Size frequency distributions of key epibenthic organisms in the eastern Chukchi Sea and their correlations with environmental parameters

Epibenthic communities play a key role in ecosystem functioning in Arctic shelf Seas, such as in the Chukchi Sea in the Pacific Arctic. These communities, however, are patchily distributed and are influenced by various environmental parameters. Along with taxonomic composition, another community aspect that may vary spatially and be influenced by the environment is the distribution of organism sizes. This study presents the first size frequency distributions of nine epifaunal taxa that were determined to be dominant in the eastern Chukchi Sea in July/August 2009 and 2010, including male, female and gravid Chionoecetes opilio and Hyas coarctatus crabs, the gastropods Neptunea spp., Plicifusus spp., Colus spp., and Cryptonatica spp., and the echinoderms Gorgonocephalus spp., Leptasterias spp., and Echinarachnius parma. Some abundant taxa exhibited a wide range of sizes (i.e. C. opilio, Neptunea spp., and Leptasterias spp.), while others had a much smaller size range (i.e. Cryptonatica spp. and E. parma). We also found that size distributions of these taxa correlated with various combinations of the environmental parameters that have been shown to be important in structuring the general distribution patterns for the epibenthic invertebrate communities in the study area, including percent total sediment organic carbon, sediment chlorophyll a, temperature, latitude, sediment grain size 2 and 4 phi, pH, and dissolved oxygen. Our findings present benchmark information that is needed to detect future alterations in body-size frequency distributions that are likely to happen in response to the predicted climate and environmental changes in the Chukchi Sea region.