The intertidal and shallow subtidal food web of sub-antarctic Marion Island

• Main Author: Blankley, William Oliver
• Other Authors: Branch, George M
• Format: Master Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: Department of Biological Sciences 1982
• Subjects: Zoology; Antarc*; Antarctic; Marion Island; Prince Edward Islands; Prince Edward Island
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/11427/9970

Bibliography: leaves 126-128. The sub-Antarctic Prince Edward Island group, consisting of Marion Island and Prince Edward Island (Fig. 1), was annexed by South Africa in 1947-1948 and subsequently declared a nature reserve. Isolated oceanic islands have always presented interesting opportunities for biological research on both the marine mammals and birds which use them for breeding purposes and the resident, often specially adapted, fauna and flora which colonise them. The ice-capped, windy and wet Marion and Prince Edward Islands are young volcanic islands, less than 300000 years old, and house a considerably less diverse biota than the much older Crozet and Kerguelen sub-Antarctic Archipelagos (Van Zinderen Bakker, 1971). In view of the relative simplicity, small size and isolation of the Marion Island ecosystem one of the major goals of the South African Scientific Committee for Antarctic Research (SASCAR) has been to provide a comprehensive model describing the functioning of the system. Thus since the start of official biological research in 1965 many studies have been undertaken in the fields of ornithology, plant ecology, mammalogy and limnology. Marine biological research has been relatively neglected and at the outset of the present project the only work available on the Marion Island littoral fauna, apart from various taxonomic reports, was that of De Villiers (1976) who described species composition and zonation patterns of the shores. The present study, along with Mr Peter Haxen's research on the inshore macro-algae, was aimed at bridging the gap in our knowledge of the intertidal and shallow subtidal communities of Marion Island.