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Abstract(s)
The deep-sea fauna, composed mainly of fish, cephalopods and crustaceans, inhabits the mesopelagic (200 m and 1000 m depth) and bathypelagic (1000 m and 4000 m depth) layers of the ocean. These layers are vast and difficult to access and are therefore the least studied in the ocean. Although the deep-sea species are found in deep waters during the day, likely to avoid predation, some migrate at night towards the surface to feed, performing diel vertical migration (DVM), becoming more accessible to surface predators, such as pelagic seabirds. This study aims to characterize, for the first time, the importance of deep-sea fauna in the diet of bird species belonging to the families Oceanitidae, Hydrobatidae and Procellariidae, which include all smaller Procellariiformes. In order to characterize this importance, a meta-analysis was carried out based on an extensive literature review of scientific articles, reports and books with diet data. I identified and analysed 177 studies on the diet of 126 target species published between 1969 and August 2024. The results revealed a lack of knowledge about the diet of these birds, not only in terms of the target species, but also in terms of the level of detail of the studies published so far. This study showed that deep-sea species, mainly fish, are key components of the Pacific and Antarctic trophic food webs, but also in the Atlantic, being an important fraction of the diet of many pelagic seabirds that occur in these oceans. Deep-sea fauna is particularly important component of the diet of seabirds that are threatened with extinction, which highlights the importance of this fauna and the need to conserve this resource that is extremely understudied but is already being targeted as commercially relevant.
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Keywords
Meta-analysis Procellariiformes Deep ocean Mesopelagic Bathypelagic