Coral After Coral After Sponge in the Deep

A story from Andrew DeVogeleare, PhD.

Deep sea coral

ANDREW DEVOGELEARE is currently the Research Director for the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary. His position involves providing scientific information about the Sanctuary to decision makers, so they can make good, informed decisions and provide for ocean education. The Research Director is also tasked with understanding what’s happening in the Sanctuary ecosystems and monitoring change through time, particularly the health of the Sanctuary and how’s it changing.

Andrew has a small staff and a small budget, but he acknowledges having the brightest and best marine science collaborators here in Monterey Bay and, for that matter, anywhere else in the world. He says they’re very bright, exciting people to be around, including the grad students, and they know more about this area of the ocean than is known about most places in the world.

Andrew was born in the San Francisco Bay area and grew up in Berkeley. His dad was on the faculty at the University of California at Berkeley (UC Berkeley), so Andrew got to grow up in the Berkeley Hills and experience all the good there was in that community.

He’s been interested in marine biology since he was a kid, where he first became interested in marine and aquatic science while raising tropical fish, reading books, and watching TV. And as with so many others, Jacques Cousteau also made an impact on Andrew’s young, impressionable mind.

In his youth, Andrew and all his friends had aquaria with fresh water fish. When he started his fish-breeding hobby he wasn’t sure whether he wanted to get into freshwater biology or marine biology, but the great visuals, photos and movies he saw during those early years inspired him to do something with his life he was passionate about. His parents were supportive and had told him to do something he loved.

Because of his love of fish and biology, he decided to study marine biology as an undergrad. Andrew attended UC Berkeley and was excited to declare his major as marine biology at the end of his second year in college, but his advisor said don’t do it you’ll never get a job, because his daughter had a marine biology degree and couldn’t get a job. Andrew decided to take his parents’ advice over his advisor’s and followed through anyway.

After completing his undergraduate work at UC Berkeley, Andrew attended Moss Landing Marine Labs (MLML) on the shores of Monterey Bay, where he got his Master’s Degree studying rocky shore ecology. Andrew then propelled those studies into a PhD at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

While in school, Andrew did some consulting work for Kinnetic Labs in Santa Cruz looking at impacts of oil spills and associated rocky shore recovery rates.  This background led him to a postdoctoral position at MLML, studying the effectiveness of different cleaning techniques after the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Prince William Sound, Alaska. At the same time, he worked as the first Research Coordinator for the Elkhorn Slough National Estuarine Research Reserve and served as an elected official as a Moss Landing Harbor Commissioner.

In 1995 Andrew started at the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, where he continues to this day now as its Research Director.

 You can watch Andrew’s story on Youtube here: https://youtu.be/QN-zZm5Q50E

CORAL AFTER CORAL AFTER SPONGE IN THE DEEP

About thirty miles offshore of Point Sur there’s a geologic feature called Sur Ridge, and it’s about eleven miles long, three miles wide. The shallowest spot is maybe 2,300’, and then it goes down at the bottom to about 5,000’ deep.

My friend and colleague, Jim Barry, and I, were on a cruise studying a lost shipping container just outside the Monterey Bay. What never happens offshore is we finished our work early. And Jim said, “Wow, we’ve got an extra day. Hmm. That never happens.” And then he said, “Why don’t we go check out Sur Ridge, you’re always talking about it. I know you want to go there. Nobody’s been there to look at the biology.” He said, “I’ve got some manuscripts I’ve got to work on. We can check it out and see what we find there.”

We looked at a map and we looked for the steepest ridge that we could find figuring that maybe we’ll see some things at the top. It’ll be muddy along the sides, and hopefully we’ll see some nice corals.

So we get there. We’re with the ROV[1] pilots, sitting with the cameras, approaching slowly from the muddy floor up to Sur Ridge. And Jim’s kind of opening up his computer working on some things, and as soon as we hit the bottom of Sur Ridge we see this Corallium on the screen: it’s this pink, beautiful coral. It’s called the Precious Coral. They make jewelry out of it. “Wow! That’s a surprise!” We go a little bit farther and we see another pink coral, but this one is called Sibogagorgia! A little bit farther and there’re these bamboo corals; then Jim closes his computer, and he’s starting to look. And the pilots are also getting kind of excited, and the rest of the day we’re just going up the side of the ridge, seeing coral after coral after sponge.

On later trips at Sur Ridge we saw a whale skeleton, an octopus garden, chemosynthetic communities, and by the end of the day we had been seeing corals all day long and everybody was really hyped up.  The ROV pilots that are out there almost every day said, “Wow, we’ve never seen anything like this!”

So, not only is it beautiful out there, but you’re sharing it with other people that are excited, and you’re the first human eyes to see this particular place on the globe. Plus you’ve found something that’s really cool. And that still makes me feel excited. It’s what you dream about doing when you’re young and you want to be a marine biologist.

But maybe better than that, is that because it’s closer than say the Davidson Seamount, which is also very special and where we’ve seen some similar things, you can get to Sur Ridge in four hours or so.  This site is closer and it’s shallower. There’re a lot of corals, and we could visit it repeatedly and start doing studies there. So rather than just saying, “Oh, there’s a cool coral” and moving on, it’s like let’s mark it, let’s look at it through time, let’s see what’s eating it.”

Then there are studies on determining how old these things are. Some of them are a couple thousand years old, and that’s pretty exciting. Then there’s another scientist who says, “Let’s use lasers to look at the particles moving around the corals and see how they’re feeding.” And then there’s, “Well, what kind of currents do they need?” The Aquarium was interested because they want to make an exhibit of corals, and what kind of currents do we need to keep these corals alive?

But for me, maybe the most exciting thing was that we’re starting, and we’ve been successful at, developing techniques for taking branches of corals and transplanting them, trans-locating them to other areas. And we’re exploring how they do in terms of living, and what’s the best way to move them, bring them to the surface, what kind of substratum to put them on, how to package them in pots.

So, because there’re a lot of areas of the ocean that have been impacted by deep-sea trawling or oil spills or other human impacts, we’re the first ones that are developing how to restore areas in the deep, not just by moving the coral, but by looking to see if they’re making eggs or propagules that they can release.

So that’s my exciting story about the deep-sea. It’s discovery, it’s beauty, it’s learning and it leads you to thinking about what a gorgeous place we have, what a special earth we have, and that we should take care of it. Not just by trans-locating coral, but by sharing the information so that the next generation of marine scientists that are thinking, “What am I gonna do? I wanna discover some things!” will get excited. That in all of these areas of the ocean that won’t be discovered for a long, long time, there are many places yet to be seen by human eyes. The next generation of marine scientists will then be able to go find amazing things and share them with everyone else, so that there’s an understanding of the ocean.

We need to lose some of the apathy around caring about the ocean that a lot of society has. We need to get people excited about it, and say, “Hey, we’re connected, we should take care of it for the next generation, not just of scientists, but for everybody.” So that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

[1] Remotely operated vehicle. These are operated by specially trained pilots aboard the mother ship.