Deep Sea News

How does Coral Week end? With a bang or a whimper? Can you tell? I still don’t know.
Three stories still sit on my desktop. While I polish them off, consider this:

Coral reefs are in decline around the world, and species are disappearing every day. But new species are being discovered, too. So, can society mitigate species loss by investing in species discovery? Below the fold is a graphic illustrating coral species discovery rates since the 1750’s.

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Marine aquarists have a photographic edge on field photographers. Their work is fixed, dry, and well-lit, while field photogs slosh back and forth with one finger on the camera and one on the reef while trying to avoid fire coral and maintain buoyancy. No wonder aquarists get such sharp focus.

A favorite gallery for coral reef creatures is Clippo’s “Digital Reefs Gallery“. More than 900 images decorate the site, and they’re not mucked up with embedded credits. Go ahead, take all day. He’s got macro shots, fish, echinoderms and crustaceans, too. The photo of the yellow sun coral (Tubastrea sp.) is posted courtesy of www.digital-reefs.com. Thanks, John!

It has been one amazing coraliscious week! I’m learning a ton and have enjoyed the guest articles and all the blogger contributions. Maybe you just can’t get enough coral, like me?? Well have I got the cure! As Bruce Dickinson might have said had known how fabulous deep sea coral is, “Guess what? I got a fever! And the only prescription.. is more coral!”

Michael Barton attempts a remedy by dispersing some Darwin for us. Darwin Online now has an article (open access) by Rosen in 1982, published in BioScience, describing Darwin’s earliest work in… you guessed it… coral reefs!

Have had yourself some conch? Don’t knock it till you try it! Rick Macpherson is reporting in live from the Turk and Caicos Islands (its tough, right?) about his molluscivorous leanings, with a twist of sustainable harvesting of this concomitant coral coinhabiter.

Lastly, I would like to reiterate the point that coral reefs, deep and shallow, are host to many species of fish. This includes commercially important ones, both in terms of fishing and tourism dollars. So, like Stanford Professor Steve Palumbi, I would like to know “How we gonna BBQ the last fish left?” if you take away all the corals? I’m really into garlic, butter, lemon pepper topped with fresh tomatillos, avocado and onion… mmmm….

Speaking of delicious, check out this coral reef video from NOAA Ocean Explorer! Life on the Edge 2004: Investigating the Gulf of Mexico Coral Reefs.

Always thoughtful Mark Powell of Blogfish says corals are “the canary in the coal mine”, and points out a list of political actions you can take to help preserve fragile coral reef habitats.

Commenter Jives from the The New Blue contributes two stories about the Giant Ocean Tank at the New England Aquarium. Remodeling doubled the number of species and individuals in the tank by adding a magic ingredient–a massive coral reef replica. Coral biologist extraordinaire Dr. Les Kaufman tells his story as one of the principal designers.

And finally, Lucia Malla from Uma Malla pelo Mundo in Brazil is posting more stories and pretty pictures than we have here! I wish I could read Portugese! Please go pay a visit and say “OLÁ” to our South American friends.

Here’s one of the today’s visitor maps:

Speaking of explosives, the nematocyst, or stinging cell, is one character that binds all cnidarians together. The nematocyst is “high tech cellular weaponry”, the unparalleled apex of organelle specialization (Boero et al 2007), and the fastest known biological structure (Tardent, 1995). From ScienceDaily, the discharge kinetics of nematocysts in Hydra to be as short as 700 nanoseconds, creating an acceleration of up to 5,410,000 g. Take that mantis shrimp! A dramatization is above, with narration in French.

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News outlets enjoyed a field day last month reporting on the amazing vitality of Porites sp. coral colonies in the South Pacific Bikini Atoll where Americans tested the fifth most powerful atom bomb ever exploded 54 years ago. The Bravo bomb was a 1000 times more powerful than the bomb at Hiroshima. It vaporized three islands, raised water temperatures to 55,000 degrees, rocked islands 200km away and left a crater 2km wide and 73m deep. According to a recent field survey, the crater is filled today with luxuriant coral beds.

Trees of branching Porites coral up to 8m high have been established, creating thriving reef habitat in what should be an atomic wasteland.

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Since the first day of Coral Week we’ve been joking that a proper invertebrate carnival should include recipes, especially if its Scallop Week or Oyster Week.* Alas, nobody eats coral, even as a snack. Yes, people eat sea anemones and jellyfish, but they would have to be seriously, deliriously, Castaway hungry to eat a coral. Or else corals would have been gone long ago… But, this does NOT mean coral is without natural enemies.

If you scuba dive on West Atlantic coral reefs, you probably know that Hawksbill turtles frequent the habitat, and eat sponges, but did you know that sea turtles eat octocorals? Turtle hugger J Nichols posts a National Geographic Critter-Cam video with a unique hitchhiker’s view of a Green Turtle foraging for sea pens. Stranded sea turtle stomachs can contain sea pens in large numbers. I think it serves them right for eating corals. They shouldn’t do that.

Even worse is Chris Mah’s Echinoblog, which actually pays tribute to asteroids like the Crown of Thorns seastars that wreak havoc on the shallow water corals of the Great Barrier Reef. It’s sad really. Asteroids are a terrible menace and a threat, by far the worst of the Echinoderms. I mean, they’re practically cannibals. Chris revels in half a dozen cold killers in his post “Echinoderms Eating Corals! Mmmmmm…” It makes me want to cry. Don’t they know corals are endangered?

*Further evidence in support of “Gorton’s Law“

This is the third in a series of five referenced articles on the shared characteristics of deep and shallow water corals.

by Michael J. Risk

Image of the Devonian seafloor from “Evolution of Life“

The coelenterates, corals and their relatives, are very ancient, and in fact may be the oldest metazoans. Proterozoic burrows preserved in the Mackenzie Mountains of Northwest Canada were probably made by animals resembling cerianthid anemones, and are about one billion years old. Silurian gorgonians are almost identical to their modern counterparts. The group as a whole has therefore had a very long time to evolve chemical and physical defenses against predation, as well as a wide spectrum of flexible feeding adaptations.

Since the Proterozoic, fossil coelenterates have been fossilized in a wide variety of sedimentary rocks. Reasoning by analogy with the present, paleontologists have usually assumed that these corals lived in shallow water-even though in many cases the depositional environment suggested much deeper water, shelf edge or more. We have now come to understand that many of these occurrences were in fact deep water corals, capable of living in the absence of light.

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One of the challenges of deep coral research is convincing people that deep corals form habitat for other animals, animals of particular concern, like fish or crabs, or endangered species like the Hawaiian Monk Seal. Precious coral beds with large colonies of Gerardia sp. 550m deep in the French Frigate Shoals support higher fish densities than adjacent areas, and monk seals forage in these coral beds (Parrish 2006- free paper alert!). Managers can rest a little easier knowing monk seals love corals, too.

In the video above, a marked monk seal dives down to a deep coral bed to strut his numbers in front of the camera for amazed researchers in the PICES submersible. It’s an “a-ha” moment – the megavertebrate connection. So glad its on YouTube.

Worldwide, corals generate $9.6 billion per year in money