Final Report Form

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Appendix K – OSRI Grant Policy Manual

Final Report Form - Oil Spill Recovery Institute An electronic copy of this report shall be submitted by mail, or e-mail to the OSRI Research Program Manager [email protected] and Financial Office [email protected] Mailing address: P.O. Box 705 - Cordova, AK 99574 -

Deadline for this report: Submittal within 90 days of grant/award expiration. Also, note that a summary Financial Statement shall be submitted within 45 days of the grant expiration. The final invoice and financial statement is due within 90 days of the grant/award expiration.

Today’s date: 15 April 2014

Name of awardee/grantee: Bodil Bluhm

OSRI Contract Number: 11-10-14

Project title: Data rescue: Epibenthic invertebrates from the Beaufort Sea sampled during WEBSEC and OCS cruises in the 1970s

Dates project began and ended:

PART I - Outline for Final Program or Technical Report This report must be submitted by all grantees. However, for those whose project work resulted in a peer reviewed publication (whether in draft or final form), this report may be abbreviated and the publication attached as part of the report.

A. Non-technical Abstract or summary of project work that does not exceed 2 pages and includes an overview of the project. This abstract should describe the nature and significance of the project. It may be provided to the Advisory Board and could be used by OSRI staff to answer inquiries as to the nature and significance of the project.

This project sought to rescue data on epibenthic invertebrates and fish sampled by trawls and photographs in the Alaskan Beaufort Sea during Western Beaufort Sea Ecological Cruise (WEBSEC) and Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) surveys in the 1970s. The material included station locations and associated water depths, faunal distribution records, a taxonomic inventory and voucher material archived at museums. Recovering this historical information is valuable in order to assess biological responses to climatic changes and other stresses acting on or imminent in the marine Arctic. The epibenthic community is a useful faunal compartment to monitor in this respect because it serves as long-term integrators of climatic conditions due to the organisms’ long live spans (years to decades). Epibenthos also contributes to carbon recycling on Arctic shelves and slopes and provides food for marine mammals and birds. The historic data in question can form a reference point for the 1970’s for comparisons to current surveys in the Beaufort Sea that have been conducted since 2008.

More specifically, this project had the following objectives: 1) To digitize geo-referenced faunal distribution records from maps and tables in reports into Excel format with metadata documentation; 2) to identify species of partly identified or unidentified voucher material archived at the National History Museum of Los Angeles County (NHMLAC); 3) to update the

Appendix K – OSRI Grant Policy Manual

taxonomy used in the 1970s to today’s standard per the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS); 4) to make the faunal data publicly available through an open access online portal; 5) to integrate the taxonomic inventory into the Arctic Register of Marine Species (part of WoRMS); and 6) to create web-based species accounts of dominant taxa in the study area as the outreach component to this project.

We were able to retrieve taxonomic lists and counts of all invertebrates and fishes collected in 22 trawl hauls from the WEBSEC 1972 survey. Geographic location information and water depths could also be compiled for these sites. The data set was comprised of 260 taxa of which 80% were resolved to the species level. The counts were done at the species level for dominant phyla, and at the phylum level for rare taxa. The overall inventory was dominated by arthropods (primarily crustaceans; 40%) and molluscs (24%). Twenty-four taxa were fishes. On a per haul basis, the number of epibenthic taxa per haul ranged from 2 to 63 and the number of fish species ranged from 1 to 9. Individuals caught per haul ranged from 2 to 6500 (but note that haul duration was variable). Densities could not be calculated because the area trawled was not recorded during the survey, but by relative composition of the numbers of individuals per haul, echinoderms and molluscs and arthropods were dominant at most sites. Hierarchical cluster analysis and non-metric multi-dimensional scaling ordination revealed that areas of faunal similarity were primarily comprised by stations distributed along depth contours. Beyond the station locations no data was found from the OCS surveys.

The sparse information that could be reconciled from the photographic transects stemmed from original film rolls and prints that Dr. Carey had mailed to the project PI. Dominant taxa identified, with some confidence, from the sub-set of images that was in focus, include the gelatinous sea cucumber Myriotrochus rinkii, and the brittle stars Ophiocten sericeum (on the shelf) and Ophiopleura borealis (on the slope). The highest density estimate, based on a compass of known size visible in select photographs, was in the range of 150 brittle stars m-2. Such high densities have also been documented from other locations in the Pacific and European Arctic.

