Echinodermata, Asteroidea in the Faroe Region: Echinodermata, Asteroidea í føroyskum øki

Abstract

Investigations of the marine benthic fauna of the Faroese fishery territory started in 1987 with a Nordic programme called BioFar with sampling efforts concentrated at depths greater than 100 m. After the BioFar sampling was concluded in 1993, a new programme called BioFar 2 started in 1995 to sample the marine benthic fauna from the intertidal zone to a depth of 100
m.

Before BioFar, 31 species of asteroids had been reported from the Faroese fishery territory. The BioFar sampling increased the number of reported species to 41. Some of the results from BioFar 2 are included in this report. For each species the following information is given: the valid name with author and publication year, relevant synonyms, reference to good descriptions -. determinations of where the species was found, the type of water mass in which the specimens were caught, depth range, measured temperature range or estimated temperature range of the near-bottom water, general depth range of the species in the Atlantic Ocean, and its general distribution.

Two species are exclusively and three other species are most often recorded from the Faroe Plateau or the tops of the banks (0-299 m); thirty species are reported from the plateau and the slope (0-999 m), fourteen of them preferring the slope depth (300-999 m); nine species are caught both in shallow and deep water (0-2,200 m). Ten species are mostly confined to "warm" Atlantic Water (> 7°C); two species are found only in the cold bottom water of the Norwegian Sea; fifteen species are distributed in all the main categories of water masses; fifteen species are recorded from two or three different water masses.