Deep-sea coral habitats off the north atlantic Morocco: Distribution and associated communities.

The recent decline in the health status of deep-sea habitats around the world has pushed the need to document and map their distribution to preserve them in their marine ecosystems. This work describes deep-water coral habitats (133-729 m) and their associated communities, based on nine ROV video transects. These transects cover a 171 km sub-seafloor profile within a predefined 5560 km area along the North Atlantic coast of Morocco, surveyed in 2020 as part of a coral habitat mapping study under the FAO-NANSEN programme.

Do cold water corals provide an essential habitat for Helicolenus dactylopterus (Delaroche, 1809) in the Northwest Africa?

Cold water corals (CWC) provide habitats for many organisms including demersal fish. Bottom trawl observations have indicated a co-occurrence of the fish Helicolenus dactylopterus with CWC reefs, but a detailed understanding of this relation is lacking. To better understand the nature of this relation we have analyzed 85 video-lines from ROV dives conducted at 25-1700 m depth off Morocco, Mauritania, and Senegal in 2020 and 2021.

Litter on the seafloor along the African coast and in the Bay of Bengal based on trawl bycatches from 2011 to 2020.

We present the occurrence of seafloor litter on the coast of Africa and in the Bay of Bengal based on records from the EAF-NANSEN Programme in 2011 to 2020. Litter bycatch records from 534 bottom trawls were standardized to km before analysis. Three percent of the records indicated areas of high littering and the highest densities occurred from 100 to 300 m in depth and 50 to 100 km from the coast.

A new species of Crinoniscus Pérez, 1900 (Crustacea: Isopoda: Crinoniscidae) parasitising the pedunculate barnacle Heteralepas newmani Buhl-Mortensen & Mifsud (Cirripedia: Heteralepadidae) with notes on its ecology and a review of the genus.

The new species Crinoniscus stroembergi n. sp. belonging to the parasitic isopod family Crinoniscidae Bonnier, 1900, is described from a pedunculate barnacle host collected in the Mediterranean Sea.

Does grab size influence sampled macrofauna composition? A test conducted on deep-sea communities in the northeast Atlantic.

In deep-sea surveys, heavy gears are often preferred to effectively collect macro benthos while smaller samplers are sufficient in coastal and shallow areas. However, there are few comparative studies of the samples retained and results gained from different-sized grabs. To study the differences in sampling properties between a small (sampling area of 0.