Deep-sea benthic diversity linked to seasonality of pelagic productivity

Latitudinal gradients in biodiversity are found in both terrestrial and marine environments, but little agreement exists on the mechanisms or ecological causes creating these patterns. Marine biodiversity patterns have been particularly challenging to document, because of the lack of appropriate data sets from ocean basins. We document latitudinal patterns of North Atlantic deep-sea benthic foraminifera and show that seasonality of primary productivity, as estimated from SeaWiFS satellite imagery, has a significant effect on diversity indices, with generally lower values of H(S), species #, and species equitability found with high seasonality between 40 and 60 degrees N. High foraminiferal diversity is not found in areas with phytodetritus deposition in the North Atlantic basin, which indicates that patch dynamics, biological disturbance, and sediment heterogeneity resulting from phytodetritus deposits do not create high deep-sea foraminiferal diversity. Annual resource stability, reflecting the timing of organic carbon flux and the mode of sedimentation, accounts for the benthic foraminiferal patterns found in this study and is an important variable structuring the deep-sea benthic foraminiferal community. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.