3/9/2023 0 Comments Sea scavengersTemporal fluctuations in the quantity and quality of POC can have marked effects on the benthic community below, and some animals appear to be specially adapted to respond to these changes. Particulate organic carbon (POC) export to the deep-sea decreases exponentially with depth and is believed to play a key role in structuring deep-sea communities –. This is mainly composed of dead plankton and fecal pellets produced by zooplankton, which are exported to the deep seafloor as fine particles of ‘marine snow’. ![]() In the absence of sunlight, most animals in the deep ocean (below 200 m) are reliant on detritus from the surface waters as their primary source of food. The funders had no role in study design, data analysis, or preparation of the manuscript.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.įunding: Nicholas Higgs was supported by a Research Fellowship from the Plymouth University Marine Institute ( Andrew Gates was funded by NERC through the SERPENT Project ( Daniel Jones was funded for this work as part of the NERC Marine Environmental Mapping Programme MAREMAP ( BP ( resources for the study in the form of the video data and authorised its use for publication. Received: JanuAccepted: MaPublished: May 7, 2014Ĭopyright: © 2014 Higgs et al. Valentine, Dauphin Island Sea Lab, United States of America We postulate that these food-falls are the result of a local concentration of large marine vertebrates, linked to the high surface primary productivity in the study area.Ĭitation: Higgs ND, Gates AR, Jones DOB (2014) Fish Food in the Deep Sea: Revisiting the Role of Large Food-Falls. Rapid flux of high-quality labile organic carbon in fish carcasses increases the transfer efficiency of the biological pump of carbon from the surface oceans to the deep sea. Using best estimates of carcass mass, we calculate that the carcasses reported here represent an average supply of carbon to the local seafloor of 0.4 mg m −2d −1, equivalent to ∼4% of the normal particulate organic carbon flux. No evidence of whale-fall type communities was observed on or around the carcasses, with the exception of putative sulphide-oxidising bacterial mats that outlined one of the mobulid carcasses. Based on a global dataset of scavenging rates, we estimate that the elasmobranch carcasses provided food for mobile scavengers over extended time periods from weeks to months. ![]() ![]() The carcasses supported moderate communities of scavenging fish (up to 50 individuals per carcass), mostly from the family Zoarcidae, which appeared to be resident on or around the remains. These observations come from industrial remotely operated vehicle video surveys of the seafloor on the Angola continental margin. Here were report on the first observations of three large ‘fish-falls’ on the deep-sea floor: a whale shark ( Rhincodon typus) and three mobulid rays (genus Mobula). The carcasses of large pelagic vertebrates that sink to the seafloor represent a bounty of food to the deep-sea benthos, but natural food-falls have been rarely observed.
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