currents: science and conservation
'All these animals were so deep nobody ever thought to look'
By Bo Peterson
Provided
The Post and Courier
The alphonsino is a common species of deep-sea coral habitats.
Governor asks Bush to declare deep-ocean paradise off-limits.
This ancient landscape is alive.
The thousand-year-old coral runs for miles in sweeping, spindling reefs and branches, towers and rock bottom mounds hundreds of feet tall, all swarmed by fish, sponges and other creatures deep under the Gulf Stream.
The vast ocean-bottom reef that Gov. Mark Sanford has asked President Bush to name a national marine monument is as big as South Carolina itself, just off the lip of the Continental Shelf, starting roughly 60 miles out.
“Beautiful, extensive, huge, wonderful,” said Steve Ross, associate research professor at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, who has cramped into a small submarine to dive 1,000 feet down to see it. He found starfish and crabs he didn’t know existed, and rare fish such as cat sharks swimming in coral branches like birds through the trees.
“A vast array of creatures. You know you’re looking at an environment nobody has ever seen,” Ross said. “We don’t know anywhere near what we thought we did. All these animals were so deep nobody ever thought to look.”
As resources deplete closer in to shore, the largely unexplored coral reef is becoming the new ground for mineral mining, and for energy industries such as oil, natural gas, even methane.
A bill proposed in 2006 in the U.S. Senate would have expanded offshore oil and natural gas drilling to South Carolina and elsewhere; it was later withdrawn. Water-powered turbines have been proposed to tap the Gulf Stream in Florida. Long-line fishing boats already make passes over the reefs. Conservationists say disturbing the irreplaceable coral destroys it.
Provided/
The Post and Courier
A conger eel swims around its deep-sea coral habitat.
The creatures in that coral might hold a key to medicines, including a potential cure for pancreatic cancer in sponges that is being researched by Latasha Amisial, a former Medical University of South Carolina graduate student who studied at the Hollings Marine Laboratory at Fort Johnson.
“We call it ‘bio-prospecting.’ Any time you’re doing bio-prospecting, if you destroy something, you never know what you’ve lost,” said Eric Lacy, national Marine Biomedicine and Environmental Sciences Center director, who is based at the Hollings lab.
Conservationists say keeping a network of the delicate, slow-growing coral intact preserves not only a matchless seascape but a nursery for deep-sea plants and animals. Designating the dark world a national monument would be like making it a national park, regulating how it’s used and banning such uses as bottom trawling.
The proposed Atlantic Coast Deep Sea Corals National Monument is shaped oddly like a sea horse. It would run for 23,000 square nautical miles from about North Carolina to Florida, with its tail along the South Florida shoreline.
Source: South Atlantic Fishery Management
More than a third of the reef is off South Carolina, including the Charleston Bump, 80 miles out from its namesake, rising nearly 1,000 feet from the bottom 2,000 feet deep, deflecting the Gulf Stream like a mountain would channel clouds. The Bump is a fishing mecca for migrating species including the white marlin and swordfish.
Sanford focused on the Bump when seeking the designation, saying, “This deepwater coral ecosystem constitutes a national treasure on par with Yosemite Valley and the Northwest Hawaiian Islands.”
Bush named the northwest islands a marine sanctuary in 2006. Sanford sent the letter at the urging of conservationists and scientists who were encouraged by the Hawaiian designation. A similar letter went to the Bush administration’s Council on Environmental Quality, signed by more than 100 scientists.
“We didn’t see a downside. We don’t view this as politics. This is a chance to protect a natural resource,” said Joel Sawyer, Sanford’s communications director. “There have been so many (fishing) restrictions placed on (the Bump) already, we didn’t feel this would make a significant difference. The area is already being regulated out of (fishing) existence.”
Source: The Post and Courier
Coral reef monument
Gov. Mark Sanford is seeking national monument status for the deep-sea coral reefs off the Southeast coast.
Deep-sea video
To see footage of the coral reefs of the proposed Atlantic Coast Deep Sea Corals National Monument, click here.
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