach was imperfect. Although remarkable and creative, the first SWG was never able to muster the tools or resources to completely master all the dimensions of the problem that participants identified. Baseline studies were incomplete, and a “taxonomic impediment” persisted. No commercially acceptable alternative to ballast water exchange presented itself, despite its obvious flaws. The problem would continue, and it would be taken up by a NEW working group under different leadership, but with a remarkably similar mandate. But that’s a story for another time…