BarentsPortal

Several species of bottom dwellers are found anchored or crawling on the sea bottom, or living in between already existing communities of benthic animals creating a multi-species habitat. By-catch in bottom trawl indicates that the current distribution of megabenthos in the Barents Sea is highly variable from area to area, with “hot spots” at the Tromsø Flake (mainly sponges), on the Spitsbergen Bank (large variety of conspicuous epifauna species), the Olga Strait (large aggregations of brittle stars), Goose Bank and Novaya Zemlya Bank. When by-catch data are compared with grab data, the fluctuation over time was similar. Long term changes in benthos biomass through the 20th century have been linked to temperature and intensity of bottom trawling, but the role of these factors for biomass variation in recent years cannot be identified with any fair certainty.