Over 200 lots of brittle stars archived at NHMLAC were studied by echinoderm curator Dr. G. Hendler and reorganized to 444 lots of which 393 were of sufficient quality for identification to species level. A total of 17 taxa including 14 species were identified from the collection representing about 50% of the species currently known from the Arctic. The four species dominant in the collection, Ophiocten sericeum, Ophiopleura borealis, Ophiacantha bidentata, Ophiura sarsii made up 94% of the specimens in the lots. Dr. Philip Lambert, curator emeritus at the Royal British Columbia Museum studied 104 holothurian (sea cucumber) lots and found nine species. By far most common was Myriotrochus rinkii, a small gelatinous and transparent mud- dwelling sea cucumber that is still common in certain parts of the Beaufort Sea today. The second most common species was Psolus peronii, a hard-bottom preferring sea cucumber which we also encountered in relatively high numbers at some stations with coarse substrate in the US Beaufort Sea in recent years. Many other taxa were archived at NHMLAC and other museums, but those collections are not fully registered electronically, and our funds did not allow to study them all. Communication with various curators and collection managers, however, indicates that an interest in further work on this collection exists.

The taxonomic inventory of the trawl fauna from this study and a list of Carey’s macrofauna work found in one of his reports (containing over 1000 species) were updated for their taxonomic names according to the World Register of Marine Species. Approximately 20% of the taxon names had either changed or been misspelled. The trawl data set has been archived at the Earth Observing Laboratory under the Pacific Marine Arctic Regional Synthesis portal that will be

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publicly available within the next year. Species accounts for 16 dominant echinoderm species of the Pacific Arctic have been prepared and will be available at www.arcodiv.org soon. The results of this study were presented in two posters at the Alaska Marine Science Symposium in Anchorage Alaska in 2013 and 2014.

We conclude that data rescue efforts such as this project contribute critical pieces of information that can extend sparsely available Arctic biological time series back in time.

B. Review objectives as described in original proposal and state whether these objectives were achieved.

1) Transform available data relating to trawl hauls and photographic transects from printed reports into digital format. The objective was achieved for the WEBSEC 1972 trawl hauls, i.e. the majority of trawls collected by Dr. Carey in the Beaufort Sea. Data for the OCS cruises and the photographic sampling apparently never appeared in reports. We were able to retrieve basin information from a subset of the original photographic material.

2) Process part of the unsorted or poorly identified voucher material archived at the National History Museum of Los Angeles County (NHMLAC).

This objective was achieved by investigation of brittle star lots (Ophiuroidea) and sea cucumber lots (Holothuroidea) from Dr. Carey’s collections archived at NHMLAC. These groups represent two orders of Echinodermata, a phylum which is the often biomass-dominant within the epibenthos of Arctic shelves. The available funds did not allow sorting and identification of other taxa.

3) Update the taxonomy to today’s standard according to the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS; www.marinespecies.org).

This objective was achieved by matching the retrieved taxonomic information to today’s taxonomy as accepted by WoRMS.

4) Make the data available to recognized open access online data bases.

The data were archived to the open access online portal of the Earth Observatory Laboratory.

5) Integrate the taxonomic inventory into the Arctic Register of Marine Species (ARMS) (www.marinespecies.org/arms/)

Bluhm has sent the taxonomic list to the ARMS administrators for integration.

6) For outreach, create electronic species pages of the dominant species to be posted at the Arctic Ocean Diversity web site and harvested by the Encyclopedia of Life (www.eol.org). The materials for the species pages were created and submitted for posting on the ArcOD website at www.arcodiv.org. The timing of posting depends on time availability of the web coordinator which is more limited now since ArcOD funding ended.

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C. Describe problems or roadblocks encountered in project implementation.

The challenge of the project was to find the pieces of relevant information, reconcile them and put them together to a coherent picture, as is perhaps true for many of these data rescue projects. From earlier communication with Dr. Carey himself (who must be in his late 80s at least), our understanding is that the trawl and photographic work was largely conducted as an unfunded side project to his funded macro- and meiofaunal studies and was, therefore, of a lower priority than the funded tasks. Hence, Dr. Carey’s group was unable to complete the trawl and photographic analyses and synthesize the data into publications. The sources for this data rescue effort consisted of progress reports to the funding sources, printouts from Carey’s benthic data base maintained on earl y computers at OSU, some handwritten notes that Dr. Carey had sent per mail, and a set of original film rolls and prints. We did not succeed in finding trawl data from the OCS cruises or from the photographic transects, and it is likely that that those data were never reported on in detail. Later attempts to contact Dr. Carey were unsuccessful. In comparison, Dr. Carey’s macro-infauna work, based on van Veen grab hauls, from WEBSEC and various OCS cruises is comparatively well documented and published (e.g. Carey and Ruff 1977, Bilyard and Carey 1979), although most of the underlying data are not digitally available at the species level, either.

