This is the first cruise of a 4-year project funded by the US Mineral Management Service (MMS) and the NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research (OER) to explore new deepwater coral communities at both natural and man-made sites. This goal of this project is to discover new coral sites in the deep Gulf of Mexico and characterize them in terms of coral habitat characteristics, biology, ecology, and genetic connectivity. The diverse group of experienced investigators on this project will use a combination of remote sensing, photographic sampling, quantitative community collections, live coral manipulative experiments, geologic characterization, oceanographic measurements, and genetic analyses to further our understanding of cold water corals and the communities associated with them. |