ABSTRACT
Boulder shores are common to coastlines across the globe at any latitude or longitude, and as such they potentially provide an important source of multiple scale comparison. At high latitudes, north and south, they are dominated by two remarkably similar sorts of organisms either side of the high water mark: encrusting bryozoans under water and encrusting bryophytes above it. Being easier to reach mosses received earlier attention and have remained important in Arctic and Antarctic terrestrial study. Their marine counterparts on shallow hard substrata at the high Arctic latitude of Spitsbergen started over a century ago and was conducted mostly by Nordic scientists. Among the first faunistic records published were works by Smitt (1868), Bidenkap (1897, 1900) and Nordgaard (1900, 1918). Necessarily, pioneer studies were mainly taxonomic investigations. Even though west Spitsbergen is probably the best investigated of high Arctic sites, even in shallow water new species are still being added (Kuklinski & Hayward 2004). In the last five decades there has been little follow up of the early studies. Though some studies mention bryozoans,
few papers have focussed on bryozoans per se (see Rozycki & Gruszczynski 1986, Gulliksen et al. 1999, Pipenburg et al. 1996, Lippert et al. 2001). Ecological data from the Spitsbergen area and from the Arctic in general are very scarce. In our study we concentrate on coastal West Spitsbergen as a part of broad investigation of the ecology of high Arctic bryozoans (Kuklinski 2002a, b).
