Maui reef expedition reveals new findings
by The Garden Island
A team of researchers from the Bishop Museum, Department of Land and Natural Resources, University of Hawai‘i and NOAA’s Pacific Island Fisheries Science Center returned last week from a successful 6-day expedition off the coast of Maui. Aboard the university’s research vessel, the team completed five dives using deep-diving submersibles.
The multi-institutional project, funded by two separate NOAA grants — $1.4 million from NOAA’s Coral Reef Ecosystem Studies and $150,000 from NOAA’s Coral Reef Conservation Program — seeks to characterize the nature of coral reef ecosystems that occur at depths of 50 to 100 meters off Maui. These deep reefs were not known to exist until relatively recently, in large part because they occur at depths below what can safely be accessed using conventional SCUBA gear, states a Bishop Museum press release. Although certain kinds of organisms, such as black coral, have been known to exist at these depths, the new discoveries are of vast expanses of densely-packed hermatypic (reef-building) corals, which have photosynthesizing algae called zooxanthellae in their tissues.
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A team of researchers from the Bishop Museum, Department of Land and Natural Resources, University of Hawai‘i and NOAA’s Pacific Island Fisheries Science Center returned last week from a successful 6-day expedition off the coast of Maui. Aboard the university’s research vessel, the team completed five dives using deep-diving submersibles.
The multi-institutional project, funded by two separate NOAA grants — $1.4 million from NOAA’s Coral Reef Ecosystem Studies and $150,000 from NOAA’s Coral Reef Conservation Program — seeks to characterize the nature of coral reef ecosystems that occur at depths of 50 to 100 meters off Maui. These deep reefs were not known to exist until relatively recently, in large part because they occur at depths below what can safely be accessed using conventional SCUBA gear, states a Bishop Museum press release. Although certain kinds of organisms, such as black coral, have been known to exist at these depths, the new discoveries are of vast expanses of densely-packed hermatypic (reef-building) corals, which have photosynthesizing algae called zooxanthellae in their tissues.
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posted by anthony m, at 8:05 PM
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