PANGAEA_993218 Under water video footage from Weddell seal NEU2024_wed_a_m_05_1 taken by seal mounted cameras during expedition ANT-Land_2024_SEAEIS (NEU2024) Schröder, Henning; Held, Christoph; Bornemann, Horst Under water video footage from Weddell seal NEU2024_wed_a_m_05_1 taken by seal mounted cameras during expedition ANT-Land_2024_SEAEIS (NEU2024) 2026-04-22 PANGAEA Dataset https://doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.993218 Earth Science geoscientificInformation Animal-borne underwater video footage Leptonychotes weddellii Weddell seal 2024-12-04 2024-12-05 Complete -70.53106000000001 -70.53106000000001 -8.20058 -8.20058 MMT Marine Mammal Tracking SEAEIS Seals and cryobenthic communities at the Ekström Ice Shelf unrestricted CC-BY-4.0: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International English PANGAEA Data Publisher for Earth & Environmental Science https://www.pangaea.de/ Data Center Contact Michael Diepenbroek info@pangaea.de

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Bremen Bremen 28359 Germany online 5 datasets application/zip Held, Christoph; Schröder, Henning; Bornemann, Horst (2026): Seals and cryo-benthic communities at the Ekström Ice Shelf (SEAEIS). In: Regnery J, Matz T, Köhler P & Wesche C. Expeditions to Antarctica: ANT-Land 2024/25 NEUMAYER STATION III, Kohnen Station and Field Campaigns, Berichte zur Polar- und Meeresforschung = Reports on Polar and Marine Research, 121-151, https://doi.org/10.57738/bzpm_0807_2026 Bornemann, Horst; Held, Christoph; Nachtsheim, Dominik A; Owsianowski, Nils; Richter, Claudio; Steinmetz, Richard (2016): Seal research at the Drescher Inlet (SEADI). in: Schröder, M (ed.) The Expedition PS96 of the Research Vessel POLARSTERN to the southern Weddell Sea in 2015/2016. Berichte zur Polar- und Meeresforschung = Reports on polar and marine research, Bremerhaven, Alfred-Wegener-Institut Helmholtz-Zentrum für Polar- und Meeresforschung, 700, 148 pp, 116-129, https://doi.org/10.2312/BzPM_0700_2016 Watanabe, Yuuki; Bornemann, Horst; Liebsch, Nikolai S; Plötz, Joachim; Sato, Katsufumi; Naito, Yasuhiko; Miyazaki, Nobuyuki (2006): Seal-mounted cameras detect invertebrate fauna on the underside of an Antarctic ice shelf. Marine Ecology Progress Series, 309, 297-300, https://doi.org/10.3354/meps309297

SEAls and cryobenthic communities at the Ekström Ice Shelf (SEAEIS) applies biologging technologies for studying the foraging ecology of Weddell seals with a direct link to the investigation of cryobenthic invertebrate communities beneath the Ekström Ice Shelf at Atka Bay. Incidences of cryobenthic communities beneath ice shelves are rare and recent discoveries. Combined seal- and ROV-borne imagery and novel sampling technologies led to the discovery of a cryobenthic isopod community (Antarcturus cf. spinacoronatus Schultz 1978), being attached head-down to the underside of floating shelf ice at Drescher Inlet (Riiser-Larsen Ice Shelf) at depths of around 80-150 m (Watanabe et al. 2006; Bornemann et al. 2016). These "hanging gardens" may represent a food horizon where seals could benefit from a local hotspot of high biologic activity. The presence of isopod aggregations explained a multimodal distribution of the seals' dive depths known from earlier investigations at Drescher Inlet, and could probably also be indicative for increased abundances of seals in Areas of Ecological Significance (AES) at the interface between shelf and sea ice. However, the question whether the aforementioned findings are representative for the far-ranging high Antarctic ice shelves or even unique remains open, and factors contributing to AES and their stability over time are largely unexplored. Therefore, we proposed a synoptic field study at Atka Bay (Neumayer Station III), where earlier deployments of satellite-linked data loggers also showed a mode in the distribution of bottom times spent at water depths corresponding to the underside of the floating shelf ice, thus supporting the hypothesis of ice shelf associated foraging. For details and results on the campaign ANT-Land_2024_SEAEIS (NEU2024) see Held et al. 2026. ** For all details see the full metadata description at "https://doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.993218"!

https://doi.org/10.2312/BzPM_0700_2016 Seal research at the Drescher Inlet (SEADI) https://doi.org/10.3354/meps309297 Seal-mounted cameras detect invertebrate fauna on the underside of an Antarctic ice shelf https://doi.org/10.57738/bzpm_0807_2026 Seals and cryo-benthic communities at the Ekström Ice Shelf (SEAEIS) https://hdl.handle.net/10013/epic.44489.d001 MMT DIF 9.4 2026-04-22 2026-04-23