Deposit feeders, animals that derive nutrition from organic matter in sedimentary deposits, are dominant among the inhabitants of muds and, therefore, of the benthos of much of the ocean. In this volume the critical research problems pertaining to deposit feeders are identified and promising approaches for dealing with those problems are proposed. Interdisciplinary approaches are of utmost importance in the study of deposit feeders and their sedimentary environment, merging fields as disparate as nutritional physiology and sediment geochemistry. Among the topics presented are advances in theories of foraging and digestion, and new experimental approaches to study the potential foods, feeding behavior and physiology of animals that ingest sediment.

1 Deposit Feeding and Coastal Oceanography.- 2 Examining Relationships Between Organic Carbon Flux and Deep-Sea Deposit Feeding.- 3 Early Diagenesis of Organic Matter and and the Nutritional Value of Sediment.- 4 The Nature and Determination of Non-Living Sedimentary Organic Matter as a Food Source for Deposit Feeders.- 5 Digestion Theory Applied to Deposit Feeding.- 6 Time-Dependent Absorption in Deposit Feeders.- 7 Radiotracer Methods for Determining Utilization of Sedimentary Organic Matter by Deposit Feeders.- 8 The Lnportance of Size-Dependent Processes in the Ecology of Deposit-Feeding Benthos.- 9 The Relationship Between Ingestion Rate of Deposit Feeders and Sediment Nutritional Value.- 10 Modeling Deposit Feeding.- 11 The Effects of Sediment Transport and Deposition on Infauna: Results Obtained in a Specially Designed Flume.- 12 Small-Scale Features of Marine Sediments and Their Importance to the Study of Deposit Feeding.- 13 On Some Mechanistic Approaches to the Study of Deposit Feeding in Polychaetes.- 14 Some Ecological Perspectives in the Study of the Nutrition of Deposit Feeders.