IMIS

A total of 18 epibenthic dredge deployments/samplings have been performed at four diffrent locations at depths ranging from 84 to 515m by using a ""Rauschert"" dredge with a mesh size of 500μm. In total 8,359 specimens have been collected belonging to 161 species and corresponding to 505 species distributional records. Of these, in order of abundance, 5,965 specimens were Gastropoda (accounting for 113 species), 1,323 were Bivalvia (accounting for 36 species), 949 were Aplacophora (accounting for 7 species), 74 specimens were Scaphopoda (3 species), 38 were Monoplacophora (1 species) and, finally, 10 specimens were Polyplacophora (1 species).
All vouchers are permanently stored at the Italian National Antarctic Museum (MNA), Section of Genoa, enabling future comparison and crosschecking. This material is also currently under study, from a molecular point of view, by the barcoding project ""BAMBi"" (PNRA 2010/A1.10).