The Weddell Sea is one of Earth’s most remote and least studied regions. The region around the Larsen C Ice shelf has been largely inaccessible because of its remoteness, extreme cold, rough seas, ice cover, and deep waters. This study documents the first discovery of maintained nesting sites of Lindbergichthys nudifrons (yellowfin notie) in the western Weddell Sea. Nesting sites were found at all locations surveyed during the...

Food web interactions govern how ecosystems respond to climate change and biodiversity loss. Modularity, where subgroups of species interact more often with each other than with species outside their subgroup, is a key structural feature which has been linked to food web stability. We sought to address the lack of understanding of how modularity varies among ecosystems by comparing the structure of four highly resolved marine...

Human populations near ecosystems are used as both a proxy for dependency on ecosystems, and conversely to estimate threats. Consequently, the number of people living near coral reefs is often used in regional coral reef management, evaluation of risk at regional and global scales, and even considerations of funding needs. Human populations and their statistics, are ever‐changing and data relating to coral reefs have not been...

Growing human activity in areas beyond national jurisdiction (ABNJ) is driving increasing impacts on the biodiversity of this vast area of the ocean. As a result, the United Nations General Assembly committed to convening a series of intergovernmental conferences (IGCs) to develop an international legally-binding instrument (ILBI) for the conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity of ABNJ [the biodiversity...

Long held notions of the universally asocial octopus are being challenged due to the identification of high-density and interacting octopus populations in Australia, Indonesia, Japan and the deep sea. This study experimentally assessed the social tolerance and presence of potential prey items of Caribbean reef octopus , Octopus briareus, in a tropical marine lake (25°21′40″N, 76°30′40″W) on the island of Eleuthera, The Bahamas...

The ocean plays a crucial role in the functioning of the Earth System and in the provision of vital goods and services. The United Nations (UN) declared 2021–2030 as the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development. The Roadmap for the Ocean Decade aims to achieve six critical societal outcomes (SOs) by 2030, through the pursuit of four objectives (Os). It specifically recognizes the scarcity of biological data for d...

Aim For many deep‐sea fisheries, there is an urgent management requirement for information on the presence of vulnerable marine ecosystems ( VME s). Gathering deep‐sea data using conventional techniques can be expensive and time‐consuming. One way to provide a relatively rapid assessment of VME presence is to use data from fisheries by‐catch and historical scientific observations. Our aim was to predict suitable habitat for oc...

Aim Three‐quarters of Octocorallia species are found in deep waters. These cold‐water octocoral colonies can form a major constituent of structurally complex habitats. The global distribution and the habitat requirements of deep‐sea octocorals are poorly understood given the expense and difficulties of sampling at depth. Habitat suitability models are useful tools to extrapolate distributions and provide an understanding of ec...