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Benthic Meiofauna in the Aegean Sea

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The Handbook of Environmental Chemistry

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Abstract

Meiofauna refers to a discrete, microscopically-sized group of organisms that have evolved to inhabit almost all aquatic environments and thrive in marine soft sediments. They include the most abundant and phyleticaly diverse metazoan on earth, with several phyla existing only in meiofaunal size. In spite of the fact that Mediterranean meiofauna has been investigated since 1845, information from the Aegean Sea appeared more than a century later. Nonetheless, meiofauna research in the Aegean Sea has flourished over the last three decades, establishing the important role of this previously neglected component of benthic research in the Eastern Mediterranean. In this chapter we summarise the most important findings of metazoan meiobenthic research in the Aegean Sea. We review spatial and temporal aspects of meiofaunal communities and discuss their bathymetric trends and the effect major environmental drivers, such as food, may have on meiobenthos.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Professor A. Eleftheriou and Mrs. M. Eleftheriou for the critical reading of this book chapter.

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  1. Hellenic Centre for Marine Research, Institute of Oceanography, Crete, Greece

    Katerina Sevastou & Nikolaos Lampadariou

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  1. Katerina Sevastou
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Correspondence to Katerina Sevastou .

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Sevastou, K., Lampadariou, N. (2021). Benthic Meiofauna in the Aegean Sea. In: The Handbook of Environmental Chemistry. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/698_2020_691

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/698_2020_691

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

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