Area and substrate description The tidal stream “Rystraumen” is situated at 69°N in northern Norway (Fig. 1) and has current velocities that exceed four m/s (Sjøkartverk 1957; McClimans 1977). It is only 500 meters wide at the most narrow and has a sill depth of 35 meters. It connects two deep fjords (Balsfjorden and Malangen), which both have high annual primary www.selleckchem.com/products/sbi-0206965.html production and large stocks of zooplankton (Gaarder 1938; Eilertsen and Taasen 1984; Tande 1990). Large volumes of homogenised water flow back and forth each tidal cycle (McClimans 1977; Svendsen

1995) and the exchange of dispersing larva, phyto- and zoo-plankton between the two fjords is probably important all through the productive season from late March through June (Reigstad and

Wassmann 1996; Reigstad 2000). Food and recruitment is thus unlimited for benthic animals. Fig. 1 Map showing the tidal inlet Rystraumen and adjacent waters of Tromsø, northern Norway (redrawn from Reigstad 2000) The M/S Flint (wrecked 1926) is situated 50 m from land and offers vertical hard substrate from 17 to 36 m depth. Kelp forest extends down to the upper parts (<18 m) and a dense sessile selleck chemicals llc fauna covers most of the wreck. The hull is mostly intact and lays in the direction of the stream (W/E) in an upright position. The lack of a deck makes it open to predators. Water currents are much slower along the inside of the hull but F. implexa find more aggregations grow densely on both the inside and outside of vertical surfaces. Aggregations are also found on rocky substrata elsewhere in the Rystraumen and in other local tidal streams (Kvalsund, the entrance of Ullsfjord, Fig. 1) but are less common here compared to on the surface of wreck. The aggregations attain sizes from a few centimetres wide to continuous patches up to a meter long and comprise many levels of structural heterogeneity. The tubes form

a lattice (Kupriyanova and Jirkov 1997) and run parallel adhering together to form ridges and protuberances (Knight-Jones and Moyse 1961). Crevices and holes in the lattice range in size from millimetres between single tubes to centimetres between protuberances (Fig. 2), and within the whole scale of structural levels over animals are found. Fig. 2 Filograna implexa Berkeley, 1828 aggregate on the wreck of “M/S Flint” in the tidal stream Rystraumen, North Norway. The picture is approximately 1/3 of natural size. An approximately 5 cm scale is shown on the picture. The aggregate shows two levels of structure scale; (1) millimetres among single tubes entwined into the finger-like projections and (2) centimetres among the finger-like projections Methods and materials Eight aggregations of Filograna implexa were sampled from verticals beneath the rail on the wreck “M/S Flint” within a range of 19–24 m depth in the tidal stream “Rystraumen” during four SCUBA dives in spring.