Long-lived species share life history traits such as slow growth, late maturity, and low fecundity, which lead to slow recovery rates and increase a population’s vulnerability to disturbance. The Greenland shark (Somniosus microcephalus) has recently been recognized as the world’s longest-lived vertebrate, but many questions regarding its biology, physiology, and ecology remain unanswered. Here we ...

The Greenland shark (<i>Somniosus microcephalus</i>, Squaliformes: Somniosidae) is a long-lived Arctic top predator, which in combination with the high historical and modern fishing pressures, has made it subject to increased scientific focus in recent years. Key aspects of reproduction are not well known as exemplified by sparse and contradictory information e.g. on birth size and number of pups ...

<i>Introduction</i>: Main purpose of this group is data exploration. For example, megafaunal community characterization, modeling of variables that influence these communities (environment, stressors, etc.). Scaling of data matters: Depending on the objectives, required resolution of the data and analyses will vary, e.g. for managing trawl closures, fine-scale analyses are required; for understanding ...

The skate fauna in the northern Northeast (NE) Atlantic is poorly investigated, and misidentifications are common. Here, ‘DNA barcoding’ was used to analyse 105 specimens of 15 species previously reported from the area to investigate the occurrence of species. Of these 15 species, three were new to the region and confirmed with voucher specimens. Three previously reported taxa were not obtained from ...

The marine area of Northeast Greenland belongs to the largest national park in the world. Biodiversity assessments and tailored conservation measures often target specific physiographic or oceanographic features of an area for which detailed knowledge on their biological communities is incomplete. This study, therefore, characterizes epibenthic megafauna communities in a priori defined seabed habitats ...

The ice cod <i>Arctogadus glacialis</i> (Peters, 1872) is one of the few fish species endemic to the Arctic. With a circumpolar distribution, the species is confined to the fjords and shelves of the Arctic seas. Biological information on <i>A. glacialis</i> is scarce, with genomic information restricted to microsatellites. Within the frame of the TUNU-Programme: Arctic Ocean Fishes—Diversity, ...

The polar cod (Boreogadus saida) and the Antarctic silverfish (Pleuragramma antarctica) are pelagic fish endemic to the Arctic and Antarctica sea, respectively. Both species are abundant and play a central role as midtrophic wasp-waist species in polar ecosystems. Due to their biological and ecological characteristics (small size, complex life histories, relatively short generation cycles, movement ...

Deep-sea marine fishes support important fisheries but estimates of their distributions are often incomplete as the data behind them may reflect fishing practices, access rights, or political boundaries, rather than actual geographic distributions. We use a simple suitable habitat model based on bottom depth, temperature, and salinity to estimate the potential distribution of Greenland halibut ...

The snow crab (<i>Chionoecetes opilio</i>) is an invasive species new to the Barents Sea that expands its geographic range by larval drift and adult migration. To evaluate the potential spreading of the species in the Barents Sea, we investigated temperature selection and the final thermal preferendum (FTP) of nine adult males in a free choice horizontal temperature gradient (~ 1.0–5.5 °C) for 24 ...

Ocean warming drives latitudinal shifts in the distribution of ectotherm species. The rate and magnitude of such shifts are constrained by physiology and behavioural thermoregulation. Here, we investigated the thermal preference and lower critical temperature (CTmin) in female edible crab <i>Cancer pagurus</i>, a decapod crustacean with an ongoing northward dispersal along the Norwegian coast. The ...