Photographic Atlas to Megafauna at H2O

Photographic Atlas to Megafauna at the Hawaii-2 Observatory, Underlying the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre at 5000-m Depth
Introduction and Methods	Literature Cited	Acknowledgments and Credits	Links

The Hawaii-2 Cable Seafloor Observatory (H2O) was established in 1998 at 27° 53' N, 142° 00' W at ~5000-m depth. This location, approximately halfway between Hawaii and California, was chosen initially for real-time data acquisition as part of the global seismic network (click to learn more about geophysical research at H2O). Due to the remote location, underlying the oligotrophic North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, H2O also serves as a model study site for examining deep-sea biodiversity and hypotheses related to food limitation in the deep sea. In this website, we present all morphotypes of megafauna observed at H2O during cruises in 1998, 1999, 2003, and 2004. Observations were made with ROVs Jason and JasonII and a camera sled, and several species of fauna were collected by ROV or with an otter trawl.

	Protists		Molluscs
	Sponges		Crustaceans
	Cnidarians		Echinoderms
	Ctenophores		Other invertebrates
	Worms		Fish

Click for entire classification table

Click for a list of all video clips

mound_row

Lebensspuren (traces of biological activity at the seafloor)

fishing_net

Other stuff on the seafloor at H2O

Funding for research at H2O was provided by the National Science Foundation. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
H2O biological research was conducted by Dr. K. Smith at Scripps Institution of Oceanography (now at Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute) and Dr. Stace Beaulieu at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Click for abstract submitted to Deep-Sea Biology Symposium July 2006

Webpage constructed by Stace Beaulieu in Netscape Composer (ver. 7.1), revised 8 Aug. 2006
Contact: Stace Beaulieu (stace@whoi.edu)