Colorful coral seabeds a "breathtaking" discovery

Clinging to the seafloor of the Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary is a candy-colored jungle: waving pink fans, giant yellow cups and slender, feathery-tipped creatures that look a bit like old fountain pens.

On an expedition off Washington's coast, government scientists for the first time have documented the most extensive collection of corals and sponges ever found in the vast ocean between California's sun-fed reefs and the deep coral gardens of western Alaska.

Researchers had known for about two years that there were unusual corals in Washington's ocean waters. But they have been taken aback by the sheer variety and beauty of this discovery. Less than 5 percent of the 3,300-square-mile sanctuary's seafloor has ever been seen by human eyes.

With a remote-controlled vehicle that traveled 300 to 2,000 feet below the ocean's surface, scientists photographed brilliant red corals with bulbous knobs poking from stems as thick as cigars. At sites three to 20 miles off the coast, they saw orange corals and white corals with delicate branches, and a stony reef-forming creature more common to the Atlantic Ocean.

"It was really breathtaking," said Mary Sue Brancato, a researcher for the marine sanctuary. "We'd see these huge red sea corals atop boulders that had rockfish all over them."

Said Bob Steelquist, education coordinator for the sanctuary: "It just shows how little we may know about a place even as close as a few miles off Cape Flattery."

Like discovering a rain forest

Washington's corals are far less ecologically diverse and widespread than the gardens of coral discovered a few years ago off Alaska's Aleutian Islands. But the find, made over a 12-day expedition that ended earlier this month, was still a happy surprise for coral scientists.

They have been learning how important corals are to marine ecosystems just as they discover how threatened they are all over the world.

This find was like "discovering never-before-mapped valleys in a national forest filled with flora and fauna we never knew existed," said Tim Keeney, co-chair of the U.S. Coral Reef Task Force and a deputy assistant secretary at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

"It's like discovering entirely new areas of rain forest."

And just like rain forests, the coral beds appear to support abundant life, from basket stars and sea slugs to crabs and anemones. One soft coral was coated with shark eggs, while another towered over a pillow of sea stars.

"In some cases we actually saw some pregnant female rockfish nearby," said Ed Bowlby, research coordinator for the sanctuary. "We'd see shrimp reflected in our lights."

Some of these corals live for hundreds of years, and at least one species is known to live for 20,000 years or more.

Damaged by fishing

But just as in Alaska, the scientists found several sites where corals appeared to have been destroyed by human activity. Some were festooned with abandoned fishing gear. Others were crushed or overturned, with the telltale tracks of bottom-trawling fishing nets nearby. The scientists also found the rubble of dead Lophelia, rare coral more typically found in the Atlantic Ocean, said Jeff Hyland of NOAA's National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science.

He said it is uncertain how or why the coral died. But he said fishing disturbance was visible at 10 of the 15 sites they observed.

In Alaska, the discovery of the coral beds eventually led federal fisheries managers to protect nearly a half-million square miles of ocean from bottom fishing. Earlier this month, 130,000 square miles off the West Coast, including some of these sites, were protected from bottom-scarring methods, but much of the newly discovered coral is outside that protection zone.

"They made a decision based on the best available information," said Mike Burner, a groundfish expert with the Pacific Fishery Management Council, the government body that banned fishing in some of these areas. "The research is new," and the council may considered adding to the boundaries in the future.

Sanctuary scientists are eager to return to the sea to visit another 33 sites they suspect will also be rich in coral.

"Believe me, we wanna get back out there," Brancato said. "We're just getting started."

Craig Welch: 206-464-2093 or cwelch@seattletimes.com