The study of marine food web models has increased during the last years, but input data of important groups such as cephalopods are missing sometimes which restricts the quality of the model results. Cephalopods feed on a variety of preys, ranging from small crustaceans to large commercially important fish species. In turn, they are taken by larger invertebrates, fish, cephalopods, marine mammals and seabirds, which emphasizes...

Squid play a major role in the Southern Ocean food web. However, their age and growth remain poorly studied. Here, using upper and lower beaks of Moroteuthopsis longimana collected from the diet of Dissostichus mawsoni from Pacific and Atlantic sectors of the Southern Ocean , we studied: (1) Feasibility of using beaks collected from predators’ stomachs to study the age of Southern Ocean oceanic squid; and (2) Age estimation an...

Global studies imply that cephalopods have benefited from climate change. However, in most areas, species-specific long-term cephalopod data sets do not exist to support this implication and to analyse the response of cephalopods to environmental changes. Our results illustrate that historical studies, in combination with recent data sets, can fill this gap, enabling descriptions of ecological changes over a long time. We show...

The deep sea is among the largest, most biologically diverse, yet least-explored ecosystems on Earth. Baseline information on deep-sea biodiversity is crucial for understanding ecosystem functioning and for detecting community changes. Here, we established a baseline of cephalopod community composition and distribution off Cabo Verde, an archipelago in the eastern tropical Atlantic. This baseline served to test the hypothesis...

Observations of the diversity, distribution and abundance of pelagic fauna are absent for many ocean regions in the Atlantic, but baseline data are required to detect changes in communities as a result of climate change. Gelatinous fauna are increasingly recognized as vital players in oceanic food webs, but sampling these delicate organisms in nets is challenging. Underwater (in situ) observations have provided unprecedented i...

There is a need for cost-efficient tools to explore deep-ocean ecosystems to collect baseline biological observations on pelagic fauna (zooplankton and nekton) and establish the vertical ecological zonation in the deep sea. The Pelagic In situ Observation System (PELAGIOS) is a 3000 m rated slowly (0.5 m s−1) towed camera system with LED illumination, an integrated oceanographic sensor set (CTD-O2) and telemetry allowing for o...

This study explores non-metric multidimensional scaling (nMDS) as a tool for investigating parasites as indicators of the elasmobranch biology. An attractive feature of nMDS is its ability to allow assemblage-level parasite data to be simultaneously applied to questions of host biology. This method was examined using the tapeworm order Trypanorhyncha Diesing, 1863, which is known to be transmitted among their hosts through the...