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Cold Water Coral Reefs

Mighty_Emperor

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Although mentioned in passing on the Giant Squid thread:

http://www.forteantimes.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&postid=394093#post394093

These natural repositories for new and strange species probably desevres their own thread:

Havens of newly found marine life under threat

Deep sea trawling poses risk to coral reef dwellers and prompts campaign for fishing ban to facilitate research

Paul Brown, environment correspondent
Saturday June 5, 2004
The Guardian

Snails and clams thought to be extinct 2m years ago have been discovered living on cold water coral reefs which are being destroyed by fishermen using heavy trawl gear to drag the ocean bed.

A campaign to save the reefs and ban destructive trawling was launched yesterday by the United Nations environment director, Klaus Töpfer. He said it was vital they were researched before it was too late.

The existence of creatures such as giant squid and sea spiders thought to have disappeared millions of years ago has only become possible because of new technology used to explore the deep ocean.

The previously unknown colonies of animals are living on numerous cold coral reefs - themselves a completely new discovery - but scientists were shocked to discover that some were already so badly damaged they might never recover. The corals themselves have been carbon-dated as 8,000 years old.

Greenpeace is among campaigning groups hoping to get the UN to ban deep sea trawling completely while investigations take place into the locations of the corals and what lives on them.

Six main cold water corals have so far been identified, compared with 400 types of warm water corals but they sometimes extend over large areas. One found recently in the Norwegian Sea was 40 square miles. Corals occur on underwater sea mounts and often have associated colonies of fish and animals.

It is these fish that are targeted by the trawls with giant rollers and chains weighing as much as 10 tonnes which are dragged across the sea mounts to catch fish such as the orange roughy, which lives up to 150 years, and is sold in British supermarkets and fishmongers.

Campaigners say that because these take so long to reproduce, trawlers fish out one area and then move on to another sea mount.

Simon Reddy of Greenpeace said: "More people have been in space than into the dark depths of the oceans. Destroying seamounts is like blowing up Mars before we get a chance to explore it.

"Scientists say there could be as many as 5 million species in our oceans we have never discovered. We could be wiping out many unknown and prehistoric creatures that could help provide cures for diseases or teach us more about the origins of life on this planet, just so we can have more exotic fish on our plates."

A research report on the problem is due to be published on June 28, partly paid for by the UK government, which has already moved to protect the Darwin Mounds, a cold coral reef found less than five years ago off the north-west of Scotland.

The report says cold water reefs live in waters between 4C and 13C and can be in water as shallow as 40 metres (130ft) and as deep as 6,300 metres. Scientists have now detected them in waters off the coast of more than 40 countries although it was previously thought they were confined to the North Atlantic. In fact, they appear in the deep sea all over the world and are home to species found nowhere else.

Professor André Freiwald, of the University of Erlangen-Nuremburg, the author of the report, has been working with the World Conservation Monitoring Centre in Cambridge. He has just returned from another voyage discovering new reefs.

He said yesterday: "We are finding not only new species of coral and cold water corals in new locations but associated organisms, like snails and clams, that were believed by paleontologists to have become extinct 2m years ago. That was a real surprise, and we expect many more of these surprises, in the future as we undertake more scientific missions."

Mr Töpfer, launching the campaign yesterday to coincide with World Envrionment Day today, said the main focus on coral up to now had been on the warm water variety. These tropical reefs were vital for fishing for many of the poorest people in the world, but it appeared cold water corals were also a vital part of the web of life on Earth and it showed the natural world was "still full of surprises".

Next week UN policy makers are meeting in New York to find new ways of regulating deep sea fishing.

Environment groups are urging a UN general assembly resolution be put forward in November, to impose an immediate moratorium on deep sea trawling while the new life forms, and the vulnerability of fish and other species to deep sea trawling, can be assessed.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1231845,00.html
 
Deepest U.S. reef found

Sunday, January 2, 2005 Posted: 2217 GMT (0617 HKT)



ST. PETERSBURG, Florida (AP) -- Marine researchers have discovered the deepest coral reef ever found in the United States in about 250 feet of water off the Florida coast.

The discovery in the Gulf of Mexico was announced last month by the U.S. Geological Survey.

It was tentatively identified as a coral reef in 1999 by a team from the University of South Florida. But it took several more years of research to confirm it as a living reef that depends on light filtering down from the surface.

