General biological features of the South Atlantic
Introduction

The goal of this section is offering an overview of some salient biological traits of the South Atlantic. The scheme outlined below reflects the known or assumed boundaries and gradients between discrete, structurally more or less homogeneous faunal domains, yet traits other than specific composition (e.g., water masses and currents, primary production, biomass, seasonality, specific diversity) are relied upon heavily.

Inventorial analyses alone, often due to the paucity of data, fail to identify major ecologically and biogeographically meaningful features. Furthermore, especially when used alone and in a quantitative manner, faunal distributional data tend to break areas into too many regions, many of which have little or no ecological meaning (Fager and McGowan, 1963; Beklemishev, 1969; Dadon and Boltovskoy, 1982).