Unexpectedly, we were able to find out that Dr. Carey had transferred lose paper copies of the invertebrate and fish counts from the WEBSEC 1972 trawls to Susan Schonberg at the Institute of Marine Science at the University of Texas Austin (Port Aransas) in the early 2000s. Those counts were not contained in progress reports. The latter contained distribution maps but no quantitative information about the trawl taxa. Mrs. Schonberg kindly scanned those documents and mailed them to the PI for digitizing. While we know from progress reports that trawl duration ranged from 5-30 min at the bottom, unpublished notes say that the area covered by the trawls was not recorded. While absolute abundances per unit area could, therefore, not be calculated the relative composition of the fauna in these trawls still provides detailed information on the taxonomic inventory, composition and dominant taxa across the study area. This is much more detailed information than the presence/absence data that we had earlier recovered from distribution maps in Carey’s final report. Also, the new document includes fishes and some benthic invertebrate taxa that were not included in the previously recovered material.

D. Highlight accomplishments, whether or not they were part of the original proposal.

The accomplishments of the projects will be addressed by original objective as outlined in section B.

Objective 1a) Trawl data

Epibenthic megafauna was sampled in the US Beaufort Sea by Andrew Carey (formerly Oregon State University) and co-workers primarily during the WEBSEC survey in 1972 (Figure 1). Additional stations were sampled during the WEBSEC 1971 and two OCS surveys (1976, 1978). The sampling gear used was a 3.7 m semi-balloon Gulf of Mexico shrimp trawl with stretch mesh and a 1.3 cm stretch mesh liner. The duration of the tows varied between hauls (5-30 min) and was often dictated by summer ice conditions. The samples were rinsed on deck and preserved in buffered 10% formaldehyde-seawater solution. Most trawls were later sorted and taxa identified in the laboratory. A few trawl hauls remained unsorted, but were later sorted to phylum level at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (NHMLAC). Most trawl samples were archived at NHMLAC, but some were deposited at the California Academy of Sciences and in the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History.

Appendix K – OSRI Grant Policy Manual

Canada Basin

Chukchi Sea Beaufort Sea Barrow Cape Halkett Icy Cap Prudhoe Barter Island Island

Alaska

Figure 1: Station locations of Carey’s trawl hauls during four cruises conducted between 1971 and 1978. This project was focused on the WEBSEC 1972 survey.

We were able to retrieve taxonomic lists and counts of all invertebrate and fish fauna collected in 22 trawl hauls from the WEBSEC 1972 survey by species. Geographic location information and water depths could also be compiled for these sites. The data set was comprised of 260 taxa of which 80% are resolved to the species level. The overall inventory was dominated by arthropods (primarily crustaceans) and molluscs (Figure 2). Twenty-four taxa were fishes with all but three resolved to species level. Phyla not identified to species level included Brachiopoda, Bryozoa, Cnidaria, Echiura, Nemertea, Porifera, and Sipuncula, all of which tend to be species poor globally or in the study area, as our recent sampling suggests. Sixty-one taxa were considered infaunal or pelagic, meaning that their proportions are not representative in the hauls, because trawls are not the appropriate tool to quantitatively sample infauna or pelagic taxa. Among the true epibenthos, mollusk, arthropod and echinoderm species dominated the inventory in varied proportions across the study area (Figure 3).

Annelida, 11

Mollusca, 63

Arthropoda, 104

Echinodermata , 30

Chordata, 24

Figure 2: Taxonomic composition of trawl fauna from WEBSEC 1972 in the Beaufort Sea. Numbers are species/taxa per phylum. Taxa not resolved beyond phylum or order level (and excluded here) included Brachiopoda, Bryozoa, Cnidaria, Echiura, Nemertea, Porifera, and Sipuncula. Recent sampling in the Beaufort Sea suggests that most of these are species poor in the study area.

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41 18 15 31 37 19 4 466 43 417 457 467 450 449 21 420 456 448 419 463 459 455 451 447 460 452 461 445 and 446 454 16 14 453

10 22

14 5 26 35 33 31 20 37

Number of species Echinodermata Molluska Arthropoda

1-10 11-20 21-30 31-40 41-50

Figure 3: Taxonomic composition of the dominant phyla, Mollusca, Arthropoda and Echinodermata at WEBSEC 1972 stations. Total number of species in the three phyla is given in pie charts. Numbers next to station circles are station numbers. Stations without station numbers were also sampled, but not trawl information has been found.

