Shallow seamounts are “oases” and activity hubs for pelagic predators in a large-scale marine reserve
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Seamounts have been likened to "oases" of life in the comparative deserts of the open ocean, often harbouring high densities of threatened and exploited pelagic top predators. However, few such aggregations have been studied in any detail and the mechanisms that sustain them are poorly understood. Here, we present the findings of an integrated study of 3 previously unexplored seamounts in the tropical Atlantic, which aimed to investigate their significance as predator "hotspots" and inform their inclusion in one of world's largest marine reserves. Baited underwater video and visual census transects revealed enhanced diversity and biomass of pelagic top predators, including elevated abundances of 7 species of sharks, predatory fish, and seabirds, within 5 km of 2 shallow seamounts (<100 m), but not a third deeper seamount (260 m). Hydroacoustic biomass of low- and mid-trophic level "prey" was also significantly elevated within 2.5 km of shallow seamounts. However, we found no evidence of enhanced primary productivity over any feature, suggesting high faunal biomass is sustained by exogenous energy inputs. Relative biomass enrichment also increased with trophic level, ranging from a 2-fold increase for zooplankton to a 41-fold increase for sharks. Tracking of the dominant predator species revealed that individual sharks (Galapagos, silky) and tuna (yellowfin, bigeye) often resided around seamounts for months to years, with evidence of connectivity between features, and (in the case of sharks) were spatially aggregated in localised hotspots that coincided with areas of high mid-trophic biomass. However, tuna and silky sharks also appeared to use seamounts as "hubs" in more extensive pelagic foraging ranges, which may help explain disproportionately high predator density. Our results reinforce the conservation significance of shallow seamounts for many marine top predators and offer fundamental insights into their functional roles as both prey "oases" and activity hubs for these species.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".