310 
Fishery Bulletin 107(3) 
70°20' 
70”1 5 1 
70*10’ 
70°20' 
Figure 2 
Locations of 163 seafloor sampling sites (white circles) within the 515 km 2 University 
of New Hampshire study area that were sampled by some combination of Shipek 
grab, Wildco box corer, and towed video camera. Distribution of three major bottom 
sediment types: light gray=mud; medium gray=sand; dark gray=gravel (which 
includes all hard bottom types ranging from gravel to bouldershVertical dashed 
line is the western boundary of the WGOM closure. 
latitude and 1 min of longitude), yielding a total of 216 
target sampling sites (not all were sampled). A combina- 
tion of techniques was used at each site, including grab 
and box samples for infauna and sediments, and towed 
video for epifauna and general seafloor conditions, as 
described below. 
Field and laboratory methods 
All seafloor sampling occurred from June 2002 through 
September 2005. However, most sampling occurred 
during 2002 (~65% of the grab and box core sampling) 
and 2004 (-90% of the video sampling, and -30% of 
the grab and box core sampling). Hence, 90-95% of all 
seafloor sampling occurred during 2002 and 2004, and 
there was no temporal bias in sampling inside compared 
to outside of the closure. In other words, approximately 
equal numbers of sites inside and outside of the closure 
were sampled during each year of the study. All sam- 
pling gear was deployed from chartered commercial 
fishing vessels. 
Bottom sediments were sampled with either a Shipek 
grab (Wildlife Supply Co., Buffalo, NY) with a design 
sampling area of 0.04 m 2 , or a Wildco box corer (Wildlife 
Supply Co.) with a design sampling area of 0.0625 m 2 . 
The depth of sediment penetration was measured to 
the nearest 0.5 cm for each sample, and a subsample of 
sediment was taken for grain size and organic content 
analyses. Grab samples were rejected if they did not 
penetrate at least 2 cm into the sediment, and box core 
samples with less than 5 cm penetration were rejected. 
The contents of the box corer were subsampled with 
a 10.4-cm inside diameter (0.0085 m 2 surface area) 
acrylic core tube. The entire grab contents and box core 
subsamples were washed through a 0.5-mm mesh sieve, 
fixed in 3% unbuffered formalin, and preserved in 70% 
isopropanol. In the laboratory, all invertebrates were 
removed under 3x magnification, sorted by major taxa, 
identified to family level in most cases, counted, and 
weighed (wet weight of preserved specimens). 
Bottom sediments were analyzed for grain-size com- 
position (texture) by using standard sieve and pipette 
analytical techniques (Folk, 1980). Organic content was 
determined by loss-on-ignition (% LOI) after 4 hours at 
450°C (Byers et al., 1978). 
Epifaunal assemblages were determined from bottom 
videographs taken with a custom-made camera system 
composed of a video camera mounted on a frame with 
synchronized strobe lights and an integrated position- 
ing system. At each station the camera was suspended 
near the bottom (within 50 cm) and 6 to 10 minutes of 
downward looking video footage was recorded along a 
drift transect at least 50 m long. For quantitative anal- 
yses, the videotape from each transect was subsampled 
to isolate still images of sufficient quality to character- 
ize seafloor features so that a series of nonoverlapping 
