Source: Stuff.co.nz
Author: Amber-Leigh Woolf
Commercial fishers are “bulldozing” ocean floors, says Greenpeace.
Its calculations show that in the 2017-2018 fishing season, New Zealand commercial fishing vessels destroyed up to 3000 tonnes of coral and other vulnerable species through bottom trawling.
Continue reading Fishing vessels ‘bulldozing’ oceans, destroying 3000 tonnes of coral in one year
Source: Radio NZ
Author: Kate Gudsell
The petition was launched by environmental groups the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition, ECO, Forest and Bird, Greenpeace, LegaSea and WWF-New Zealand as well as recreational fishers.
It is calling for the government to ban the destructive practice on seamounts, or submarine mountains, and other ecologically sensitive areas.
A recent report from NIWA on the impact of bottom trawling, concluded that the benthic communities on the seamounts had low resilience to the effects of bottom trawling.
It said New Zealand’s major deepwater fisheries occur on seamounts for a number of fish species, including orange roughy.
Continue reading here.
Source: NZ Herald
Leading environmental organisations and recreational fishers have joined forces to call on the government to restrict bottom trawling.
Continue reading Forces joined in battle against bottom trawling
Source: Phys.Org
DNA analysis recently confirmed that Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) scientists and their collaborators at OceanX, the University of Connecticut (UConn), and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) discovered two new species of deep-sea corals during a September 2018 expedition in the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts National Monument, located about 100 miles from the Northeast U.S. coast.
Continue reading New species of deep-sea corals discovered in Atlantic marine monument
Source: Fstoppers
Author: Jennifer Tallerico
The devastating effects of bottom trawlers lead one activist and photographer to create a campaign to drive emotional messages through their imagery.
Continue reading Underwater Photography to Take a Powerful Stand Against Trawling
Source: EarthSky
Author: Sandra Brooke
When people think of coral reefs, they typically picture warm, clear waters with brightly colored corals and fishes. But other corals live in deep, dark, cold waters, often far from shore in remote locations. These varieties are just as ecologically important as their shallow water counterparts. They also are just as vulnerable to human activitieslike fishing and energy production.
Continue reading Huge previously-undetected coral reef off US East Coast
Source: The Conversation
Author: Sandra Brooke
When people think of coral reefs, they typically picture warm, clear waters with brightly colored corals and fishes. But other corals live in deep, dark, cold waters, often far from shore in remote locations. These varieties are just as ecologically important as their shallow water counterparts. They also are just as vulnerable to human activities like fishing and energy production.
Continue reading Deepwater corals thrive at the bottom of the ocean, but can’t escape human impacts
Source: Mongabay
Author: Emily Clark
When Luiz Rocha, a fish biologist at the California Academy of Sciences, goes scuba diving, he tacks on one and a half times his body weight in specialized diving gear. Once he submerges, he can’t spare a moment to take in the vibrant corals just beneath the surface — he has greater depths to plumb.
Rocha is headed toward what Smithsonian Institution fish biologist Carole Baldwin calls “a very diverse and productive portion of the tropical ocean that science has largely missed”: mesophotic reefs. “Mesophotic” is Greek for “middle light,” referring to the intermediate amount of sunlight that can penetrate to depths of 30 to 150 meters (100 to 500 feet) below the ocean’s surface.
Continue reading Are deep sea reefs really a lifeboat for our vanishing corals?
Source: Nature
Author: L. Chapron, E. Peru, A. Engler, J. F. Ghiglione, A. L. Meistertzheim, A. M. Pruski, A. Purser, G. Vétion, P. E. Galand & F. Lartaud
Plastic contamination is now recognized as one of the most serious environmental issues for oceans. Both macro- and microplastic debris are accumulating in surface and deep waters. However, little is known about their impact on deep marine ecosystems and especially on the deep-sea reefs built by emblematic cold-water corals. The aim of this study was to investigate whether plastics affected the growth, feeding and behaviour of the main engineer species, Lophelia pertusa. Our experiments showed that both micro- and macroplastics significantly reduced skeletal growth rates. Macroplastics induced an increased polyp activity but decreased prey capture rates. They acted as physical barriers for food supply, likely affecting energy acquisition and allocation.
Continue reading Macro- and microplastics affect cold-water corals growth, feeding and behaviour
Source: Business Insider
Author: Jeremy Berke
The seafloor is one of the last unexplored regions of our watery planet.
On a recent expedition dubbed Deep Search 2018, a group of ocean researchers discovered 85 miles of deep-sea coral reef off the coast of the southeastern US.
“Good news is too rare these days, and this is a victory that we can all share. We have found a pristine coral reef in our own backyard,” Erik Cordes, the chief scientist on the expedition and a deep-sea ecologist at Temple University, wrote in a mission summary.
