Abstract
Cephalopods are important members of deep-sea communities. However, the preference of many incirrate octopods for rocky substrate makes them largely unavailable with traditional sampling methods such as trawls. Therefore, much remains to be discovered about their diversity. This study focuses on the diversity and distribution of bathyal incirrate species in the western North Atlantic. We used observations from remotely operated vehicle (ROVs) videos, augmented by museum specimens and records from the Ocean Biogeographic Information System (OBIS), to compile a summary of the diversity of bathyal incirrates in the study area and their general distribution. In 22,861 approximately 5-min ROV video clips, we counted 2017 unique incirrate octopod individuals representing at least seven different species. Across observation types, the most common species we recorded were Bathypolypus bairdii Verrill, 1873, Graneledone verrucosa Verrill 1881, Muusoctopus spp., Scaeurgus unicirrhus Delle Chiaje in Ferussac & Orbigny, 1841, Pteroctopus tetracirrhus Delle Chiaje, 1830, and Tetracheledone spinicirrus Voss, 1955.
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Acknowledgements
The first author would like to thank the other members of the France lab at UL Lafayette: L Walling, J Awbrey, and U Ganguly, for ideas and troubleshooting, and Dr. Kelly Robinson (UL Lafayette) for help with the confusion matrix. The Invertebrate Zoology Department at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History and Nancy Voss (recently deceased) at the University of Miami Marine Invertebrate Museum allowed access to their respective collections. This study would not have been possible without the NOAA Okeanos Explorer program and the National Centers for Environmental Information. We would like to thank the reviewers for their input.
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No funding was required for this study as it used already available data.
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The authors declare no competing interests.
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No animal testing was performed during this study.
Sampling and field studies
The study does not contain sampling material or data from any new field studies.
Data availability
The datasets analyzed during the current study are available in the NOAA Okeanos Explorer Video Portal (https://www.nodc.noaa.gov/oer/video/), museum collections at the Museum of Comparative Zoology (https://mczbase.mcz.harvard.edu/SpecimenSearch.cfm), National Museum of Natural History (https://collections.nmnh.si.edu/search/iz/), Yale Peabody Museum (https://collections.peabody.yale.edu/search/), and University of Miami Invertebrate Collections (no online search), and the Ocean Biogeographic Information System (https://obis.org/).
Author contributions
This study was undertaken as a chapter for the first author’s master’s thesis. The second and third authors were the first author’s advisors. All the authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection, and analysis were performed by Abigail Pratt. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Abigail Pratt and all the authors commented on following versions of the manuscript. All the authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Communicated by K. Kocot
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Pratt, A., France, S.C. & Vecchione, M. Survey of bathyal incirrate octopods in the western North Atlantic. Mar. Biodivers. 51, 49 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12526-021-01191-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12526-021-01191-y