Mesopelagic fishes play critical ecological roles by sequestering carbon, recycling nutrients, and acting as a key trophic link between primary consumers higher levels. They are also an important food source for harvestable economically valuable fish stocks shallow deep-sea ecosystems. Despite their relevance, mesopelagic ecosystems increasingly threatened direct indirect human activities while...

The diet of Antarctic silverfish Pleuragramma antarcticum was evaluated by examining stomach contents of specimens collected in the Ross Sea (71°-77° S; 165°-180° E) in January to March 2008. Pleuragramma antarcticum (50-236 mm standard length, L(S)) and prey items were analysed for stable-isotopic composition of carbon and nitrogen. According to index of relative importance (I(RI) ), which inc...

Forty-seven species of eight families of stomiatoid fishes were collected in the upper 1,000 m near Hawaii. Most species appear to undertake diurnal vertical migrations; only two definitely did not. Many of the abundant species showed changes in size composition within both day and night depth ranges, the smaller fish occurring shallower. All sizes of several other species appeared to occur thr...

The South Sandwich Islands (SSI) are a biologically productive archipelago situated in the eastern Scotia Sea to south of eastward flowing Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC). islands support important populations higher predators, including several penguin species, seals and humpback whales. Despite this, plankton ecology region has been little studied information on mesoscale structure enviro...

This report describes the methods and data sources used to estimate ecological parameters and to construct mass-balance models of oceanic ecosystem of the Atlantic using the Ecopath with Ecosim (EwE) software. Six models were constructed representing oceanic ecosystems of the North, Central and South Atlantic for the 1950s and the late 1990s (1997-1998). The first section of this report charact...