100 Epifauna taxa Fish taxa

10 Number of taxa (mostly species) (mostly taxa ofNumber

1 445 446 447 448 449 450 451 452 453 454 455 456 457 459 460 461 463 464 465 466 467 468 Station

Figure 4: Relationship of number of fish species versus invertebrate species in the WEBSEC 1972 cruise. Note that a log scale was used to make the low number of fish species (1-9) visible.

Individuals caught per haul ranged from 2 to 6500 (but note that haul duration was variable). The number of epibenthic taxa per haul ranged from 2 to 63, while the number of fish species ranged from 1 to 9 per station (Figure 4). Stations with the highest species numbers were on the shelf break (Figure 3). In terms of relative composition based on numbers of individuals in trawls, echinoderms and molluscs were the dominant taxa at most stations, followed by arthropods (Figure 5). The latter dominated a few hauls. Fish contributed very little to total abundance, which our recent sampling from both the Chukchi and Beaufort seas can confirm.

Appendix K – OSRI Grant Policy Manual

Annelida Arthropoda Chordata Cnidaria Echinodermata Mollusca Other 100%

90%

80%

70%

60%

50%

40%

Number of individuals per trawl per individualsofNumber 30%

20%

10%

0% 445 446 447 448 449 450 451 452 453 454 455 456 457 459 460 461 463 464 465 466 467 468 Station

Figure 5: Relative composition of trawl hauls from the WEBSEC survey in the Beaufort Sea in 1972 by numbers of individuals.

Although data analysis was not part of the submitted proposal, we explored the recovered data set at least a bit in terms of epibenthic community structure. We identified regions of faunal similarity in the study region, using multivariate statistics of the software package PRIMER™ version 6 (Clarke & Gorley, 2006). Hierarchical cluster analysis and non-metric multi-dimensional scaling ordination (nMDS) revealed that areas of faunal similarity were primarily comprised by stations distributed roughly along depth contours (Figure 6, bottom panel). These depth-related groupings are still prominent in the Beaufort Sea today (Figure 6, top panel). Species contributing most to the similarity of stations within clusters, identified from SIMPER analysis, included some widespread taxa such as the bivalve Similipecten greenlandicus, the shrimps Eualus gaimardii and Sclerocrangon sp. and the brittle star Ophiocten sericeum, as well as species specific to a certain depth stratum such as the snail Colus sabini, the shrimp Lebbeus polaris and the sea lily Heliometra glacialis (Figure 7).

The retrieved trawl data set is substantial given that the only other significant historic information available for epibenthos and demersal fishes from the area is from less than 30 locations sampled in 1976/1977 by Frost and Llowry (1983). In that data set, relative trawl composition by counts was only recorded for fishes and the 40 dominant invertebrate taxa, while only presence was recorded for the remaining >100 invertebrate taxa. While we have been successful in reconstructing the WEBSEC 1972 trawl data, we have found no trace of any trawl data from OCS cruises.

Appendix K – OSRI Grant Policy Manual

TB 2012/13 20 – 750 m plumb-staff beam trawl 7 mm mesh, 4 mm codend liner

Carey 1972 WEBSEC 1972, 27 –721 m, 3.7 m semi-balloon shrimp trawl, 1.3 cm mesh liner

Figure 6: Current (upper panel) and historic (lower panel) epibenthic community structure in the Beaufort Sea: Distinct coastal, shelf, shelf break and slope communities (indicated by different colors and symbols) were found in the 1970s and recent surveys. Same colors in the two panels were used to indicate similar depth groupings found in both survey times but are not the result of a combined analysis.

Transform: Presence/absence Resemblance: S17 Bray Curtis similarity Similipecten greenlandicus 2D Stress: 0.15 463 SIMPROF5% Boreotrophon clathratus 467 453 Similipecten greenlandicus e h Margarites costalis 450 460 Eualus gaimardii j c Eualus gaimardii 417 Hyas coarctatus b i Lebbeus polaris 456 461 Sclerocrangon sp. d g Sclerocrangon sp. 466 455 454 Paroediceros lynceus a f Ophiocten sericuem 452 Ophiocten sericeum Heliometra glacialis Similarity Irpa abyssicola Irpa abyssicola 459 446 40 447 Solariella obscura Spirontocaris spinus 420 Strongylocentrotus pallidus 451 445 Similipecten greenlandicus 419 457 Eualus gaimardii Sclerocrangon sp. Ericthhonius megalops Colus sabini Ophiocten sericeum Sclerocrangon salebrosa 449 Epimeria loricata Stegocephalus inflatus 448 Saduria sabini

Figure 7: nMDS plot of WEBSEC 1972 trawl stations. Color symbols with adjacent station numbers represent statistically significant clusters (i.e. station groups of high faunal similarity). Green circles indicate 40% similarity level among encircled stations. Species listed closed to green circles contributed a total of 50% to within-cluster similarity. Stations 448 and 419 formed a statistically significant cluster, but were <40% similar with no characteristic species identified. Images: Similipecten greenlandicus (left), Sclerocrangon sp. (top right), Eualus gairmardii (bottom right).

