Cameras and carcasses: historical and current methods for using artificial food falls to study deep-water animals

Deep-ocean animals remain poorly understood compared to their shallow-water relatives, mainly because of the great cost and difficulty involved in obtaining reliable ecological data. This is a serious issue as exploitation of deep-water resources progresses without sufficient data being available to assess its risks and impacts. First described almost 40 years ago, the use of baited cameras was pioneered by deep-sea biologists and is now a widely used technique for the assessing patterns of animal behaviour, abundance and biodiversity. The technique provides a non-destructive and cost-effective means of collecting data, where other techniques such as trawling are difficult or impractical. This review will first describe the evolution of baited camera techniques in deep-sea research from the early deployments, through recent programs to investigate trends in animal distribution with depth, latitude, and ocean basin. In the second section the techniques used for imaging, baiting, and analysis are synthesized, with special consideration for the modeling techniques used in assessing animal abundance and biomass

Long-term change in benthopelagic fish abundance in the abyssal northeast Pacific Ocean

Food web structure, particularly the relative importance of bottom-up and top-down control of animal abundances, is poorly known for the Earth's largest habitats: the abyssal plains. A unique 15-yr time series of climate, productivity, particulate flux, and abundance of primary consumers (primarily echinoderms) and secondary consumers (fish) was examined to elucidate the response of trophic levels to temporal variation in one another. Towed camera sled deployments in the abyssal northeast Pacific (4100 m water depth) showed that annual mean numbers of the dominant fish genus (Coryphaenoides spp.) more than doubled over the period 1989-2004. Coryphaenoides spp. abundance was significantly correlated with total abundance of mobile epibenthic megafauna (echinoderms), with changes in fish abundance lagging behind changes in the echinoderms. Direct correlations between surface climate and fish abundances, and particulate organic carbon (POC) flux and fish abundances, were insignificant, which may be related to the varied response of the potential prey taxa to climate and POC flux. This Study provides a fare opportunity to study the long-term dynamics of an unexploited marine fish population and Suggests a dominant role for bottom-up control in this system

Winter residency and site association in the critically endangered North East Atlantic spurdog (Squalus acanthias)

Identification and incorporation of residential behaviour into elasmobranch management plans has the potential to substantially increase their effectiveness by identifying sites where Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) might be used to help conserve species with high migratory potential. There is evidence that spurdog (Squalus acanthias) displays site association in some parts of its global distribution, but this has currently not been shown within the North East Atlantic where it is critically endangered. Here we investigate the movements of electronically tagged spurdog within Loch Etive, a sea loch on the west coast of Scotland. Archival data storage tags (DSTs), that recorded depth and temperature, revealed that mature female spurdog over wintered within the loch, restricting their movements to the upper basin, and remaining either in the loch or the local vicinity for the rest of the year. This finding was supported by evidence for limited movements from conventional mark/recapture data and acoustically tagged individual spurdog. Some of the movements between the loch basins appear to be associated with breeding and parturition events. This high level of site association suggests that spatial protection of the loch would aid the conservation of different age and sex classes of spurdog

Absolute abundance estimates from shallow water baited underwater camera surveys; a stochastic modelling approach tested against field data

This research was supported by a University of Glasgow Faculty Scholarship to KMD, a Collaborative Gearing Scheme grant from the Natural Environmental Research Council and the British Antarctic Survey (CGS-77) and an ASSEMBLE infrastructure access grant to DMB.Baited underwater cameras are becoming a popular tool to monitor fish and invertebrate populations within protected and inshore environments where trawl surveys are unsuitable. Modelling the arrival times of deep-sea grenadiers using an inverse square relationship has enabled abundance estimates, comparable to those from bottom trawl surveys, to be gathered from deep-sea baited camera surveys. Baited underwater camera systems in the shallow water environments are however, currently limited to relative comparisons of assemblages based on simple metrics such as MaxN (maximum number of fish seen at any one time). This study describes a stochastic simulation approach used to model the behaviour of fish and invertebrates around a BUC system to enable absolute abundance estimates to be generated from arrival patterns. Species-specific models were developed for the tropical reef fishes the black tip grouper (Epinephelus fasciatus) and moray eel (Gymnothorax spp.) and the Antarctic scavengers; the asteroid (Odontaster validus) and the nemertean worm (Parbolasia corrugatus). A sensitivity analysis explored the impact of input parameters on the arrival patterns (MaxN, time to the arrival of the first individual and the time to reach MaxN) for each species generated by the model. Sensitivity analysis showed a particularly strong link between MaxN and abundance indicating that this model could be used to generate absolute abundances from existing or future MaxN data. It in effect allows the slope of the MaxN vs. abundance relationship to be estimated. Arrival patterns generated by each model were used to estimate population abundance for the focal species and these estimates were compared to data from underwater visual census transects. Using a Bland-Altman analysis, baited underwater camera data processed using this model were shown to generate absolute abundance estimates that were comparable to underwater visual census data.PostprintPeer reviewe

