Corals searching for food in the cold and dark waters of the deep sea are building higher and higher mountains to get closer to the source of their food.
Corals searching for food in the cold and dark waters of the deep sea are building higher and higher mountains to get closer to the source of their food. But in doing so, they may find themselves trapped when the climate changes. That is shown in the thesis that theoretical ecologist Anna van der Kaaden of NIOZ in Yerseke and the Copernicus Institute for Sustainable Development in Utrecht will defend on Feb. 20 at the University of Groningen. “When the water gets warmer, these creatures prefer to be deeper, but a coral doesn’t just walk down the mountain,” Van der Kaaden said.
Deep and Dark
Unlike the famous, colorful tropical corals, cold-water corals live in dark waters a few hundred meters deep, for example off the west coast of Ireland. In the dark, they do not coexist with algae that often give tropical corals their spectacular colors; after all, those algae need light. “But that certainly does not mean that cold-water corals are boring,” Van der Kaaden emphasizes. “They sometimes have beautiful colors of their own. And they certainly play an equally important role in the ecosystem as tropical reefs. For example, they are oases of food for fish. They have a very central place in the ocean systems.”
Read more at Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research
