1. deepseanews
  2. Friday Deep-sea Picture: Swiftia sp. in series

Friday Deep-sea Picture: Swiftia sp. in series

By petnoyer on August 29, 2008.

i-dc9b444dca5b6dd8884d17aa81d4a0d2-swiftia_polyp_sm.JPG
Living polyp of a Swiftia sp. sea fan. Photo credit: Peter Etnoyer, HRI.

Many deep-water animals have never been photographed alive in their natural habitat, they're known only from their pickled state. Dried, dusty, and broken specimens fill museum drawers. "Living specimen photography" captures vital information before a specimen is collected. Remember to "snap" before you snip. It brings those dusty drawers to life!

Swiftia sp. is a dark loving, azooxanthellate sea fan, one of many 'asymbiotes' in the twilight zone of the West Atlantic. The living colony's color and morphology is seen below in a series of images through the microscope, and in-situ through the lens of the Sonsub Innovator ROV aboard NOAA's RV Ron Brown on the 2003 Gulf of Mexico Deep Sea Habitats Expedition.

i-b36dae6d1b5987d9b4630977e3a9b88a-swiftia_branch_sm.JPG

i-7ab368ff6edb054b4af2c57fcdb28339-swiftia_med_sm.JPG

i-75cbd47f098104bb27adbd933506f310-swiftia_wide_sm.JPG

Tags
Uncategorized

More like this

Twilight Zone... the Expedition
100 m deep on Flower Garden Banks. Photo credit FGBNMS/NURC. Like many marine protected areas around the world, most of the seafloor in the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary (FGBNMS) is deeper than the depth limit for recreational and scientific diving (50 m). We call this the "…
Deep-corals provide habitat for numerous associated species
This is the fourth in a series of five referenced articles on the shared characteristics of deep and shallow water corals. Shallow water corals reefs have been called "the rainforests of the sea" because nooks and crannies created by reef building corals form micro-habitats for other animals,…
Baby Jaguar Sharks Like To Hang Out in Corals
Figure 2 from Etnoyer and Warrenchuk (2007). Callogorgia americana delta colonies with catshark egg cases attached. Depth 533 m. ROV suction hose on the left is 15.25 cm (6 in) in diameter. I am excited that our first post on new research for 2008 covers work by DSN's own Peter Etnoyer. 2008 also…
Challenger Expedition on Google Earth
People seem fascinated by the prospect of purchasing virtual real estate at Second Life, but if you ask me, Google Earth is a better place to stake your claim. For instance, I am studying deep sea-fans, or gorgonians, in the West Atlantic twilight zone between 50-150 m. Many of these have their…

It gets EVEN better...there's some microbial ecology data for this coral:
Bruck, T. B., W. M. Bruck, L. Z. Santiago-Vazquez, P. J. McCarthy, and R. Kerr, G. 2007. Diversity of the bacterial communities associated with the azooxanthellate deep water octocorals Leptogorgia minimata, Iciligorgia schrammi, and Swiftia exertia. Marine Biotechnology 9:561-576.
Note that both "Bruck"s have an umlaut over the "u" but the HTML kept interpreting it as a weird character so I took it out.

Awesome! I guess "zooming in" is not as hard as "zooming out" to show the landscape scale.

You can write ü as ue as well.
What are the characters that make Swiftia Swiftia?
And a random thought. If a boat runs over this gorgonian, is it swift boated? :D

Mostly the shape and texture of some tiny microscopic bones inside the polyp called sclerites. This would be an order of magnitude finer scale than the polyp, and larger than the bacteria. The continuum is growing!