NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer is America’s ship for ocean exploration.
It really represents NOAA’s commitment to collecting baseline information and
better understanding areas of our ocean that are poorly known or unknown and poorly understood.
So, for us, that means that we’re looking at places that people have never been, looking at things that people have never seen.
This is one of our nation’s national marine monuments and we know very little about the fauna in this entire area.
So in order for our resource managers to be able to better manage these resources, both living and non-living resources, we need to know what’s there.
There are a lot of places in the world where we have no idea what’s down there or very little idea,
and especially in the Pacific Ocean, it’s a huge, huge ocean
and there are many parts of it that have simply never had submersibles or ROVs go down into the bottom.
So in particular, here in the Mariana Islands, Mariana Trench, we’ve never had any ROV surveys to look at what sorts of species might be living there.
If we find coral species, are they different species than we find in other places?
What sort of things are living with the corals?
They are creating new habitat wherever it is they grow.
Just think of a tree growing out of the forest, and there are birds and squirrels and butterflies and caterpillars.
Well, it’s the same thing with the corals.
We see lots of brittle stars climbing on them, crinoids, shrimp, and fish, and octopus may lay their eggs in the branches of the corals,
and so the presence of the coral itself actually increases the biodiversity of the species richness of a particular area.
So, that is one reason why we think that corals are important to focus on, because they show us places in the ocean that are “hotspots of diversity.”
So much like deep-sea corals provide habitat for other organisms to live on, sponges do as well.
These are almost like oases for other organisms.
And in addition to that, some of these organisms actually are the source of chemicals
that can be developed into drugs that can be used to treat diseases like cancer, Alzheimer’s, and infectious diseases.
And the reason for that is that these sponges are attached to the bottom,
they can’t get away from something that’s trying to eat them or grow over top of them.
So they’ve evolved a very sophisticated chemical defense system.
On this expedition alone, on this leg of this expedition alone, we have observed, in place,
in their natural environments, organisms that are interacting with each other in ways that we didn’t know existed.
Or in ways that maybe we just hypothesized might be happening.
To me, the excitement has been seeing the diversity of life in the deep sea.
And some places, the real abundance, not only the diversity, but the abundance of this diverse fauna in the deep sea.
I remember one dive in particular just a few days ago where we weren’t expecting to see this at all,
but it was just like, massive sponge, massive coral heaven in the deep sea that I just never expected to see.
And so when people say there’s not much growing in the deep sea, that’s just not true.