New Finite Rogers-Ramanujan Identities

We present two general finite extensions for each of the two Rogers-Ramanujan identities. Of these one can be derived directly from Watson's transformation formula by specialization or through Bailey's method, the second similar formula can be proved either by using the first formula and the q-Gosper algorithm, or through the so-called Bailey lattice.Comment: 19 pages. to appear in Ramanujan

High resolution study of the spatial distributions of abyssal fishes by autonomous underwater vehicle

On abyssal plains, demersal fish are believed to play an important role in transferring energy across the seafloor and between the pelagic and benthic realms. However, little is known about their spatial distributions, making it difficult to quantify their ecological significance. To address this, we employed an autonomous underwater vehicle to conduct an exceptionally large photographic survey of fish distributions on the Porcupine Abyssal Plain (NE Atlantic, 4850?m water depth) encompassing two spatial scales (1–10?km2) on and adjacent to a small abyssal hill (240?m elevation). The spatial distributions of the total fish fauna and that of the two dominant morphotypes (Coryphaenoides sp. 1 and C. profundicolus) appeared to be random, a result contrary to common expectation but consistent with previous predictions for these fishes. We estimated total fish density on the abyssal plain to be 723 individuals km?2 (95% CI: 601–844). This estimate is higher, and likely more precise, than prior estimates from trawl catch and baited camera techniques (152 and 188 individuals km?2 respectively). We detected no significant difference in fish density between abyssal hill and plain, nor did we detect any evidence for the existence of fish aggregations at any spatial scale assessed

Monkey-based Research on Human Disease: The Implications of Genetic Differences

Assertions that the use of monkeys to investigate human diseases is valid scientifically are frequently based on a reported 90–93% genetic similarity between the species. Critical analyses of the relevance of monkey studies to human biology, however, indicate that this genetic similarity does not result in sufficient physiological similarity for monkeys to constitute good models for research, and that monkey data do not translate well to progress in clinical practice for humans. Salient examples include the failure of new drugs in clinical trials, the highly different infectivity and pathology of SIV/HIV, and poor extrapolation of research on Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and stroke. The major molecular differences underlying these inter-species phenotypic disparities have been revealed by comparative genomics and molecular biology — there are key differences in all aspects of gene expression and protein function, from chromosome and chromatin structure to post-translational modification. The collective effects of these differences are striking, extensive and widespread, and they show that the superficial similarity between human and monkey genetic sequences is of little benefit for biomedical research. The extrapolation of biomedical data from monkeys to humans is therefore highly unreliable, and the use of monkeys must be considered of questionable value, particularly given the breadth and potential of alternative methods of enquiry that are currently available to scientists

The impact of deep-sea fisheries and implementation of the UNGA Resolutions 61/105 and 64/72. Report of an international scientific workshop

The scientific workshop to review fisheries management, held in Lisbon in May 2011, brought together 22 scientists and fisheries experts from around the world to consider the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) resolutions on high seas bottom fisheries: what progress has been made and what the outstanding issues are. This report summarises the workshop conclusions, identifying examples of good practice and making recommendations in areas where it was agreed that the current management measures fall short of their target

Multilateral inversion of A_r, C_r and D_r basic hypergeometric series

In [Electron. J. Combin. 10 (2003), #R10], the author presented a new basic hypergeometric matrix inverse with applications to bilateral basic hypergeometric series. This matrix inversion result was directly extracted from an instance of Bailey's very-well-poised 6-psi-6 summation theorem, and involves two infinite matrices which are not lower-triangular. The present paper features three different multivariable generalizations of the above result. These are extracted from Gustafson's A_r and C_r extensions and of the author's recent A_r extension of Bailey's 6-psi-6 summation formula. By combining these new multidimensional matrix inverses with A_r and D_r extensions of Jackson's 8-phi-7 summation theorem three balanced very-well-poised 8-psi-8 summation theorems associated with the root systems A_r and C_r are derived.Comment: 24 page

An Anglo-Saxon execution cemetery at Walkington Wold, Yorkshire

This paper presents a re-evaluation of a cemetery excavated over 30 years ago at Walkington Wold in east Yorkshire. The cemetery is characterized by careless burial on diverse alignments, and by the fact that most of the skeletons did not have associated crania. The cemetery has been variously described as being the result of an early post-Roman massacre, as providing evidence for a ‘Celtic’ head cult or as an Anglo-Saxon execution cemetery. In order to resolve the matter, radiocarbon dates were acquired and a re-examination of the skeletal remains was undertaken. It was confirmed that the cemetery was an Anglo-Saxon execution cemetery, the only known example from northern England, and the site is set into its wider context in the paper