"We were all blown away by this bizarre, flat, living sea floor covered with blue and brown corals and lettuce-like green algae," researcher Bret Jarrett said of seeing live video from an unmanned submersible.

The video revealed a stunning number of fish, both deep and shallow water species: giant red grouper, scamp, damselfish, angelfish, rock beauty, hogfish and bass.

The reef is on Pulley Ridge, a vast area west of the Dry Tortugas, a cluster of seven islands 70 miles west of Key West. The reef is up to three miles wide and runs for about 20 miles.

Shallow-water reefs tend to grow vertically, like those off the Florida Keys. Pulley Ridge coral grows flat because it has adapted to the low light.

"Corals require light to grow, and so they spread out laterally as opposed to vertically," Jarrett said. "They've adapted to the situation, they've maximized the sunlight."

Officials who oversee the gulf are now wondering how to preserve the reef.

The scientists' research has been presented to the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council, which will decide in the coming months whether to restrict fishing or trawling in the area.

Source
 

Listen to the fish sing: scientists record ‘mind-blowing’ noises of restored coral reef

From Indonesia.

A reef which had been trashed by blast fishing has been restored by stabilising the seabed and re-seeded with new corals over a decade.

Describing the recordings, Dr Lamont said the "backing track of the reef" was snapping shrimp.

"That sounds like a bit like the static on the radio or frying bacon. Then, through that sound, you'll occasionally hear little trills, whoops or croaks."

The species responsible for many of these unusual sounds remain a mystery. Dr Lamont said the diversity of the sounds that fish produced was "as much as the diversity of birdsong".

"In some cases we can make an educated guess about what animal is making the noise, and in other cases we have no idea,"

"For me, that's part of the excitement of this whole field - the the joy of knowing that you might hear something that nobody else has ever heard before."

There’s a recording of sounds & a before & after video.
 
Some good news about coral reefs at last! Listening to the sounds, I thought they all sounded like frogs until an owl and Bernie Winters interrupted. Amazing range, you never think about that, do you?
 
Some good news about coral reefs at last! Listening to the sounds, I thought they all sounded like frogs until an owl and Bernie Winters interrupted. Amazing range, you never think about that, do you?

:confused:

maximus otter
 
I figured this report is better suited to being placed in this thread than either of the 'Global Warming' ones.
Massive Coral Growth at the Great Barrier Reef Continues to Defy all the Fashionable Doomsday Climate Predictions
The near vertiginous rise in the annual growth of coral at the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) is continuing, with further major increases recorded across large areas. According to the 2021-22 annual summary from the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS), levels of coral cover in the northern and central areas of the reef were at their highest levels over the past 36 years of monitoring.

Links to report and data:
Daily Sceptic report
Data summary
 
Further additions from other sources to back-up the previous claims are given in an update today.

"You would have to have a heart of stone not to chuckle at the coral contortions endured by many journalists as they wrote through gritted keyboards that the little critters are growing back in record numbers on the Great Barrier Reef (GBR). The initial reaction seems to have been one of shock. It cannot be true – Sir David Attenborough had assured us that the GBR was in “grave danger” of disappearing within decades because of climate change. Far from disappearing, the coral is now at its highest cover level since reef-wide monitoring began 36 years ago.

The news has yet to feature on the BBC climate page. The Corporation employs numerous environment correspondents, but the only report on its news site had a Sydney, Australia byline and appeared on the general science page. Curiously there was a similar absence of reporting earlier this year, when it was learnt that the South Pole had recently had its coldest six month winter since records began."
https://dailysceptic.org/2022/08/06...t-is-not-what-sir-david-attenborough-told-me/
 
I don't know if that would feel warm or not, seeing as I don't swim.
But I bet it feels bloody cold.
 
I don't know if that would feel warm or not, seeing as I don't swim.
But I bet it feels bloody cold.
I do know that even when it's like a nice warm bath on the surface (and say 45c air temperature) you don't have to go very far down before it's very cold. Only a few feet.
 
Dramatic Recovery of Coral Calls into Question Integrity of Science and Media, Says Top Scientist
Last year the (...) coral on the Australian Great Barrier Reef (GBR) showed its highest level since records began in 1985.
1676026397951.png

https://dailysceptic.org/2023/02/09...rity-of-science-and-media-says-top-scientist/
 
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