Electrical pulse trawling is an alternative to conventional beam for common sole ( Solea solea ), with the potential higher revenues and less impact on marine ecosystem. Concerns exist, however, that benthic invertebrates might be seriously affected by fishing. Even if direct injuries mortality were limited, changes in behaviour compromise their survival, potentially large impacts food webs. He...

AMBI and Bentix are widely used benthic indices for guiding remediation decisions under two major pieces of environmental legislation in Europe—the Water Framework Directive (WFD) and the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD). These indices usually incorporate all living marine benthic invertebrates in a sample. Some recent studies, however, have applied these benthic indices to only mollu...

A previously undescribed fauna of primitive brachyurans of the family Prosopidae is reported from sponge bioherms in eastern Romania. One new species, Cycloprosopon dobrogea, and several other forms, constitute the brachyuran fauna. The sponge bioherms, which attain a height of 30 meters, have yielded an abundant, but not overly diverse, array of benthic invertebrates. Some of the brachyuran sp...

Estuaries, compared to offshore waters, are often characterized as habitats in which the biomass of aquatic organisms is high but their diversity is low. Standard reference works [e.g. (Kinne, 1971)] and textbooks on estuarine ecology [e.g. (Day et al., 1989)] present inverse relationships between species abundance and salinity, typically for benthic invertebrates. Variability of the environmen...

Ecological interactions, such as predation and bioturbation, are thought to be fundamental determinants of macroevolutionary trends. A data set containing global occurrences of Phanerozoic fossils of benthic marine invertebrates shows escalatory trends in the relative frequency of ecological groups, such as carnivores and noncarnivorous infaunal or mobile organisms. Associations between these t...

BACKGROUND Long-term benthic monitoring is rewarding in terms of science, but labour-intensive, whether in the field, the laboratory, or behind the computer. Building and managing databases require multiple skills, including consistency over time as well as organisation via a systematic approach. Here, we introduce and share our spatially explicit benthic database, comprising 11 years of benthi...

Coral reefs are often termed underwater wonderlands due to the presence of an incredible biodiversity including numerous invertebrates and vertebrates. Among the dense population of benthic and bottom-dwelling inhabitants of the reef, many significant species remain hidden or neglected by researchers. One such example is the vermetids, a unique group of marine gastropods. The present study atte...

Benthic–pelagic couplingmediated by bivalves has been shown to increase the flow of energy towards the benthos. To assess the capability of clams to process and therewith modify the quality of pelagic food sources for subsequent use by benthic invertebrates, we conducted a growth experiment in which juvenile Gammarus roeseliiwere raised either directly on sedimented pelagic autotrophs (algae, c...