Sea-bed photographs (benthos) from the AWI-Hausgarten area along OFOS profile PS62/191-1

• Main Authors: Soltwedel, Thomas, von Juterzenka, Karen, Premke, Karin, Klages, Michael
• Format: Dataset
• Language: English
• Published: PANGAEA 2003
• Subjects: Archive of Underwater Imaging; ARK-XVIII/1; AUI; Fram Strait; Hausgarten; Long-term Investigation at AWI-Hausgarten off Svalbard; Ocean Floor Observation System; OFOS; Polarstern; PS62; PS62/191-1; Pacific; Svalbard
• Online Access: https://doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.227671; https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.227671

Although the use of deep-sea imagery considerably increased during the last decades, reports on nekton falls to the deep seafloor are very scarce. Whereas there are a few reports describing the finding of whale carcasses in the deep north-eastern and south-eastern Pacific, descriptions of invertebrate or vertebrate food-falls at centimetre to metre scale are extremely rare. After 4 years of extensive work at a deep-sea long-term station in northern polar regions (AWI-"Hausgarten"), including large-scale visual observations with various camera systems covering some 10 000 m2 of seafloor at water depths between 1250 and 5600 m, this paper describes the first observation of a fish carcass at about 1280 m water depth, west off Svålbard. The fish skeleton had a total length of 36 cm and an approximated biomass of 0.5 kg wet weight. On the basis of in situ experiments, we estimated a very short residence time of this particular carcass of about 7 h at the bottom. The fast response of the motile deep-sea scavenger community to such events and the rapid utilisation of this kind of organic carbon supply might partly explain the extreme rarity of such an observation.