| About Ballast Water Management
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 For hundreds of years, ships carried rocks and/or metal as solid ballast. Ships of modern times use seawater for ballasting.
When a ship empties its cargo, it takes in water as ballast to maintain its stability and structural integrity. Conversely, when it loads cargo, the ballast water is discharged usually in the vicinity of ports just prior to loading the cargo from an exporting country. Seawater loaded for ballast purposes contain a gamut of organisms and their propagules.
In the native environment, organisms live in semblance and are controlled by ecosystem interactions. Once in an alien environment, introduced species can turn out to be a threat, bringing about untold, often undesirable imbalances in the ecosystem.
The introduction of harmful aquatic organisms and pathogens to new environments via ships ballast water has been identified as one of the four greatest threats to the worlds oceans.
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