Marine & Environmental Sciences Faculty Articles

ORCID

0000-0002-5280-7071

ResearcherID

W-8662-2019

Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Frontiers in Marine Science

ISSN

2296-7745

Publication Date

2-21-2020

Keywords

Deep-sea crustaceans, Mesopelagic, Euphausiacea, Gulf of Mexico, Vertical migrations

Abstract

The vertical and horizontal distributions of Euphausiacea in the northern Gulf of Mexico (GOM), including the location of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, were analyzed from 340 trawl samples collected between April and June 2011. This study is the first comprehensive survey of euphausiid distributions from depths deeper than 1000 m in the GOM and includes stratified sampling from five discrete depth ranges (0–200 m, 200–600 m, 600–1000 m, 1000–1200 m, and 1200–1500 m), and expands the depth ranges of 30 species. In addition, this study demonstrates significantly higher abundance and biomass of the euphausiid assemblage from slope vs. offshore stations, while the offshore assemblage was significantly more diverse. There is also some evidence for seasonality in reproduction amongst the seven species that had gravid females. Lastly, these data represent the first quantification of the euphausiid assemblage in the region heavily impacted by the Deepwater Horizon event, and as there are no pre-spill data, may serve as an impacted baseline against which to monitor changes in the euphausiid assemblage in the years following exposure to Deepwater Horizon oil and dispersants in the water column.

DOI

10.3389/fmars.2020.00099

Volume

7

Issue

99

First Page

1

Last Page

14

Comments

©2020 Frank, Fine, Burdett, Cook and Sutton. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Peer Reviewed

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