Faunal abundance and taxa richness are sufficiently log-normal to be treated as such. They are, however, high variance attributes of the benthic system in which variation is multiplicative. Cross-shelf macroinfauna abundance decreases as a function of distance from shore most in the South Texas region and Least in the Central Gulf Platform area. Off Florida, there is an increase in abundance near the seaward edge of the shelf at the southern end. Only the South Texas study showed a distinct long-term trend in abundance.
Faunal variation is predominantly cross shelf.
Zoogeographic patterns in the macroinfauna are possibly obscured by taxonomic inconsistencies. Only 74 species were found to be in common to all four studies. The utility of species diversity is greatly complicated by the fact that all four studies showed a very similar underlying pattern of relative abundance amongst species. This suggests an underlying mechanism which is either a reflection of random events or common ecological processes. Whatever the cause, the ubiquity of the relationship suggests that more informative species analyses could be developed which looked at departures from the common pattern, rather than contributions to it.