Invasive alien species are a major threat to biodiversity and human activities, providing a strong incentive to understand the processes by which alien invasion occurs. While it is important to understand the determinants of success at each of several invasion stages-transport, introduction, establishment, and spread-few studies have explored the first of these stages. Here, we quantify and analyze variation in the success of individual animals in surviving the transport stage, based on shipping records of European passerines destined for New Zealand. We mined the original documents of Acclimatisation Societies, established in New Zealand for the purpose of introducing supposedly beneficial alien species, in combination with recently digitized newspaper archives, to produce a unique dataset of 122 ships that carried passerines from Europe to New Zealand between 1850 and 1885. For 37 of these shipments, data on the survival of individual species were available. Using generalized linear mixed models, we explored how survival was related to characteristics of the shipments and the species. We show that species differed greatly in their survival, but none of the tested traits accounted for these differences. Yet, survival increased over time, which mirrors the switch from early haphazard shipments to larger organized shipments. Our results imply that it was the quality of care received by the birds that most affected success at this stage of the invasion process.

Centre for Applied Conservation Science School of Biological Sciences The University of Adelaide Adelaide SA Australia

Centre for Biodiversity and Environment Research University College London London UK

College of Sciences Koç University Istanbul Turkey

Conservation Science Group Department of Zoology University of Cambridge Cambridge UK

Department of Biology University of Utah Salt Lake City UT USA

Department of Ecology Faculty of Science Charles University Prague Czech Republic

Department of Invasion Ecology Czech Academy of Sciences Institute of Botany Průhonice Czech Republic

Institute of Zoology Zoological Society of London London UK

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Disentangling the relationships among abundance, invasiveness and invasibility in trait space