Megafauna of the German exploration license area for seafloor massive sulfides along the Central and South East Indian Ridge (Indian Ocean)

DOI

Background: The growing interest in mineral resources of the deep sea, such as seafloor massive sulfide deposits, has led to an increasing number of exploration licenses issued by the International Seabed Authority. In the Indian Ocean four license areas exist, resulting in an increasing number of new hydrothermal vent fields and the discovery of new species. Most studies focus on active venting areas including their ecology, but the non-vent megafauna of the Central Indian Ridge and South East Indian Ridge remains poorly known.In the framework of the Indian Ocean Exploration project in the German license area for seafloor massive sulfides, baseline imagery and sampling surveys were conducted yearly during research expeditions from 2013 to 2018, using video sledges and Remotely Operated Vehicles.New information: This is the first report of an imagery collection of megafauna from the southern Central Indian- and South East Indian Ridge, reporting the taxonomic richness and their distribution. A total of 218 taxa were recorded and identified based on imagery, with additional morphological and molecular confirmed identifications of 20 taxa from 89 sampled specimens. The compiled fauna catalogue is a synthesis of megafauna occurrences aiming at a consistent morphological identification of taxa and showing their regional distribution. The imagery data was collected during multiple research cruises in different exploration clusters of the German license area, located 500 km north of the Rodriguez Triple Junction along the Central Indian Ridge and 500 km southeast of it along the Southeast Indian Ridge .

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.936659
Related Identifier IsSupplementTo https://doi.org/10.3897/BDJ.9.e69955
Related Identifier IsDocumentedBy https://store.pangaea.de/Publications/Gerdes-etal_2021/Taxon_Images.zip
Metadata Access https://ws.pangaea.de/oai/provider?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=datacite4&identifier=oai:pangaea.de:doi:10.1594/PANGAEA.936659
Provenance
Creator Gerdes, Klaas ORCID logo; Kihara, Terue Cristina; Martínez Arbizu, Pedro; Kuhn, Thomas ORCID logo; Schwarz-Schampera, Ulrich; Mah, Christopher L; Norenburg, Jon L ORCID logo; Linley, Thomas D; Shalaeva, Kate; Macpherson, Enrique ORCID logo; Gordon, Dennis; Stöhr, Sabine ORCID logo; Messing, Charles G ORCID logo; Bober, Simon; Guggolz, Theresa; Christodoulou, Magdalini; Gebruk, Andrey V; Kremenetskaia, Antonina ORCID logo; Kroh, Andreas ORCID logo; Sanamyan, Karen; Bolstad, Kathrin; Hoffman, Leon; Gooday, Andrew J; Molodtsova, Tina ORCID logo
Publisher PANGAEA
Publication Year 2021
Rights Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International; https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
OpenAccess true
Representation
Resource Type Dataset
Format text/tab-separated-values
Size 106499 data points
Discipline Fine Arts, Music, Theatre and Media Studies; Humanities; Photography
Spatial Coverage (69.234W, -27.707S, 73.903E, -23.377N); South East Indian Ridge; Central Indian Ridge; Indian Ocean; Rodriguez Triple Junction
Temporal Coverage Begin 2013-11-25T02:49:00Z
Temporal Coverage End 2018-12-11T10:32:00Z