The number of individuals of razor clams and other bivalves were counted at each sampling station and the density was estimated using the area of the sampling frame. Sediment samples were collected with a 30 cm corer. Then they were dried in an oven at 80 °C for two days and apportioned using a 1000 μm analytical sieve (Retsch, Düsseldorf, Germany). Their size distribution was estimated with a laser granulometer (LS200, Beckman Coulter Inc, Brea, CA, USA) and classified according to the Folk classification ( Folk, 1954 and Jackson and Richardson, 2007). All this information is summarised in Table 1. The acoustic survey was carried

out on 12 July 2009, using a small fishing boat (6.25 m long). A Simrad EK60 scientific echosounder with an ES200-7C split-beam 200 kHz transducer was mounted find more on a steel pole attached to the hull rail of the boat. The transducer was operated with maximum emitting power (1 kW), minimum pulse length (64 μs) and a sampling rate of 10 pings s− 1 to obtain the maximum vertical and horizontal resolution. The acoustic survey was carried out under good weather conditions and keeping

the boat’s speed between 1.5 and 3.5 knots. This speed permits the oversampling of every bottom point in at least 4 consecutive pings (the split beam angle is 7° and the survey area depth ranges from 5–11 m), thereby ensuring spatial continuity. Positions were recorded into the sounder files using a GPS (Simrad GN33) signal input. To define the acoustic transects, an imaginary line, parallel to the coast, was defined over each sandbar. Transects were sailed along these lines repeatedly, each one at least three Lumacaftor research buy times (see Figure 3, p. 507), switching the course in between, i.e. leaving the coast to the left and right sides; this was later used to assess the differences due to the ship’s course. In total,

14 acoustic transects were recorded: five along the Raxó sandbar, five along Aguete and four along A Cova, with respective mean lengths of 550 m, 250 m and 285 m. Angular information from the seabed. The phase distribution of the backscattered signal is due to the bottom surface roughness and the sub-bottom scatterers (razor shells in our study case) within the insonified seabed area. In Alanine-glyoxylate transaminase previous works split-beam characterisation of bottom roughness has been used to discriminate fish aggregations near the seabed (MacLennan et al. 2004) or to improve 3-D bathymetry resolution and seabed classification (Demer et al., 2009 and Cutter and Demer, 2010). This technique uses multifrequency transducer assemblies to overcome the baseline decorrelation problem. Our hypothesis is that a similar mechanism in the sub-bottom volume, where impedance fluctuations are due to the presence of benthic biomass, local variations of granulometry, or seabed composition, should give us angular information about the presence of razor clam patches (angle φ in Figure 2a and alongship and athwartship angles in Figure 2b).