WEBVTT

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Today we are looking for deep-sea coral communities

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and other benthic communities in the canyons region.

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As fishing is moving into deeper waters, as potential hydrocarbon exploration

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and extraction, as well as mining activities move into deeper waters, it’s really

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important to understand first and foremost where these coral communities

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are and this is an important region here in the canyons.

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This coral, it looks like the polyps are retracted.

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Cup corals in the mix, Desmophylum.

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We’re gonna be looking not just for where we’ve found corals

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but where we do not see corals where we don’t expect to see them.

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On the site coming up to the right, there’s quite an extensive field of the ... as well.

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This is kind of a rare and exciting thing for me as a modeler just to be

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able to develop the model that’s making predictions about where things

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should be and then to actually go test that, especially in the deep sea.

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That looks like a paragorgian.

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Yeah, it looks like we have paragorgia, bubble gum coral.

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Okay, we’re counting, so far we’ve come across four different species of coral during

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this dive already and, we’ve been on the bottom for about 20 minutes.

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It helps us to synthesize all of the data that we have from observations

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like this effort and sort of generalize it to create maps that help us

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develop better conservation tools, to improve management,

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and to target future explorations like we’re doing right now.

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So the calibration, validation, ground truthing aspect is also an important

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and exciting thing that we’re doing today.

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We can’t visit every location that a model might predict that there are

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deep-sea coral communities, this gives us some way of getting inferences

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on the connectivity between and amongst canyons.

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We’re interested in knowing whether these canyons

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are actually isolating mechanisms for preventing communities.

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It’s very important.

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You know, ......, issues of isolation in the canyon and those models really help us

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predict where to go and look but also to help us in filing the genetics in how things

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might be, canyons might be used a stepping stones … seamounts and vice versa.

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The big thing that makes models as useful tool is that it allows you to take what you

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know in terms of where corals have been observed and then take what you know about

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the environment there, the morphology of the seafloor, the substrate, hard bottom,

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sediment, oceanography, the productivity of the overlying waters and then

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use that to predict other locations that are like the places that you’ve already observed.

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This is important not only to understand evolution in the deep sea, and corals are

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really ideal model system to understand deep-sea  evolution, but also understanding

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connectivity patterns allows us to pinpoint where we might focus conservation

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efforts so if there’s a source of larval recruits to other areas,

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that’s a really good place to target conservation efforts.

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