Composition of the abyssal infauna of the Kuril–Kamchatka area (NW Pacific) collected with a box corer

During the German–Russian KuramBio (Kuril–Kamchatka Biodiversity Studies) expedition with the RV Sonne from July to September 2012, a 0.25 m2 box corer was used to sample the benthic fauna of the Kuril–Kamchatka area. 23 cores were deployed at 12 stations, and in total 36,648 individuals could be identified from a combined surface area of 5.75 m2. Total faunal densities ranged from 1024 to 16,592 ind. m−2, respectively, for the macrofauna from 436 to 3520 ind. m−2. The fauna was dominated by Nematoda (65%), even though this group and other meiofaunal taxa were only partially retained by the 300 µm screen that was used as the smallest screen for this study. The remaining part of the fauna was dominated by polychaetes (23%), followed by peracarid crustaceans (6%) and molluscs (3%). Most of the collected taxa occurred very patchily. Over 80% of the animals were extracted from the upper 2 centimeters of the sediment. Compared to other regions of the Pacific the density of the benthic fauna was unusually high. At the upper slope of the continental margin of the trench and at the southern part of the area the benthic fauna was most taxon rich. Station 3 from the continental slope of the trench was also most rich in terms of faunal density (total numbers of ind. m−2), followed by the station 11 and 12 from that the southernmost part of the abyss. Although the Kuril–Kamchatka area has been sampled on several expeditions during the last century, and some studies on the biomass of the benthic fauna have been published, this study offers the first quantitative community analysis of the benthic fauna in terms of abundance and taxon richness.