Deep-Sea Species Richness: Regional and Local Diversity Estimates from Quantitative Bottom Samples

Abstract

The deep-sea communities of the continental slope and rise off the eastern coast of the United States have a remarkably high diversity-measured regionally or locally either as species richness or as the evenness of relative abundance among species. In a 1,500-2,500-m depth range off New Jersey and Delaware, 233 30 x 30-cm samples contained 798 species in 171 families and 14 phyla. Addition of stations from sites to the north and south approximately doubled the number of samples and doubled the number of species to 1,597. Species-area curves do not level off within stations or when stations are added together. Moreover, the proportion of species represented by single individuals is high at all scales of sampling, which indicates that much more sampling is needed to adequately represent the species richness either locally or regionally. Diversity changes very little through time at a single site or with distance along a 180-km transect at a depth of 2,100 m. Diversity is maintained by a combination of biogenic microhabitat heterogeneity in a system with few barriers to dispersal, disturbance created by feeding activities of larger animals, and food resources divided into patches of a few square meters to square centimeters initiated by specific temporally separated events.