As the climate warms, boreal fish species are expected to expand into the Arctic domain. Though water temperature is an important factor driving expansion of aquatic species, other variables may play a critical role in restricting those movements. Continuous darkness during the Arctic polar night has been suggested to impair foraging in visually searching boreal fish and may thus limit their northward ...

Epifaunal communities from the poorly studied Arctic deep sea of the Chukchi Borderland region were investigated to: (1) determine differences in community structure among ridges, plateau with pockmarks, and much deeper basins as three main habitat types, (2) analyse the environmental factors that might shape these communities, and (3) investigate biogeographic affinities dominating the epifaunal ...

Many marine species are known to change their distribution in response to changing climatic conditions. One such example is the blue mussel Mytilus spp., spreading northward coincident with an increase in ocean temperatures. On Svalbard, the frst living specimens of Mytilus spp. were discovered in 2004. Here we present an analysis of the current distribution of Mytilus spp. on Svalbard, with a ...

Current knowledge of the Arctic marine ecosystem is based primarily on studies performed during the polar day on the pelagic and benthic realms. Both the polar night and the hyperbenthic layer remain as substantial knowledge gaps in our understanding of the marine system at high latitudes. This study investigated the hyperbenthic food web in Kongsfjord, a high-latitude, ice-free fjord, in September ...

Jellyfish can cause high mortality of farmed fish and hence significant economic losses for the aquaculture industry. Despite their socio-economic importance, distribution and diversity data on gelatinous plankton are scarce from northern Norwegian fjords and other Nordic systems. Intense blooms of jellyfish have repeatedly been observed in Ryggefjord, Finnmark (Norway), sometimes concurrent with ...

Predation shapes marine benthic communities and affects prey species population dynamics in tropic and temperate coastal systems. However, information on its magnitude in systematically understudied Arctic coastal habitats is scarce. To test predation effects on the diversity and structure of Arctic benthic communities, we conducted caging experiments in which consumers were excluded from plots at ...

Mesopelagic sound scattering layers (SSL) are ubiquitous in all oceans. Pelagic organisms within the SSL play important roles as prey for higher trophic levels and in climate regulation through the biological carbon pump. Yet, the biomass and species composition of SSL in the Arctic Ocean remain poorly documented, particularly in winter. A multifrequency echosounder detected a SSL north of Svalbard, ...

The Barents Sea (BS) is a high-latitude shelf ecosystem with important fisheries, high and historically variable harvesting pressure, and ongoing high variability in climatic conditions. To quantify carbon flow pathways and assess if changes in harvesting intensity and climate variability have affected the BS ecosystem, we modeled the ecosystem for the period 1950–2013 using a highly trophically ...

Pelagic–benthic coupling describes the connection between surface-water production and seafloor habitats via energy, nutrient and mass exchange. Massive ice loss and warming in the poorly studied Arctic Chukchi Borderland are hypothesized to affect this coupling. The strength of pelagic–benthic coupling was compared between 2 years varying in climate settings, 2005 and 2016, based on δ¹³C and ...