Deep octopod habitat in the western North Atlantic characterized by Standard Ecological Classification from videos

Abstract

Habitat characterization is important to assess fully the niches of different organisms. There is a large knowledge gap regarding habitat use by deep‐sea benthic incirrate octopods, partly due to their assumed preference for hard‐to‐sample rocky substrata. This study uses observations from in situ videos recorded by remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) deployed from the NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer and implements the Coastal and Marine Ecological Classification Standard (CMECS) to describe the habitat of three common species of bathyal incirrate octopods living in the western North Atlantic Ocean: Bathypolypus bairdii (Verrill 1873), Graneledone verrucosa (Verrill 1881), and Muusoctopus johnsonianus (Allcock, Strugnell, Ruggiero, & Collins 2006). Significant differences in species' preferences for geoform setting, depth, and substrate type were found. All three species are most likely to be observed by ROV in a submarine canyon and least likely to be seen on a seamount. B. bairdii was found shallower than G. verrucosa and M. johnsonianus. This is the first study of its kind using CMECS to classify the habitat of specific organisms as opposed to the habitat types in a specific area.

Long-term annual trawl data show shifts in cephalopod community in the western Barents sea during 18 years

“…Underwater imagery analyses has been applied in biodiversity assessments of cephalopod communities (e.g., Merten et al, 2021;Pratt et al, 2021, Pratt et al, 2023. For example, G. fabricii was recorded in the central Arctic Ocean under ice by a mooring camera system (Snoeijs-Leijonmalm et al, 2022), and Arctic cirrate octopods were documented to perform benthopelagic migrations (Golikov et al, 2023b).…”

“…On the other hand, presumably natural cephalopod behavior has been documented repeatedly via in situ observations of remotely operated vehicles (e.g., Hoving and Robison, 2012;Hoving et al, 2013b;Hoving and Haddock, 2017). Benthic cephalopods are often hard to identify to species level from images (e.g., Pratt et al, 2021;Robinson et al, 2021;Snoeijs-Leijonmalm et al, 2022; and many others). To summarise, currently trawling, eDNA and video imagery each have their strengths and weaknesses, and the best results are rendered by combining them (e.g., Thomsen et al, 2016;Merten et al, 2021;Kopp et al, 2023).…”