Name that coral!

I am back at it - analyzing all the video footage my team collected from the Gulf of Mexico last summer. I finished the fish already, so now I feel more at home: I am identifying the invertebrates. 

This frame grab from our mystery shipwreck shows cup corals
(Tubastrea coccinea) and sea rods (Diodogorgia nodulifera).

Many of the engineers at WHOI subscribe to a 3-part taxonomic system. Having little knowledge of the living creatures in the wide, watery world, the engineers classify objects they observe in the ocean into three categories. An object is either a rock, a shark, or snot. That's right - all inanimate objects are termed "rocks," all swimming animals are called "sharks," and the rest gets described as "snot." I didn't say it was a good system, mind you. 

I suppose under the rock-shark-snot worldview, all the sessile invertebrates that I love so much fall into the "snot" category. To be fair, they are a bit slimy sometimes. 

This week, I have had the pleasure of identifying all that "snot" from the Gulf of Mexico to species. So far, I have seen stony corals and wire corals and cup corals and octocorals - every type of coral imaginable. There have also been sponges, bryozoans, and bearded fireworms galore. The mesophotic zone tends to have lower species richness than shallower depths, but I am finding no shortage of beautiful creatures to keep me occupied. 

It's very satisfying to see our footage from last summer being converted into numeric data. Soon, I should be able to run some statistical analyses!