Abstract
During a survey of the Belarusian part of the Dnieper River conducted on 19-22 July 2006, we revealed five invasive Ponto-Caspian amphipod species in its benthos community: Chaetogammarus ischnus, Chelicorophium curvispinum, Dikerogammarus haemobaphes, Dikerogammarus villosus and Pontogammarus robustoides. All of them except C. curvispinum are reported in Belarus for the first time. The number of alien amphipod species and their abundance were found to decrease gradually in the upper sections of the river.
Highlights
The Republic of Belarus contains a considerable part of the so called central invasion corridor (Bij de Vaate et al 2002), i.e. the Dnieper River with its large tributaries Pripyat, Berezina and Sozh (Figure 1)
The present paper is directly related to development of the database and is based on benthic sampling conducted from 19-22 July 2006 during an expedition along the Belarusian section of the Dnieper River (720 km, i.e. about 32% of the total length)
Most of them are likely to arrive in Belarusian waters through the shipping canal between the Pripyat River, a tributary of the Dnieper River (Black Sea basin), and the Zapadnyi Bug River (Baltic Sea basin), which was constructed about 200 years ago and is still navigable within the territory of Belarus
Summary
The Republic of Belarus contains a considerable part of the so called central invasion corridor (Bij de Vaate et al 2002), i.e. the Dnieper River with its large tributaries Pripyat, Berezina and Sozh (Figure 1). C. ischnus was never recorded in Belarus before our study; its record in the Polish River Vistula in 1928 (reviewed in Jazdzewski and Konopacka 2002; Grabowski et al 2006, 2007) indicates that it is likely as old an invader as C. curvispinum.
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