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Objective 1b) Photographic material

The second tool used to sample epifauna was an Edgerton stereo deep-sea camera system (Model 205) deployed during the WEBSEC-72 and OCS-4 cruises at a total of 30 stations, mostly at stations that were also trawled. The camera was lowered to 1-2 m above the sediment surface and set to automatically take 100+ photos per location in a transect. Dr. Carey’s progress reports contain very sparse information on the photographic surveys and image analysis, and the PI has had limited success in communicating with Dr. Carey in this respect. However, Dr. Carey did provide prints and original photo rolls of a total of eight photographic stations to Bluhm. Visual inspection of the prints (available from two stations) and inspection of the photo rolls under a stereo-microscope showed that some images from four of those eight stations was of sufficient quality to yield any useful information (Figure 4). The problem, however, was the lack of a validated reference frame that would allow accurate calculation of a density per unit area, a problem that Dr. Carey had outlined in a hand-written note that he mailed with the film rolls.

Figure 5: Examples of photographs taken during the WEBSEC 1972 survey in the central US Beaufort Sea. The left panel is a digitized version of a film negative showing the compass with its vane in an area of high brittle star density (likely Ophiopleura borealis). The right panel shows a digitized image of a print of a location with high density of sea cucumbers and an eelpout. Both were taken on the continental slope around 300 m depth.

Dominant taxa identified, with some confidence, from the sub-set of images that was in focus, included the gelatinous sea cucumber Myriotrochus rinkii, and the brittle stars Ophiocten sericeum (on the shelf) and Ophiopleura borealis (on the slope). The first two species were also the most abundant sea cucumbers and brittle stars, respectively, in the NHMLAC collection (see objective 2), where Carey had archived part of his trawl and grab material. The two brittle star species were also dominant in the eastern Beaufort Sea in recent surveys since 2011 (Bluhm and Iken, pers. obs.), while a different brittle star species, Ophiura sarsii, by far dominates the western Beaufort Sea shelf where Ophiocten sericeum is

Appendix K – OSRI Grant Policy Manual virtually absent (Rand and Logerwell 2010, Konar and Ravelo 2013). A. Ravelo, a recipient of a recent OSRI fellowship and PhD student at the School of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences at UAF, has dedicated a chapter of her thesis to studying the distribution and population dynamics of the two dominant brittle star species on the Beaufort Sea shelf. Other taxa that occurred on the slides and prints included several unidentifiable species of sea stars, anemones, crustaceans and fishes.

In that hand-written note that Dr. Carey had sent a photocopy of, we found that the length of the vane of a compass that was visible in a few of the images measured 34.0 cm. This reference allowed us to, for the few images where the compass was near the seafloor, to estimate the area covered by the respective image, enumerate the brittle star density and calculate an estimated density. The highest density estimate was in the range of 150 brittle stars m-2. Even with some error, these are very high densities, which have also been documented from some locations in the Pacific and European Arctic (Piepenburg 2000). This observation confirms that brittle stars are among the dominant epibenthic taxon on a pan-Arctic scale.

