The distribution of the taxa Eurycletodes Sars, 1909 and Mesocletodes Sars, 1909 in the Eastern Atlantic Ocean: a comparison between deep sea and seamount fauna
Our knowledge about large scale distribution of harpacticoids in the deep sea is still very limited. Mainly because of two reasons: concerning meiofauna the oceans in general are undersampled 2) each time sampling the deep sea we find a lot of new species, which will never be described and just get numbers valuable for the single study. So the studies get stuck in ecological analyses and are in taxonomical terms not comparable to others. That is the reason why the present study focuses on two supraspecific taxa to cover a large geographical range. This study shows the species distribution of the taxa Mesocletodes Sars, 1909 and Eurycletodes Sars, 1909 in the deep sea and on two seamounts in the Eastern Atlantic Ocean between Azores (38°40’N) and Cape of Good Hope (34°50’S). The material studied was collected during the cruises of RV Meteor DIVA 1 (2000), DIVA 2 (2005), OASIS (2003) and M42/3 (1998). 9 deep sea stations between 2800m and 4500m depth and the summits of Seine Seamount (200m) and Great Meteor Bank (400m) were sampled using multicorer, boxcorer and epibenthos-sledge. Questions we tried to answer with this study are: Are there geographical barriers in the deep sea? Are there any barriers for the distribution of harpacticoid copepods? Are seamounts colonized from the deep sea?