Density of Marine Benthic Communities off West Africa

Abstract

RECENTLY, Thorson¹ has suggested that a series of related marine benthic communities might occur on level sea-bottoms from the Arctic to the tropics, similar communities occurring on similar deposits irrespective of latitude, and he directed attention to the possibility of studying, in these communities, growth-rates and recruitment of stock under similar ecological conditions in cold and in warm seas. Although there is now fairly extensive knowledge of the density of benthic communities in temperate, boreal and arctic waters, there is no comparable information from tropical seas; Sparck² has presented data derived from a few quantitative stations worked in the Gulf of Guinea with a van Veen sampler, but these were mostly in deep water off the continental shelf. All the other quantitative surveys in the tropics appear to have been concerned with the fauna of coral reefs.