FOUNDATIONS FOR ECOLOGICAL RESEARCH WEST OF THE ANTARCTIC PENINSULA ANTARCTIC RESEARCH SERIES, VOLUME 70, PAGES 219-230 THE DISTRIBUTION OF ANTARCTIC MARINE BENTHIC COMMUNITIES

• Main Author: Andrew Clarke
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Antarctic; Antarctic Peninsula; Arctic; Dayton; Southern Ocean; The Antarctic; Antarc*; Antarctica; Arctic Basin
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.458.8390; http://pal.lternet.edu/docs/bibliography/Public/345lterc.pdf

The Polar Frontal Zone, although predominantly a surface feature, forms a natural northernmost boundary for defining the Southern Ocean, and relatively few benthic organisms have distributions which cross this boundary. Many Antarctic benthic plants and animals have circumpolar distributions but some broad geo-graphical subdivisions may be made. Detailed studies of community distribution are few in Antarctica, but heterogeneity has been demonstrated on all spatial scales. The Southern Ocean has a rich fauna compared with the much younger Arctic basin, and there is no convincing evidence either for or against a universallati-tudinal cline in diversity in the southern hemisphere to match that well described from the northern hemi-sphere. Shallow water distributions are strongly affected by ice-related processes, and this leads to a strong vertical zonation in the biological assemblages of sublittoral habitats. Although the study of Antarctic benthos has a long and distinguished history as far back as the work of HMS Challenger [Dell, 1972; White, 1984; Dayton, 1990; Fogg, 19941, until relatively recently most work has been de-