Observations of fauna attending wood and bone deployments from two seamounts on the Southwest Indian Ridge
Observations of fauna attending wood and bone deployments from two seamounts on the Southwest Indian Ridge
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DOI：
10.1016/j.dsr2.2015.07.003
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发表时间：
2017-02-01
影响因子：
3
通讯作者：
Glover, Adrian G.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Amon, Diva J.;Copley, Jonathan T.;Glover, Adrian G.
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The Southwest Indian Ridge is an ultraslow-spreading mid-ocean ridge with numerous poorly-explored seamounts. The benthic fauna of seamounts are thought to be highly heterogeneous, within even small geographic areas. Here we report observations from a two-year opportunistic experiment, which was comprised of two deployments of mango wood and whale bones. One was deployed at 732 m on Coral Seamount (similar to 32 degrees S) and the other at 750 m on Atlantis Bank (similar to 41 degrees S), two areas with little background faunal knowledge and a significant distance from the continental shelf. The packages mimic natural organic falls, large parcels of food on the deep-sea floor that are important in fulfilling the nutritional needs and providing shelter and substratum for many deep-sea animals. A large number of species colonised the deployments: 69 species at Coral Seamount and 42 species at Atlantis Bank. The two colonising assemblages were different, however, with only 11 species in common. This is suggestive of both differing environmental conditions and potentially, barriers to dispersal between these seamounts. Apart from Xylophaga and Idas bivalves, few organic-fall specialists were present. Several putative new species have been observed, and three new species have been described from the experiments thus far. It is not clear, however, whether this is indicative of high degrees of endemism or simply a result of under sampling at the regional level. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.