Texas A&M College of Geosciences researcher Dr. Brendan Roark co-authored game-changing research on the Hawaiian-Emperor Seamount Chain.
For decades, overfishing and trawling devastated parts of an underwater mountain range in the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii, wrecking deep-sea corals and destroying much of their ecological community. But now, after years of federally mandated protection, scientists see signs that this once ecologically fertile area known as the Hawaiian-Emperor Seamount Chain is making a comeback.
The research team who discovered the evidence of recovery was led by Dr. Brendan Roark, associate professor in the Department of Geography at Texas A&M University, Dr. Amy Baco-Taylor, Florida State University (FSU) associate professor of oceanography, and FSU doctoral student Nicole Morgan. The research was funded by NSF’s Division of Ocean Sciences and involved four research cruises out to the central and north Pacific Ocean to investigate the ecological communities of the region.
Because of the slow-growing nature of the corals and sponges that live on seamounts, “It’s been hypothesized that these areas, if they’ve been trawled, that there’s not much hope for them,” Baco-Taylor said. “So, we explored these sites fully expecting to not find any sign of recovery,” she said. “But we were surprised to find evidence that some species are starting to come back to these areas.”
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