Some Quantitative Comparisons of Offshore Meiobenthos and Macrobenthos South of Martha's Vineyard

Abstract

Quantitative samples were taken from the offshore arca south of Martha's Vineyard,

Abundance and Biomass of the Meiobenthos in Nearshore Lake Michigan with Comparisons to the Macrobenthos

“…Mean biomass of the macrobenthos at our site was 4.7 gjm2, compared to a maxmimum of about 1.5 gj m 2 in these other freshwater lakes. Ratios in nearshore marine waters range from 12:1 to 90:1 (Stripp 1969, Wigley andMcintyre 1964, andothers).…”

Meiobenthos of the Deep Northeast Atlantic

“…Data on meiobenthic distributions are available for a number of geographical regions other than the northeast Atlantic: the northwest Atlantic (Wigley and McIntyre, 1964;Tietjen, 1971;Coull et ai.., 1977;Sibuet et ai., 1984;Thistle et ai., 1985), the Pacific Ocean (Thiel, 1975;Shirayama, 1984a, b;Snider et ai., 1984), the Mediterranean and Red Sea (Dinet et ai., 1973;Thiel, 1975;Dinet, 1976;Vivier, 1978;Thiel, 1979aThiel et ai., 1987;Soetaert et ai., 1991a, b;Pfannkuche, 1993a), from the/Norwegian Sea (Dinet, 1979), from the Greenland, Norwegian Sea and Indian Ocean (Thiel, 1975;Jensen, 1988), the Arctic Ocean , and the southeast Atlantic (Soltwedel, 1993). …”

“…Since the first quantitative investigation by Wigley and McIntyre (1964), data on deep-sea meiobenthos have been gathered from all oceans and attempts made to relate the broad geographical patterns observed to various environmental factors" On a planetary scale, one of the major environmental gradients is created by the slope of the ocean floor, a gradient which has important effects on benthic communities. As in the case of macrobenthos , the data available on meiobenthic densities in deep-sea environments also show trends which can be related to the amount and nature of organic matter reaching the seafloor Shirayama, 1983;Pfannkuche, 1985;Pfannkuche and Thiel, 1987).…”

Energy Flow in a Tidal Flat Ecosystem

“…1974) or by the body-weight categories (Fenchel, 1978); in general, micro-and meiofauna are considered to comprise the group of organisms that passes through 0.5 or 1.0 mm mesh sizes, while microfauna alone passes through 0.04 to 0.1 mm. The biomass of these categories in the natural sediment is low when expressed as a percentage of macrobenthos biomass at the same positions: 3 '10 (Sanders, 1960), 6.6 % (McIntyre, 1961), 4.2 % (Wigley and McIntyre, 1964 Thorson (1966), Fenchel (1969, Gerlach (1971) and Perkins (1974). According to the basic principle that metabolism is a function of body surface rather than of body weight, Fenchel (1969) expressed metabolism in different size categories of organisms in the bottom community of different Danish bays a s K $ F where W = body weight.…”