Objective 2) Taxonomic identifications from archived specimens

Dr. G. Hendler from the Natural History Museum of Table 1: Brittle star taxa from Carey’s Beaufort Sea Los Angeles County analyzed ophiuroid (brittle star) work identified by NHMLAC Echinoderm Curator Dr. Hendler for this project. lots from Beaufort Sea OCS and WEBSEC studies that Dr. Carey had archived at that facility in the 1980s. Dr. Number of Hendler’s final report includes a listing of the lots individuals in all lots studied by species with the number of specimens in Species / taxon of a given species each lot (summary see Table 1) and a narrative of Ophiocten sericeum 9475 biogeographic notes on the species found. The 229 lots Ophiopleura borealis 1063 were sorted, identified and reorganized to 444 lots of Ophiacantha bidentata 556 which 393 lots were identified to the species level Ophiura sarsii 288 indicating they were in good enough condition. This Ophiuroidea sp. 265 high proportion is one more piece of convincing Stegophiura nodosa 164 evidence that long-term archival of field collected Amphiura sundervalli 160 specimens in museum collections are valuable even Amphiodia craterodmeta 62 many decades after the collection date. A total of 17 Ophiura maculata 88 taxa including 14 species were identified from the Amphipholis torelli 4 collection representing about 50% of the species Ophiopholis aculeata 3 Ophiura robusta 3 currently known from the Arctic. The four species Gorgonocephalus eucnemis 2 dominant in the collection, Ophiocten sericeum, Gorgonocephalus sp. 1 Ophiopleura borealis, Ophiacantha bidentata, Ophioscolex glacialis 1 Ophiura sarsii made up 94% of the specimens in the Ophiura leptoctenia 1 lots. Four other species, Stegophiura nodosa, Ophiura Ophiura sp. 1 maculata, Amphiura craterodmeta, and Ophiura maculata occurred with 60 or more specimens in the collections. Ophiocten sericeum was by far the most dominant, followed by Ophiopleura borealis, a slope species, and Ophiacantha bidentata, a common shelf species. These findings agree with results from our recent Beaufort Sea expeditions, except that we find an additional species, Ophiura sarsii, to be dominant in the western Beaufort Sea, an area not sampled by Carey. This study has sparked Dr. Hendler’s interest in Arctic brittle star taxonomy and zoogeography, and he has subsequently identified voucher materials from 2011, 2012 and 2013 for projects that the PI is involved in. We have also archived a substantial set of recent brittle star voucher material in the NHMLAC collection.

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Table 2: Sea cucumber taxa from Carey’s Beaufort Dr. Philip Lambert, curator emeritus at the Royal Sea work identified by Dr. Lambert for this project. British Columbia Museum, studied 104 holothurian

Number of individuals (sea cucumber) lots to species level during a visit to in all lots of a given NHMLAC. Ninety-four of those lots were previously Species / taxon taxon Eupyrgus scaber 11 unidentified and ten were re-identified. The Irpa abyssicola 2 investigated material included specimens collected not Kolga hyalina 2 only with trawls, but also with van Veen grabs in the Molpadia sp. 1 Myriotrochus rinkii 513 same area. Nineteen lots were actually not Myriotrochus sp. 2 holothurians despite that label on the jar. Thirty-four Ocnus glacialis 1 slides were prepared of the wheel ossicles, an Pentamera pseudocalcigera 3 Psolus peronii 425 identification character, during the process and Psolus phantapus 2 mounted in Canada balsam. These slides are now also Psolus sp. 1 deposited at NHMLAC as a permanent record. Species diversity was overall low in this material (Table 2). By far most common was the sea cucumber Myriotrochus rinkii, a small gelatinous and transparent mud dwelling apodid species. From our ongoing work we know that M. rinkii is still common in certain parts of both the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas today (Bluhm et al. 2009, Bluhm and Iken pers. com.). The second most common species in the lot collection was Psolus peronii, which we encountered at some stations in the eastern US Beaufort Sea in 2011 (Konar and Ravelo 2013), 2012 and 2013 (Bluhm and Iken, pers. obs.). The other species were represented with few individuals in the collections included Eupygrus scaber, Irpa abyssicola (tentative), Kolga hyalina, Psolus phantapus and one specimen of Pentamera pseudocaligera. Dr. Lamberg commented on this latter species “This seems out of normal range, perhaps mislabeled locality”. Various specimens could not be identified to species level because ossicles critical for identification were missing, or specimens were otherwise damaged or were juveniles lacking fully developed characters.

While this project was limited to identifications of brittle stars and sea cucumbers, communication with NHMLAC Curators and staff in charge of the mollusk (Lindsey Groves), crustacean (Dr. Joel Martin) and polychaete (Leslie Harris) collections demonstrate that Carey archived extensive material from his WEBSEC and OCS trawls also from those taxa. Part of this material is sorted by station and species, while part is archived as bulk on the phylum level by station. Our understanding is that for the trawled crustaceans and polychaetes, there are currently no full paper or electronic inventories of the holdings available, but the staff in charge estimate at least 85 lots for the trawled crustaceans with possibly many more and an unknown fraction of 150 jars in the ‘larger polychaetes’ collection. One lot typically includes multiple specimens. Based on the museum’s electronic data base, approximately 150 lots of mollusks, primarily gastropods and bivalves, are already identified to the species level.

Objective 3)

For both the WEBSEC 1972 trawl hauls and Carey’s entire Beaufort Sea taxonomic inventory found in a report, the taxon names used were checked against WoRMS using the match function available on the WoRMS web site. Approximately 80% of the names matched accepted names by WoRMS standards. The remaining names that did not match WoRMS records were checked for typos, incorrect endings, name changes, etc. and over 99% could eventually be reconciled to accepted WoRMS names.

