Fig 1.
Southern Ocean and the Antarctic Polar Front (APF).
Full circles show locations where previous studies analysed the food-web (e.g. Fildes Bay); Empty circles show the location of general studies, i.e. studies analysing the food-web of an entire region (e.g. Ross Sea). Colour code shows the different types of food-webs. WAP: Western Antarctic Peninsula. Map was produced using QGis 3.20 Odense. Basemap is the “ESRI Ocean Basemap” [65].
Fig 2.
Illustration of Southern Ocean food-web different pathways.
Yellow arrows show the long standing short, krill-dominated pathway while red arrows show alternative, but equally important, pathways with other krill, fish, and squid as major links between primary producers and higher-level predators. Myctophid and toothfish drew by Tom Langbehn.
Table 1.
Summary of the advantages and limitations of different methodologies used to study Southern Ocean food-webs.
Studies presented are examples of applying the different methodology to study the entire food-web, the diet and/or trophic ecology of Southern Ocean ecosystems and species (and in some cases from the Patagonian shelf).