Stomach evacuation experiment The experiment was designed to estimate the stomach evacuation rate of capelin eggs in red king crabs at an ambient temperature of 2.9°C, which is within the range of bottom temperature at capelin spawning sites along the coast of northern Norway (Sætre & Gjøsæter 1975). The experiment ran between March 27 and April 6 2011. The collection of experimental animals and capelin eggs is described in Mikkelsen (2013). To obtain at least one datum per hour of digestion time, 36 crabs were expected to be sufficient for this experiment. Red king crabs were captured using traps in Porsangerfjord, Finnmark County, Norway (70⁰ 22’ N, 25⁰ 27’ E) in spring 2011. All captured females were released, because females are not allowed …show more content…
In 2006, 25 crab trawl hauls of approximately 16 min duration were conducted, covering on average 5.7 x 10-3 km2 (CV: 0.54). The abundance of crabs (ind. km-2) was estimated for each haul by dividing the number of crabs caught per crab trawl haul by the area covered by the individual haul (Table S1). Estimates of mean abundance (ind. km-2) in each stratum were calculated from abundance values of all crab trawl stations within the stratum (Table …show more content…
km-2) and ED was tested by calculating correlation coefficients (rs). ED was estimated from grab samples taken at the midpoint of each crab trawl track. The correlation between crab abundance and distance from CSA to the midpoint of trawl track was also tested. Finally, distance from CSA was divided into 2 km bins (0 - 2, 2 - 4, 4 - 6, and > 6 km) to investigate whether RKC abundance changed non-monotonically with distance, and the Kruskal-Wallis test was used to examine whether RKC abundance differed between bins. Stomach evacuation model An exponential decay model was fitted to the experimental data on the proportion of eggs remaining in the stomach f(t) at the time (t) after the start of feeding and is given by: f(t)=e^((-b∙t) )