Baited camera survey of deep-sea demersal fishes of the West African oil provinces off Angola: 1200-2500m depth, East Atlantic Ocean

Alan J Jamieson, Thomas D Linley, Jessica Craig

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

10 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Deep-sea demersal fish surveys using baited cameras were undertaken in the West African oil provinces between 1297 m and 2453 m depth in 2002, 2005 and 2008. A total of 29 deployments amounting to 16,175 images encountered 31 species of bait attending deep-sea fish from 17 families. The extrapolated species richness was 34, indicating that the survey encountered over 90% of bait attending fish species in this area. The dominant species in the area were the morid Antimora rostrata, the synaphobranchids Synaphobranchus cf. kaupii and Simenchelys parasitica, the somniosid Centroscymnus coelolepis and the zoarcid Pachycara crassiceps. An unusually high diversity of bait attending macrourids was observed in addition to patchy aggregations of zoarcids. This study serves as baseline survey data on which to base future long-term environmental monitoring of fish populations in the vicinity of the West African oil provinces.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)347-364
Number of pages18
JournalMarine Environmental Research
Volume129
Early online date16 Jun 2017
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Aug 2017

Bibliographical note

Acknowledgements
We thank BP Exploration (Angola) Ltd. for organising the Block 31 environmental baseline survey. We thank Gardline Geosurvey Ltd., the Captain, crew and company of the MV Sea Trident for assistance in deploying the lander. For help in species identification we thank Natalia Chernova (Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Russia), Jørgen Nielson and Peter Møller (National History Museum of Denmark), Tomio Iwamoto (California Academy of Science, USA) and Sven Thatje (NOCS, UK). We also thank Monty Priede, Phil Bagley and Nicola Cousins (formally Oceanlab, University of Aberdeen, UK) and Ben Wigham (Newcastle University, UK) for their assistance and advice. AJJ was supported by Marine Alliance for Science and Technology for Scotland (MASTS) (Charity Number: SC045259).

Keywords

  • West African oil province
  • Deep-sea fish
  • Baited camera
  • Synaphobranchidae
  • Somniosidae
  • Zoarcidae
  • Macrouridae
  • Moridae

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