Objective 4)

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The data retrieved during this project were formatted and submitted to the data archive at the Earth Observatory Laboratory at the UCAR/NCAR facility under their Pacific Arctic Marine Regional Synthesis (PacMARS) portal. It will be made public on the schedule of the PacMARS project of which Bluhm is a Co-PI. EOL has extensive expertise with long-term data archival. The PI has also made contact with the US node of the Ocean Biogeographic Information System for archival in their portal and is awaiting submission instructions.

Objective 5) Integrate the taxonomic inventory into the Arctic Register of Marine Species (ARMS)

Bluhm has sent the taxonomic list to the ARMS administrators for integration of any species not already in the register.

Objective 6) Species pages

We prepared a total of 16 species accounts for some of the dominant brittle stars, sea cucumbers and sea urchins of the Pacific Arctic shelves and adjacent Canada Basin (Table 3).The template had been created during the Census of Marine Life Arctic Ocean Diversity (ArcOD) project (2004-2011). The materials (text and multiple photographs per speces) have been transferred to the web administrator of the ArcOD website who will post the pages as his schedule allows.

Table 3: Species for which web-based species accounts were prepared for as an outreach contribution to this project.

Taxon (common name) Species Ophiuroidea (brittle stars) Ophiura sarsii Ophiocten sericeum Ophiopholis aculeata Ophiopleura borealis Stegophiura nodosa Gorgonocephalus eucnemis G. arcticus Holothuroidea (sea cucumbers) Myriotrochus rinkii Psolus peronii Elpidia heckeri Elpidia glacialis Elpidia belyaevi Kolga hyalina Echinoidea (sea urchins) Strongylocentrotus pallidus Strongylocentrotus droebachiensis Pourtalesia jeffreysi

E. Conclusions.

The main conclusions or this data rescue project are:

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 Over 250 species were caught in trawls in the 1972 WEBSEC survey, with approximately three quarters of all species contributed by arthropods and mollusks.  The relative composition of the trawls by abundance was dominated by echinoderms and mollusks, followed by arthropods.  Dominant species and orders appear to have persisted from the 1970s to the 2010s, although our comparison is far from extensive.  Strong turnover in community composition along the Beaufort Sea shelf and slope is related to water depth.  Historic data provide a valuable extension of sparse Arctic time series into the past and make data rescue projects such as this worth the effort.  Voucher specimens archived in recognized and well-maintained museums provide long-term access to taxonomic material that can still be used to validate species identifications decades after collection.

F. Appendix including copies of all written reports or publications completed or in progress, resulting from the project work. This also includes abstracts of papers presented at conferences. Please note the acknowledgment of OSRI support stated in Section 10.3.4 of the Grant Policy Manual.

Presentations (electronic versions attached)

A poster containing the results of the data rescue efforts was presented by Bluhm at the January 2013 Alaska Marine Science Symposium, titled “Data rescue: Epibenthic invertebrates from the Beaufort Sea sampled during WEBSEC and OCS cruises in the 1970s”. The submitted abstract was:

A major challenge in climate- and human impact-related studies is the lack of historical data against which to assess biological response to changes and stresses in the environment. This ongoing work seeks to rescue data on epibenthic invertebrates sampled by trawls in the Alaskan Beaufort Sea during Western Beaufort Sea Ecological Cruises and Outer Continental Shelf cruises in the 1970s. To date, a geo-referenced presence/absence data matrix of faunal distribution records was compiled for 210 taxa (mostly species level) at 23 sites from maps in print-only reports. Approximately 60 of those taxa were primarily infaunal. Of the remaining epifaunal species (the target group of trawls), the majority were crustaceans, followed by mollusks and echinoderms. Occurrences of some phyla were not listed in the available sources such as Porifera and Cnidaria. Holothuroid and ophiuroid material from Carey’s work, archived at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, is under investigation and suggests that Myriotrochus rinkii and Psolus peronii were the most common sea cucumbers in the US Beaufort Sea in the 1970s. The taxonomic inventory resulting from this work was combined with Carey’s macrofaunal inventory and reconciled to the World Register of Marine Species. The number of all taxa combined amounted to 1026. The taxonomic inventory and distribution data can form a reference point for the 1970’s for future comparisons to surveys in the Beaufort Sea done in/planned for 2008 and 2011-2014.

