A descriptive account of benthic macrofauna and sediment from an area of planned petroleum exploration in the southern Caspian Sea

Parr, T.D.; Tait, R.D.; Maxon, C.L.; Newton, F. Charles; Hardin, John

doi:10.1016/j.ecss.2006.07.018

Cited by 25 publications

(24 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…Similar patterns of elevated species richness in Intermediate Layers were observed in ancient lakes Tanganyika (Michel, 1994), Baikal (Sitnikova, 2006) and Titicaca (Dejoux, 1992). In contrast, the Caspian Sea shows a rather continuous decline of species richness and density with increasing water depth (Parr et al, 2007). However, elevated species richness in shallow parts is suggested to be a general feature of ancient lakes (Martens, 1997).…”

Section: Hotspots Of Species Richnessmentioning

confidence: 89%

“…Variance partitioning (see Peres-Neto et al, 2006 for methological details) have been shown to be an adequate method to assess whether niche or neutral based processes drive biodiversity (Smith and Lundholm, 2010). In order to explain the similarity of gastropod communities in Lake Ohrid, we partitioned the variance into two fractions, one accounting for niche based and one for neutral processes.…”

Section: Explanatory Variables Of Community Compositionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…According to Peres-Neto et al (2006), the partitioning of variance into fractions should be unbiased, that is, fractions with more degrees of freedom have to be penalized. The resulting R 2 adj allows for a direct comparison of predictor fractions.…”

Section: Explanatory Variables Of Community Compositionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Spatially explicit analysis of gastropod biodiversity in ancient Lake Ohrid

et al. 2011

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Abstract. The quality of spatial analyses of biodiversity is improved by (i) utilizing study areas with well defined physiogeographical boundaries, (ii) limiting the impact of widespread species, and (iii) using taxa with heterogeneous distributions. These conditions are typically met by ecosystems such as oceanic islands or ancient lakes and their biota. While research on ancient lakes has contributed significantly to our understanding of evolutionary processes, statistically sound studies of spatial variation of extant biodiversity have been hampered by the frequently vast size of ancient lakes, their limited accessibility, and the lack of scientific infrastructure. The European ancient Lake Ohrid provides a rare opportunity for such a reliable spatial study. The comprehensive horizontal and vertical sampling of a speciesrich taxon, the Gastropoda, presented here, revealed interesting patterns of biodiversity, which, in part, have not been shown before for other ancient lakes.In a total of 284 samples from 224 different locations throughout the Ohrid Basin, 68 gastropod species, with 50 of them (= 73.5%) being endemic, could be reported. The spatial distribution of these species shows the following characteristics: (i) within Lake Ohrid, the most frequent species are endemic taxa with a wide depth range, (ii) widespread species (i.e. those occurring throughout the Balkans or beyond) are rare and mainly occur in the upper layer of the lake, (iii) while the total number of species decreases with water depth, the proportion of endemics increases, and (iv) the deeper layers of Lake Ohrid appear to have a higher spatial homogeneity of biodiversity. Moreover, gastropod communities of Lake Ohrid and its feeder springs are both distinct from each other and from the surrounding waters. The analysis also shows that community similarity of Lake Correspondence to: T. Hauffe (torsten.hauffe@bio.uni-giessen.de) Ohrid is mainly driven by niche processes (e.g. environmental factors), but also by neutral processes (e.g. dispersal limitation and evolutionary histories of species). For niche-based mechanisms it is shown that large scale effects such as type of water body or water depth are mainly responsible for the similarity of gastropod communities, whereas small scale effects like environmental gradients affect gastropod compositions only marginally. In fact, neutral processes appear to be more important than the small scale environmental factors, thus emphasizing the importance of dispersal capacities and evolutionary histories of species.

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Section: Hotspots Of Species Richnessmentioning

confidence: 89%

Section: Explanatory Variables Of Community Compositionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Spatially explicit analysis of gastropod biodiversity in ancient Lake Ohrid

et al. 2011

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“…The studies of macrobenthos from the western shelf are not representative unfortunately. Guseinov's (2005) data are from 2001, and thus, probably predate the possible A. aurita immigration from the Turkmen shelf, whereas Parr et al (2007) have few stations at depths \100 m where scyphistoma sightings may be anticipated. The southern shelf has decent station coverage (Roohi et al 2010;Taheri and Foshtomi 2011), and therefore, it seems likely that scyphistomae were absent or rare here until at least 2006, the last year for which the data are presented.…”

Section: The First Record Of Caspian Scyphistomaementioning

confidence: 99%

Invading Aurelia aurita has established scyphistoma populations in the Caspian Sea

2012

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The Caspian Sea has no endemic Scyphozoa. In 1999, a mass accumulation of Aurelia medusae was recorded, indicating that sometime earlier, jellyfish had invaded the basin, but since then no scyphozoans have been reported in the Caspian. In the fall of 2008, we found scyphistomae (scyphoid polyps) during a cruise to the eastern Middle Caspian. The scyphistomae were numerous (100-10,000 ind. m -2 ) and occupied a depth range of 30-73 m. Genetic data (18S rDNA, ITS-1 and COI) showed that the scyphistomae belonged to the species A. aurita. The current genetic data set is insufficient to determine the source region(s) of the invasive A. aurita. It remains unclear why no moon jellies have been recorded in the Caspian in the last 10 years. Because swarming scyphomedusae are often pests, the presence of scyphistomae should be considered as a warning of a possible outbreak of A. aurita medusae in the Caspian.

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“…While the Northern basin of Caspian Sea is extremely shallow (depth<25 m), the central and the Southern basins exhibit deep regions where depths reach approximately 800 and 1000 m, respectively [1,2]. Three main sources of inflows are present: river runoff (79%-80% of it coming from the Volga river), rainfall (20%) and groundwater inflow (1%) [3], while outflow is exclusively a result of evaporation.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%