Large, motile epifauna interact strongly with harpacticoid copepods and polychaetes at a bathyal site

Strengths of interactions among groups of animals in deep-sea-sediment communities are poorly known. Large, motile epifauna (LME) such as sea cucumbers, star fishes, and demersal fishes occur in the deep sea and are sources of predation, disturbance, and habitat alteration and thus have the potential to interact strongly with infauna. At a site off the southwestern coast of the United States (32°57.3′N, 117°32.2′W, 780 m depth), we excluded the LME from five 75- ×75-cm plots with cages. After 143 d, we sampled these plots and five plots of the same size paired with them as controls. Abundances of harpacticoid copepods and polychaetes were significantly lower in cages than in controls. In several cages, nematodes and kinorhynchs were also dramatically less abundant than in paired controls. Results suggest that LME ordinarily affect the infaunal assemblage in such a way that harpacticoids and polychaetes (and perhaps nematodes and kinorhynchs) can maintain higher abundances than they can in the absence of LME, indicating that strong interactions can influence the organization of deep-sea-sediment communities. In a multivariate analysis of environmental parameters, cage and control samples were intermixed, so if the effect is transmitted by alterations of the environment by the LME, the nature of the alterations must be relatively local and remains to be discovered.