Infaunal marine invertebrate fauna inside and outside of bacterial mats, Casey 2006-07

Infaunal marine invertebrates were collected from inside and outside of patches of white bacterial mats from several sites in the Windmill Islands, Antarctica, around Casey station during the 2006-07 summer. Samples were collected from McGrady Cove inner and outer, the tide gauge near the Casey wharf, Stevenson's Cove and Brown Bay inner. Sediment cores of 10cm depth and 5cm diameter were collected by divers using a PVC corer from inside (4 cores) and outside (4 cores) each bacterial patch. The size of each patch varied from site to site. Cores were sieved at 500 microns and the extracted fauna preserved in 4 percent neutral buffered formalin. All fauna were counted and identified to species where possible or assigned to morphospecies based on previous infaunal sampling around Casey.

An excel spreadsheet is available for download at the URL given below. The spreadsheet does not represent the complete dataset, and is only the bacterial mat infauna data.

Regarding the infauna dataset:

• in - in the mat or patch of bacteria and out is in the "normal" sediment surrounding the patch without evidence of any bacterial mat presence.
• Patch numbers were allocated to ensure there was no confusion between patches in the same area.
• Fauna names are our identification codes for each species. Some we have confirmed identifications for, some not. Species names, where we have them and as we get them, are listed against these codes in the Casey marine soft-sediment fauna identification guide.

This work was completed as part of ASAC 2201 (ASAC_2201).