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loophole for SC fishing (Hoel 2015; Hansen 2015). Meanwhile, it is clear that there are significant
hopes that the crab will bring new economic opportunities to the Barents Sea (Hvingel 2015). Interest
in the question of whether the SC is a sedentary species is particularly poignant in the Barents Sea
because at the moment there is no authorization on fisheries on the outer continental shelf. The
northwest spread of the species, in particular toward Svalbard, has created concerns that would
recommend harvesting above sustainable fishery levels to reduce the spread and potential damages of
a large and expanding SC population into more clearly valued marine habitat (Hop et al. 2002;
Jørgensen & Spiridonov 2013; Sætra 2011), evidenced not least by the scientific effort put in to
determining the ecosystem functioning, and will require concerted efforts to address its management
in the Barents Sea between Russia and Norway.
The borders between nations provide both opportunity and risk pertaining to invasive species. While
international trade requirements may facilitate inspections, quarantines, and other preventative
measures, borders also determine the extent of a nation’s direct control over monitoring and
enforcement and over incentives to reduce being a source of invasive species to a neighbor. Again,
the RKC experience in the Barents presents an example of the gaps that come at borders if research
and information are not properly shared. When the Norwegians agreed not to harvest RKC in the
1970s, they had little information on the Russian’s actions to transplant the crab to the Barents and
the potential for the species to become a significant presence in their waters. This led to unanticipated
costs to Norwegian cod and capelin fishermen in the early 1990s and inefficient policy over
containment of the RKC in Norwegian waters, in addition to the current conflicting Norwegian
internal policy.
Synthetic analysis of existing research
Misplaced emphasis? Dearth of data and existing knowledge gaps
Before deepening the discussion of abatement costs/investments and assigning burdens, we first need
to acquire an adequate understanding of why the above mentioned impacts are of such great
importance. Invasions, together with the various disease vectors and pathogens, can have critical
interactions with other drivers of ecosystem change thus causing a series of cascading effects both on
human health and economic well-being, besides changing ecosystem dynamics.
Nevertheless species under-representations (usually microorganisms such as invasive microbes)
(Amalfitano, Coci, Corno & Luna 2015; Thomaz, Kovalenko, Havel & Kats 2015) and other bioeconomic biases such as funding uncertainties (Kaiser & Burnett 2010), and policy gaps between stages
of invasions (Burnett, D’Evelyn, Kaiser, Nantamanasikarn & Roumasset 2008; Burnett, Kaiser, Pitafi
& Roumasset 2006; Kaiser 2006) frequently present themselves in invasion-related research. The lower
level of difficulty in detecting and fighting invasive macroorganisms compared to microorganisms is
indisputable, but lately there has been