Benthic Community

A benthic community is the assemblage of organisms living on or in the seabed, from microbes and meiofauna to large epifauna and infauna. It splits into epifauna living on the surface (sponges, corals, bivalves) and infauna buried in sediment (polychaetes, amphipods, bivalves), with feeding guilds spanning filter feeders, deposit feeders, and predators. Benthic community structure responds to sediment grain size, oxygen, organic input, and disturbance, which makes it a standard bioindicator in marine monitoring such as the EU Marine Strategy Framework Directive 2008/56/EC seabed-integrity descriptor. Bottom trawling and hypoxia shift communities toward opportunistic, short-lived species.