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The widespread distribution of cold-water reefs is becoming better documented through deep-sea exploration. Historically, these efforts have focused on the waters of North America and Europe, leaving large gaps in our knowledge of the rest of the deep ocean. Here, we describe spectacular coral growths in the Southern Ocean. A few coral specimens have been collected from the Drake Passage region (Cairns 1982), but it was not until 2008 that an expedition was launched specifically to study cold-water coral distributions in space and time (Burke et al. 2010). During that cruise, we found that corals were abundant across the Drake Passage (Waller et al. 2011) and thus revisited in 2011 with a Drop Camera system to investigate these areas in greater detail.
In this Reef Site, we show the first high-resolution images of the diverse coral assemblages on Cabo de Hornos (Cape Horn—57°04S, 67°30W), from 500 m to over 1,400 m depth. Stylasterids dominated this ecosystem, but large numbers of octocorals and solitary corals were also present. Dead stylasterids were observed in the images (e.g., Fig. 1a, b) indicating that reef formation has been active over time. At the deeper locations (Fig. 1c, d), the largest aggregations occurred on boulders and bedrock, though free-living solitary corals (Flabellum sp.) were frequently seen in sediments. In all areas where corals were present, a high diversity of associated fauna was also observed (e.g., sponges, ophiuroids, cephalopods, fish, and actinarians). This area appears to be a hotspot of biodiversity in the deep sea, perhaps representing a key larval source of cold-water corals into the Drake Passage.
References
Burke A, Robinson LF, McNichol AP, Jenkins WJ, Scanlon KM, Gerlach DS (2010) Reconnaissance dating: A new radiocarbon method applied to assessing the temporal distribution of Southern Ocean deep-sea corals. Deep-Sea Res I 57:1510–1520
Cairns SD (1982) Antarctic and Subantarctic Scleractinia. Biology of the Antarctic Seas XI: Antarctic Research Series 34, American Geophysical Union, pp 1–74
Waller RG, Scanlon KM, Robinson LF (2011) Cold-water coral distributions from towed camera observations—initial interpretations. PloS ONE 6(1):e16153
Acknowledgments
This work was funded through the National Science Foundation Office of Polar Programs (Grant #1127582) using the ARV Nathaniel B. Palmer. We gratefully acknowledge the science party, Raytheon technicians, and ECO crew for the collection of data.
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Waller, R.G., Robinson, L.F. Southern ocean corals: Cabo de Hornos. Coral Reefs 31, 205 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00338-011-0852-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00338-011-0852-1