Abstract
The East-Siberian Sea (ESS) plays a significant role in circulation of surface water and biological production in the Arctic, yet due to its remote location and historically difficult sampling conditions remains the most understudied of all Arctic shelf seas, with even baseline information on biological communities absent in literature. We aim to fill this gap by describing the distribution and community structure of mesozooplankton in the ESS and the adjacent Arctic Ocean based on recent (September 2009, 2015) as well as historical (August–September 1946, 1948) observations. We found that the overall biomass and abundance during our studies were significantly lower than in the adjacent Chukchi Sea, but higher than historical estimates from the ESS, around 25–35 mg DW m−3. The diversity was low and characteristic for other Arctic shelf seas, with increasing number of species in deeper waters. Biomass was highest at the shelf break, where it approached 70 mg DW m−3, and was mainly composed of the large copepod Calanus glacialis. On the shelf, abundance and biomass were low (10–20 mg DW m−3) and was dominated by small copepods and chaetognaths. Several distinct assemblages of zooplankton were identified and related to the physical properties of the water masses present. A striking result was the presence of both Atlantic and Pacific expatriates in offshore waters close to the shelf break, but generally not on the shelf itself. Tracking these advected organisms could be a useful tool in determining the pathways, extent, and transit time of Atlantic and Pacific water entering the Arctic.
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Acknowledgements
The shipboard collections of zooplankton were conducted within and with financial support of the NABOS-2015 program, and the authors acknowledge Kathy Crane, Igor Polyakov, Vladimir Ivanov, Vladimir Gagarin, Dmitry Kulagin, as well as the crew and scientists of RV “Professor Tryoshnikov”. We thank Elena Markhaseva and Russell Hopcroft for providing additional data from previous expeditions. The work of EE has been jointly funded by UiT the Arctic university of Norway and the Tromsø Research Foundation under the project "Arctic Seasonal Ice Zone Ecology", project number 01vm/h15. Data processing and manuscript preparation was supported by the Russian Ministry of Science and Education, agreement number 298 14.616.21.0078 (RFMEFI61617X0078). We thank the three anonymous reviewers who improved the manuscript with their comments.
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Supplementary file1—a Results of non-metric multidimensional scaling and cluster analysis of fourth log transformed zooplankton biomass in the East-Siberian Sea during September 2015 and b locations of clusters along the sampled transects. Each symbol represents one sample; symbol types represent sampled depth strata; colors indicate significant clusters. Vectors show correlations of species abundances and physical parameters to the ordination (with length reflecting the correlation coefficient r) (PDF 399 kb)
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Ershova, E.A., Kosobokova, K.N. Cross-shelf structure and distribution of mesozooplankton communities in the East-Siberian Sea and the adjacent Arctic Ocean. Polar Biol 42, 1353–1367 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00300-019-02523-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00300-019-02523-2