Today is a dive dedicated to submarine
canyons. These are important habitat for
variety of deepwater animals. Several studies
have shown that these enhance diversity and
also abundance. There has been very limited
work done on these kind of habitat. Now, a lot
of these places up here in northwest Hawaiian
Islands were sampled in 1902 by the Albatross.
This ship that was by many considered the
first large oceanographic research
vessel. They did close to 350 trawls down to
depths of three thousand meters. Hey Chris, thank
you so much for capturing beautiful
imagery of this animal. That animal is not in
the HURL guide. In the immortal words of Taylor
Smith "I have never, like ever, seen that
one". Excellent. This is exactly what we expected
to find in a submarine canyon which are
notorious for having a higher density as well
as a higher diversity of animals. They have even
been deemed to be hotspots of diversity.
So yeah that large anemone that is now in
view, that is in the genus Calliactis, the
small individual next to it is unknown to us.
It's it's beneficial for a lot of these organisms
to get higher up in the water column so they
basically have more flow over the tissues that
they can use to capture food. It's been about
four hours now on the bottom, transit about
600 meters on this rift zone ridge, collected
two biological samples which are going to be
very valuable to analyze in the laboratory. The
coral samples in particular are like
nothing we have seen before in this region.
Where in Papahanaumokuakea for
example some rudimentary analysis and baseline
inventories that were done suggest that we
have about seven thousand marine species,
about twenty five percent are found no
where else on the planet. As we are
starting to look deeper and deeper we are coming
back with new species, new genre, and
potentially new families. So really
highlighting that we've only really scratched
the surface and it's the tip of the iceberg, and
that there is a lot of biodiversity that
remains to be discovered.