Abundance and biomass latitudinal distribution of pelagic Decapoda, Lophogastrida, and Euphausiacea in the tropical and equatorial Atlantic Ocean

In this dataset, we included the abundance and biomass distribution of pelagic shrimps from off the Brazil coast (15ºS) to the Canary Islands (25ºN). Sampling was conducted in April 2015 using the Mesopelagos net (Meillat, 2012) during both day and night periods, at various depth layers employing the multi-sampler VERDA (Castellón and Olivar, 2023), ranging from 800 - 1000 m depth to the surface. Samples were preserved in 4% buffered formalin and, in the laboratory, organisms were identified to the lowest taxon possible. Organisms were weighed to determine wet weight (WW), which was then converted to dry weight (DW) using a DW/WW ratio of 0.179 (Pakhomov et al., 2019). DW values were further converted to carbon units (g C) assuming that 40% of DW represents carbon content (Hernández-León et al., 2019). Abundance and biomass values were standardized using the filtered volume of the net.