The discovery

“When I was first out of graduate school,” says Reed, “I was hired at HBOI, and this was just after they’d discovered the deep-water Oculina reefs using a submersible. They had come across one of these 60- to 100-foot-high deep-sea coral reefs. “My first study, in 1976, was to see what lived in the coral, what used it for habitat. I began to study the invertebrates, and what I found out was that a small coral colony with a head the size of a basketball could hold up to over 2,000 individual animals and hundreds of species, including worms, crabs, shrimp and fish. It was an incredible biologically diverse environment that we had never known about before.

Organisms use brown or dead Oculina as well as white living Oculina for habitat.

Figure 2: Whether dead (brown) or alive (white) – Oculina serves as a high-relief habitat for many organisms, including some commercially important fish species. Photo credit: L. Horn, NURP/UNCW

“By 1980, we realized that this was a totally unique habitat found nowhere else in the continental United States. And possibly nowhere else in the world (Figure 2).

“At the same time, I began to look at how fast the coral grows. So my next study was to see how old the colonies’ heads were. We were seeing coral heads the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. I did a study over two years and found that they actually grow very slowly, about a half an inch a year. So a large head could easily be 100 to 200 years old. Then I did a coral core sample into one of these reefs and determined the age of the dead coral that came from the inside of the reef.”

What Reed and his colleagues learned by radiocarbon dating the dead coral that came from the inside of the reef was that the coral was around 10,000 to 12,000 years old, meaning it began life near the end of the last Ice Age.

“We also came to realize,” Reed continues, “how fragile the coral was: the branches themselves are the diameter of a pencil, and the reefs form into big bushes. So imagine how any heavy weight, like fishing gear, dragging through it could very easily crush it.

“At that time, in the early ‘80s, there was indication that boats were coming down from the Georgia coast and up from the Gulf of Mexico and fishing with roller trawls that were able to fish over the bottom of high-relief areas. Roller trawls have wheels that allow them to easily roll over the bottom of the ocean floor.”

These rare coral reefs, home to hundreds of species, including commercially important fish, were being destroyed. Because of their slow growth rates, it will take hundreds of years to restore them, if they can be restored at all. “My main concern is that while on paper this has been a protected area since 1984, they’ve still been heavily fished,” both by poachers and by the unaware. “Tremendous damage can be done by an errant shrimp trawler going across one of these coral reefs. One pass can destroy a great many Oculina corals.”