At the 2014 Alaska Marine Science Symposium, we included a brief and preliminary comparison of these historic WEBSEC (1972) with the recent (2012, 2013) epibenthos in our poster presentation entitled “Strong community turnover in epibenthos composition along and across the shelf and slope of the central and eastern Beaufort Sea” (Bodil A Bluhm, Katrin Iken, Lauren E Bell). The submitted abstract was:

Appendix K – OSRI Grant Policy Manual

As part of the Pacific Arctic region, the Beaufort Sea exhibits both along and across-shelf gradients in physical and zoogeographical conditions. The influence of Pacific waters and species pools diminishes in benthic communities from the west to the east and from the shelf towards the deep sea. One objective in our ongoing study within the US-Canadian Transboundary program is to explore how these gradients are expressed in epibenthic communities. Epibenthos was sampled at a total of 57 stations along 9 shelf-to-slope transects (20, 50, 100, 200, 350, 500, 750, 1000 m) in the Beaufort Sea from 137.8-151.1 °W and 69.6-71.5 °N in October 2012 and August 2013. Fauna was collected using a plumb-staff beam trawl. Over 300 putative taxa were identified. As typical for Arctic epibenthos, the community was mostly dominated by echinoderms and crustaceans in abundance and biomass, and by arthropods, mollusks, and echinoderms in species numbers. Multivariate analysis documented significant change of community structure with water depth as well as with longitude. Nearshore (20 m depth) stations were dominated by amphipod, decapod and cumacean crustaceans, and shelf stations (50-200 m) were characterized by different brittle star species in the central (Ophiura sarsii) and eastern (Ophiocten sericeum) Beaufort Sea. The slope (350-1000 m) was generally characterized by a third brittle star species, Ophiopleura borealis and the isopod Saduria sabini; different additional species dominated in the central (i.e., sea star Ctenodiscus crispatus, snails Tachyrhynchus spp.) compared with the eastern (i.e., sea stars Pontaster tenuispinus and Bathybiaster vexillifer) Beaufort Sea. The community turnover with depth on the slope coincided with the transition from Pacific to Atlantic-origin water masses. A comparison with findings from the 1970s suggests that the distribution of dominant epifaunal taxa has generally persisted over the past decades.

The data will likely contribute a synthetic epibenthos paper of the Beaufort Sea in a couple of years that will combine data from three surveys under the Transboundary project (2012, 2013, 2014) in comparison with historic surveys (WEBSEC 1972 and OCSEAP 1977).

Data sets (attached)

- WEBSEC72_trawls_Counts_OSRI10-11-14.xlsx:, taxonomic composition as counts per taxon per haul, each with geographic locations (as submitted to EOL) - WEBSEC72_Trawltaxa_fromSchonberg_WoRMS_OSRI11-10-14.xlsx: list of species with taxonomic hierarchy, original names and standardized to the World Register of Marine Species - WEBSEC72_Trawls_ Metadata_OSRI11-10-14.docx: Metadata explaining data collection and history of data retrieval - Carey_Allspecies_17APR14_WoRMS_OSRI11-10-14.xlsx: Complete list of Dr. Carey’s work (trawls, van Veen grabs) in the Beaufort Sea as printed in his final report (Carey et al. 1984) and updated to WoRMS (as of late 2012)

References

Bilyard GR, Carey AG Jr (1979) Distribution of western Beaufort Sea polychaetous annelids. Marine Biology 54:329-339. Bluhm BA, Iken K, Mincks SL, Sirenko BI, Holladay BA (2009) Community structure of epibenthic megafauna in the Chukchi Sea. Aquatic Biology 7:269-293. Carey AG Jr, Ruff RE (1977) Ecological studies of the benthos in the western Beaufort Sea with special reference to bivalve molluscs. In: Dunbar MJ (ed) Polar Oceans. Arctic Institute of North America, Calgary, pp 505-530. Carey AG, Boudrias MA, Kern JC, Ruff RE (1984) Selected ecological studies on continental shelf benthos and sea ice fauna in the southwestern Beaufort Sea. Outer Continental Shelf Environmental Assessment Program, ResearchUnit 6. Final Report

Appendix K – OSRI Grant Policy Manual

Frost KJ, Lowry LF (1983) Demersal fishes and invertebrates trawled in the northeastern Chuckhi and western Beaufort Seas, 1976-77. NOAA Technical Report NMFS SSRF-764. Konar B, Ravelo AM (2013) Epibenthic community variability on the Alaskan Beaufort Sea continental shelf. Coastal Marine Institute Final Report, OCS Study BOEM 2013-01148 Piepenburg D (2003) Arctic brittle stars (Echinodermata: Ophiuroidea). Oceanography and Marine Biology: An Annual Review 38: 189. Rand KM, Logerwell EA (2011) The first demersal trawl survey of benthic fish and invertebrates in the Beaufort Sea since the late 1970s. Polar Biology 34: 475-488.

Part II - Final Financial Statement Please complete the attached Excel spreadsheet (GPM-appendix I – Fin Rpt Form).