Researchers revealed for the first time growth rates of deep-sea coral communities and the pattern of colonization by various species.
The scientific team used the UH Mānoa Hawai‘i Undersea Research Laboratory’s submersible and remotely-operated vehicles to examine coral communities on submarine lava flows of various ages on the leeward flank of the Island of Hawai‘i. Utilizing the fact that the age of the lava flows—between 61 and 15,000 years—is the oldest possible age of the coral community growing there, they observed the deep-water coral community in Hawai‘i appears to undergo a pattern of ecological succession over time scales of centuries to millennia.
The study , published this week, reported Coralliidae, pink coral, were the pioneering taxa, the first to colonize after lava flows were deposited. With enough time, the deep-water coral community showed a shift toward supporting a more diverse array of tall, slower growing taxa: Isididae, bamboo coral, and Antipatharia, black coral. The last to colonize was Kulamanamana haumeaae, gold coral, which grows over mature bamboo corals, and is the slowest growing taxa within the community.
“This study was the first to estimate the rate of growth of a deep-sea corals on a community scale,” said Meagan Putts, lead author of the study and research associate at SOEST’s Joint Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research (JIMAR). “This could help inform the management of the precious coral fishery in Hawai‘i. Furthermore, Hawai‘i is probably the only place in the world where such a study could have been performed due to its continuous and well known volcanology.”
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Image via University of Hawai‘i Mānoa
