petnoyer | May 2, 2008
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…
cmcclain | May 1, 2008Coral spawning occurs when multiple corals release their gametes at the same moment. The underwater love fests are triggered by the moon, temperature, and mood music (Can't Get Enough of Your Love, Babe). All this sexual activity underwater can trigger other organisms to join in. Basically little colored balls consisting of both sperm and eggs, wrapped in a mucus, detach and float away. These love packets eventually break apart due to water movement. Now the real action happens were sperm and eggs seek each other out. When a match occurs, the development of the larvae ensues that hangs in…
kevin z | May 1, 2008It 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…
petnoyer | May 1, 2008Always 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…
petnoyer | May 1, 2008
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.
References:
1. Boero et al. 2007. Cnidarian milestones in metazoan evolution. Int…
petnoyer | May 1, 2008News 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…
petnoyer | April 30, 2008Since 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…
cmcclain | April 30, 2008
A deep-sea coral was collected at ~700m in the north-west Hawaiin islands. Back in lab, the lights were turned off and the scientists were excited to see how brightly the coral bioluminesced. Coral samples were collected by Hawaii Undersea Research Laboratory (HURL) and the Pisces V submersible
petnoyer | April 30, 2008This 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…
kevin z | April 29, 2008Just a friendly reminder that Deep Sea News will play host to the Circus of the Spineless this month. Due to the excitement here at Coral Week, I will be posting the Circus on Saturday. Please get your submissions to me by Friday evening! You can leave a link in the comments here or email them to me at kzelnio at gmail dot com.
kevin z | April 29, 2008
Reef City is sung to Sin City by Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris, a favorite song (and artists) of mine. Deep and shallow reefs alike under a multifaceted threat, but we'll not let them go down without fists wailing!
Reef City
This old reef has seen some days
Many changes through the haze
And smoke like mists of gametes in the water
Polyps stretched out reaching
For a particle, just a piece and
Who knows what it just might grab
(Chorus)
Takes more than an earthquake to shake this ole coral
Seems like this whole ocean's insane
Over fishing, nutrient loading, harvesting and trawling
From…
petnoyer | April 29, 2008
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…
petnoyer | April 29, 2008
Bubblegum coral (Paragorgia arborea) never looked so... cuddly. It's amazing. Who would believe someone could knit a sea fan and do it so well? Ecology Action Center in Halifax brings a unique perspective to the deep coral movement. They go straight to the fishermen for the information that counts, rather than waiting for science to answer important questions about deep-coral distribution and collateral impacts to coral from destructive fishing gear. That, and they're knitting the benthos back together one species at a time.
While scientists have only recently begun to learn about cold-…
cmcclain | April 29, 2008Cephalopodcast points to the Florida Center for Instructional Technology website that has several beautiful illustrations for education use. Preeetttttyyyy.
petnoyer | April 29, 2008This is the second in a series of five referenced articles about shared characteristics between deep and shallow water corals
Special guest post by Christina A. Kellogg
Just as humans have beneficial bacteria living on our skin and in our intestines, corals have symbiotic microbes in their mucus, tissues, and skeletons. Unfortunately, there are also disease-causing microbes that can infect corals. These coral-associated microbes include all three of the major domains of life: Bacteria, Archaea, and Eukarya (fungi, and in shallow-water corals, algae) and also viruses (Rosenberg et al. 2007…
petnoyer | April 28, 2008
Figure reprinted from Cairns, 2007 in Bulletin of Marine Science
One of the central questions in marine biogeography asks "why are there more species of coral and fish in the Indo-Pacific Coral Triangle than anywhere else in the world?" By many accounts, this is the global epicenter of marine biodiversity. More than 1500 species of fish and 500 species of shallow hermatypic corals occur in the Coral Triangle compared to the other global epicenter of marine biodiversity, the Caribbean Sea, where you'll find 'only' 900 species of fish and 50 species of corals (Carpenter and Springer 2005,…
petnoyer | April 27, 2008This is first in a series of five referenced articles about shared characteristics in deep-sea and shallow-water corals.
Deep-sea corals are benthic suspension feeders in the classes Anthozoa and Hydrozoa. They share the Phylum Cnidaria along with the jellyfish, sea anemones, and the siphonophores. Cnidarians all share one common trait, a stinging cell called the cnidocite, which is the fastest known biological structure (1) and the unparalleled apex of organelle specialization (2).
Cnidocite structures, aka nematocysts, or stinging cells, are housed within the tentacles of the polyps.…
cmcclain | April 27, 2008A yellow stony coral courtesy "Mountains in the Sea" scientific party, NOAA, and the Institute for Exploration via Oceanus