The Benthic Fauna of the Continental Slope and Shelf of the Solomon Sea – Investigations of Marine Biodiversity

Professor, PhD and hon. dr. scient Reinhardt Møbjerg Kristensen, Zoological Museum, Natural History Museum, University of Copenhagen

This project consists of a ship-based investigation of the benthic fauna of the continental shelf, slope and deep sea of the Solomon Sea and a land-based study of the littoral fauna of Gizo, Solomon Islands. Current knowledge of the macrofauna at depths greater than 100 m in the Solomon Sea is very limited and the meiofauna of the area is completely unknown at all depths. The ship-based studies involve sampling using several types of gear along two transects from 400-600 m down to 4000 m, one on the eastern side of the ridge that divides the Solomon Sea from Woodlark Basin, the other one in the northern part of the Solomon Sea, south of the island of Bougainville. Collections will be comprehensive, extraction of meiofauna will include completely new methods such as ultracentrifugation, and preservation of specimens will subsequently allow both morphological and molecular studies to be carried out. The primary focus of the land-based research on Gizo will be the meiofauna of the area, which is expected to be very rich and result in several significant finds. Investigations of the littoral macrofauna at Gizo will be limited to groups that lie within the fields of expertise of the project participants (crustaceans, polychaetes and gastropods). A total of 15 researchers, assistants and students from the Zoological Museum, Danish Museum of Natural History, University of Copenhagen will participate in this project.

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