Biology of the Antarctic Seas XVII
ISBN: 9781118666708
Platform/Publisher: WOL / American Geophysical Union
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Unlimited; Download: Unlimited
Subjects: Earth Space & Environmental Sciences; Earth Sciences;

Published by the American Geophysical Union as part of the Antarctic Research Series, Volume 44.

This volume includes three diverse studies on the fauna of the Antarctic seas. The first concerns feeding preference of an echinoderm, the brittle star Asterotoma Agassizii, collected on the continental shelf off South Georgia and along the Antarctic Peninsula between 1975 and 1983. Stomach contents revealed a diet consisting of, in order of their abundance, copepods, mysids, chaetognaths, and euphausiids, and also unidentified crustacean and organic remains, ostracodes, and amphipods. The presence of both herbiverous and predatory copepods in the diet suggested to the authors that carbon fixed in surface waters may be transferred to the benthos within a year. The second study concerns pelagic shrimps of the family Oplophoridae collected in the Pacific sector mainly during USNS Eltanin cruises between 1963 and 1966, The material comprised five genera with 10 species, including two new species. Keys are presented for the recognition of oplophorid genera and species, and the patterns of distribution of species are related to major hydrographic regions. The third study concerns seabirds observed in the South Atlantic during a cruise of the ARA Islas Orcadas to South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands in May and June 1975 and supplements the few records of bird observations in that area made during the late austral autumn. The observations are presented as an annotated list and in tables. Some correlation was observed between bird distribution and surface water temperature, but zonation patterns were not pronounced.

Louis S. Kornicker is the editor of Biology of the Antarctic Seas XVII , published by Wiley.


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