Truly magnificent garden of coral fans. I don't think we've seen these densities yet today, and possibly not yet on the expedition.
Certainly, we haven't seen these densities at these depths.
So we're at 2,300 meters here.
Really dramatic terrain on this ridge top.
Maybe these more vertical settings create sort of the micro habitat that initiates these denser colonies of bamboo coral we're seeing.
As we move over here, we can see all the fans are lined up and that gives you an idea of where the currents are coming from.
These fans are likely hundreds, if not over a thousand, years old.
So that gives the sense that although this looks unstable, these blocks have been sitting in their current position for quite some time.
I think this is a really good illustration that we need a lot of factors coming together in order to find these high-density communities.
We need to have the right underlying geology. We need to have the current flow.
We need to have food available and you need to have the recruiting corals in an area that is stable enough that they can grow for long periods of time,
then you get to see all these really large, old colonies.
To my recollection, we haven't seen anything quite like this in the Gulf of Mexico so far.
We're starting to see all the different things that have to come together to make really great communities.
And those are going to help inform models of coral densities.
So that in the future, we can become even better at predicting where we may find communities like this and planning our exploration dives accordingly.