Hawaiian Coral Reef Ecosystem

State of Hawaiian main island coral reef ecosystems.

Hawaii's mystical coral reefs turn out to be super strange

Hawaiian coral that you know - the bright turquoise water and tropical fish and the sporadic turtles - are just a facad. Plunge past these top oceans, lower and lower, and you will find even more unbelievable coral cliffs that, wrapped in almost complete obscurity, should not even be there. Several hundred meters below the seafloor, the so-called low reef - also known as the dusk area - is just in sight.

A multi-disciplinary scientific community today featured in the magazine PenJ a 20-year survey of the Hawaiian depths: geologist, biologist and botanist work together to shed a bright spotlight on a coral reef. And I' m sorry your Hawaiian holiday looks kind of sloppy.

It' only been 20 years since researchers began to learn about deeper canyons. It is too low to be reached with conventional diving equipment and too flat to pay the $30,000 to $40,000 a days that it takes to use a dive boat. It was only thanks to the invention of a so-called Rebreathers, which recycle the (very expensive) heat that has been blended with the air in a diving bottle, that the researchers were able to begin to study reef depth.

At Hawaii this crew of rebreathers dived into the deep canyons. "â??We can do things that subs can't do, like collecting samples of seafood and digging cliffs and going into caves,â says Richard Pyle, an author of the stud and Zoologist at the Bishop Museum of Hawaii. Putting a cupola over the coral and coloring it, the explorers can observe its growing, a little like a ring of trees.

There is a reason why this is so, a hypothesis that goes far beyond Hawaii. A reef is not always nearer to the top: "This will dry out the shallows and kill anything that cannot escape into deepwater. The ecosystem's doing just great down in these deep coves.

For example, the dusk and dawn areas off the Hawaiian Isles are probably very old from an ecological point of view. The young flat coral cliffs come and go, but the lower ones remain old and grey. While the seas are spinning, the temperature is rising and the water is acidifying, the water is crumbling and the shallows are bleaching, it could be that the depths of the coral canals are a kind of shelter.

It is possible that the local populations may withdraw further while the flat cliffs further diminish. The results of this survey show that some types are indeed able to inhabit both the shallows and depths of the Hawaiian reef. "So, if the same strain is present and this populations are in good health, it might help to fill them up," says Kimberly Puglise from NOAA, a programme management in the group.

" It is a great deal of insecurity, certainly, but it is for a certain purpose that it is referred to as the dawn area.