The Eastern Bering Sea Shelf The Eastern Bering Sea Shelf : oceanography and resources / edited by Donald W. Hood and John A. Calder easternberingsea00hood Year: 1981 Benthic invertebrate macro fauna 1083 I Bering. This northward increase in diversity beyond Bering Strait, somewhat at odds with most theories of high-latitude fauna, may reflect the large influx of food into this area. Apparently this influx is reliable and constant enough to permit competition and diversification of feeding techniques, resulting in increased species diversity in a region where the physical stress of the enviro
The Eastern Bering Sea Shelf The Eastern Bering Sea Shelf : oceanography and resources / edited by Donald W. Hood and John A. Calder easternberingsea00hood Year: 1981 Benthic invertebrate macro fauna 1083 I Bering. This northward increase in diversity beyond Bering Strait, somewhat at odds with most theories of high-latitude fauna, may reflect the large influx of food into this area. Apparently this influx is reliable and constant enough to permit competition and diversification of feeding techniques, resulting in increased species diversity in a region where the physical stress of the environment would normally have the opposite effect. This increased diversity in the northern Chukchi may also reflect predation pressure by marine mammals (walruses and bearded seals), which summer along the edge of the arctic pack ice. In summary, benthic standing stocks on the Bering/Chukchi shelf are determined by levels of primary productivity, current structure and velocity (both dictating food availability), and benthic-feeding fish and marine mammal predation, and only coin- cidentally by depth, sediment type, and latitude. Salinity, except perhaps near the mouths of the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers, is probably never variable enough to be a major factor, nor is dissolved oxygen content, which everywhere seems near the maximum. Winter temperatures near bottom are probably not important as a distributional influence, since they are always near the minimum over the study area. During the summer, however, these bottom temperatures may be important as a mech- anism regulating the distribution of benthic-feeding fish and may effect the reproductive potential of at least some benthic bivalves (Hall 1964). Over most of the study region, the distribution of benthos appears to be extremely patchy. This is particularly true of the central Bering shelf from St. Matthew and Nunivak islands to just north of St. Lawrence Island. The reasons for this patchiness are uncertain, but it is though
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