I'm Charles Messing, I'm a professor at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
I'm an invertebrate zoologist. I specialize in particular in a group of animals called the crinoids, the sea lilies and feather stars.
But I also work on deep-sea coral habitats.
Right now, I'm aboard NOAA's Okeanos Explorer, in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico.
The goals for this expedition could make a list as long as your arm.
First of all, we're exploring. We're going to places that nobody has been to before,
to see things no one has seen before.
But we're looking particularly for vulnerable marine habitats, deep-sea coral and sponge habitats, chemosynthetic communities.
We're also investigating the organisms that live in the midwaters and the geology of the seafloor
and we're exploring our nation's maritime heritage. We're going to be looking for some shipwrecks.
So one of our mission goals is to look for deep-sea corals.
And when we talk about deep-sea corals, of course, we're talking about the corals that live in the deep ocean.
When you think about corals, you usually think about shallow coral reefs and that they need sunlight.
And of course, the deep-sea corals live in an area where there is no sunlight.
So they don't have, for example, the symbiotic algae that allows shallow-water corals to grow.
Here in the Gulf of Mexico, there's a wide variety of deep-sea corals, and we know this because
the previous expeditions have found them.
They've found bamboo corals and stony corals and soft corals and so on in the deep sea.
On this expedition, we found some of the same things that people have found before,
but we're finding them in places where they've never been seen before.
And we've also found a couple of things that are probably new species of corals.
This is the beauty of exploration, you never know what you're going to see,
and here we've luckily ended up in an incredible area, on an incredible wall of just a huge diversity of suspension feeders --
corals, sponges, corals and their commensals.
So it looks like, coming in to view, we've got a couple more of these very large coral colonies.
Oh yes, look at that.
Now, we have great video. I mean, it's amazing the detail that they can zoom in and we can see on our monitors,
but in the final analysis, in many cases, we have to have the specimen to look at the microscopic anatomy,
to see structures we can't see in the video.
And of course we need to take tissue samples to analyze the DNA of these organisms.
So the other day we came across this coral, and our scientists ashore had the idea that maybe this was new.
They hadn't seen it before. So this was one of the ones that we really wanted to collect.
And we were successful.
Deep-sea corals are extremely important because they are architects of complex habitats.
They build three-dimensional frameworks that can be taken advantage of by other organisms,
from fish and crustaceans, including commercial species, worms, microscopic organisms, sponges, mollusks --
you name it, all of these organisms can find homes, shelter, food, etc., in these deep-sea coral habitats.
Deep-sea corals are really important for a number of reasons, one of which we're seeing here,
in that they provide this complex, three-dimensional habitat which is used by lots of other invertebrates.
So a lot of animals use these corals as a form of substrate to attach to and
also a form of shelter to shelter within so that they can escape predators that may be passing by.
So it's really important that we explore for these deep-sea habitats, like these coral communities,
because NOAA and other agencies are tasked with managing the marine resources of the Gulf of Mexico,
and they can't manage what they don't know.
So we're exploring as much as we can to contribute to the knowledge of the deep-sea resources of the Gulf of Mexico.