June 17, 2014 — WOODS HOLE, Mass. — Light doesn't penetrate below 600 feet. Nearly 1½ miles down, it's pitch black and the water temperature hovers just above freezing at a little over 39 degrees. Water pressure is a crushing 3,481 pounds per square inch. Few people would expect that anything could live in that environment, let alone something beautiful. Even fewer would believe that it would be coral, something most people associate with a snorkeling vacation in warm, tropical waters.
Deep-water coral is a lot harder to find and study than its Caribbean and South Pacific counterparts. It took scientists Martha Nizinski and Anna Metaxas two years to mount an expedition to the eastern edge of Georges Bank and the Gulf of Maine to study these colonial animals that feed on the detritus that rains down on them from above.
Metaxas, a professor of oceanography at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia and Nizinski, from the National Marine Fisheries Service science center in Woods Hole, will depart on the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration's research vessel Henry B. Bigelow Wednesday on a two-week joint venture between Canadian and U.S. scientists. Although the actual mission is scientific research into the habitat and biology of these deep-sea communities, Nizinski and Metaxas hope their findings will help inform both countries' efforts at protecting these ancient and fragile colonial animals.
They have both seen the damage caused by fishing trawls. The existence of these corals, which live in depths from 600 feet to 8,200 feet, has been known for centuries because fishermen encountered them as early as the 1800s. When fishermen reported hauling up trees from the ocean bottom, it was likely they were bringing up coral, said Metaxas. It was Canadian fishermen who noticed they were snagging a lot of coral in their nets more than a decade ago in an area off Georges Bank known as the Northeast Channel. The Canadian government eventually closed the area to fishing in 2002. Outside that protected area there is little left but debris-covered rubble, the two scientists said.
The scientists believe the species was once much more widespread than it is now. It is still found in the Atlantic from south of Africa on up into Arctic waters, and sporadically along the West Coast and a few spots off Australia. They grow slowly, less than a half inch to 4 inches a year. The most common types branch into large fans over 6 feet high and hundreds to 10,000 years old, located in groves or thickets with about 4 to 10 feet separating each coral.
Read the full story at the Cape Cod Times