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In the Northern Alboran Sea, artisanal small-scale fisheries using trammel nets suffer economic losses, and local fishermen see their way-of-life endangered, due to interactions with wildlife species such as alien species and dolphins. On the one hand, the alien seaweed Rugulopteryx okamurae, which was first recorded in the Alboran Sea in 2015, has undergone an intensive expansion in the sub-region, monopolizing the available seabed, causing radical changes in the underwater seascape and clogging the trammel nets. On the other hand, the damage caused to the fishing nets by dolphin fish predation is an ancient problem worldwide, but it is intensifying in the last years. The main objective of this study is to understand the main environmental and technical conditions that favor damages of fishing trammel nets in the Alboran Sea, which entails an important loss of catchability, due to (i) the clogging of the artisanal fishing trammel nets by invasive seaweed, and (ii) the breaking of the nets by dolphin predation. Through close monitoring of fishermen in port, we obtained direct information of 548 sets. Our results indicate that approximately 30% of trammel sets suffered a damage due to unwanted interaction with alien seaweeds and dolphins. As seaweeds invasion is a global problem while dolphin-fishing gear interaction is more local, we concluded that only a large-scale management of exotic algae, together with the involvement of local fishermen, could solve the economic problems of this activity., This study has been financed by MAVA Foundation through an agreement between ACCOBAMS (Agreement on the Conservation of Cetaceans of the Black Sea, Mediterranean Sea and Contiguous Atlantic Area) and the Spanish Herpetological Society (AHE, Asociación Herpetológica Española), under the project: “CETAFISHBE, Interactions between air breathing marine vertebrates, particularly cetaceans, and artisanal fisheries in northern` Alboran Sea”. We thank the fishermen, skippers and shipowners who have helped us during this study. We also recognize the support provided by the fishermen’s associations from the ports of Caleta de Vélez and Fuengirola (Southern Spain). We are grateful for the comments of anonymous reviewers who improved a previous paper version. Open Access funding provided thanks to the CRUE-CSIC agreement with Springer Nature.

Aureococcus anophagefferens causes economically and ecologically destructive “brown tides” in the United States, China and South Africa. Here we report the 370,920bp genomic sequence of AaV, a virus capable of infecting and lysing A. anophagefferens. AaV is a member of the nucleocytoplasmic large DNA virus (NCLDV) group, harboring 377 putative coding sequences and 8 tRNAs. Despite being an algal virus, AaV shows no phylogenetic affinity to the Phycodnaviridae family, to which most algae-infecting viruses belong. Core gene phylogenies, shared gene content and genome-wide similarities suggest AaV is the smallest member of the emerging clade “Megaviridae”. The genomic architecture of AaV demonstrates that the ancestral virus had an even smaller genome, which expanded through gene duplication and assimilation of genes from diverse sources including the host itself – some of which probably modulate important host processes. AaV also harbors a number of genes exclusive to phycodnaviruses – reinforcing the hypothesis that Phycodna- and Mimiviridae share a common ancestor.