Deep-Sea Coral Collection Protocols - NOAA's Coral Reef ...

Handling procedures adopted by the Mountains-in-the-Sea Research Groupby Les WatlingFig. 18a and 18b. The Mountains-in-the-Sea ResearchGroup in actionThe Mountains-in-the-Sea Research groupgot its start in the canyons ofthe northeastern United States, where we were first confronted with octocorals of various kinds, butmost of which were pretty hardy. During the course of our subsequent expeditions to the New Englandseamounts of the North Atlantic, we have come to recognize that certain of the octocoral families haveto be handled differently from others. Handling issues are especially important when bringing specimensfrom the cold deep sea through warm temperate or tropical surface waters. Deepwater temperaturescan drop to 2 ºC. However, the collection and handling procedures outlined below can be modifiedsomewhat when dealing with surface waters that are approximately the same as those at the collectiondepth. We do not yet know much about the temperature tolerance of octocorals and antipathariansliving below normal scuba diving depth, so our guiding principle has been use methods that cause as littleshock to the organism’s tissues as possible.Collection ProceduresManipulator arm. We found that if octocorals and black corals (and perhaps other delicate specimensas well) are the only items to be collected with the manipulator arm of the submersible or ROV, thestandard three-fingered claw should be replaced by a cutting and gripping style claw. The one designedfor us by the Institute for Exploration can be seen on NOAA’s Ocean Explorer web site. It consists oftwo stainless steel angle-iron pieces with two Nalgene tubing pieces arranged so that as the sharpenededges of the opposing angle-irons cut the coral stem the tubing acted to grip the cut piece.Collection boxes. When there is a possibility that the specimens will be recovered through surfacewaters that are more than a few degrees warmer than the temperatures experienced at the collectionsite, we try to use tightly sealing insulated bio-boxes. In some cases we have not been able to have allinsulated boxes, so we have experimented with which corals put in the non-insulated boxes19