RAPID: Natural Laboratories in the Chilean Fjords: Studying Reproduction and Development in Emergent Deep-Sea Corals

The northern Patagonian fjords lie on the interface between the high Andes Mountains in the east and the South Pacific Ocean, formed thousands of years ago through erosive glacial activity and tectonic sinking (Borgel, 1970). Around 12,000 years ago the icefields in the Chiloé Interior Sea began to open, leaving behind over 15,000km2 of fjords, channels and gulfs (Clapperton, 1994). The waters within the fjords are influenced by strong tides, large volumes of freshwater runoff, and upwelling of deep-ocean waters as well as steep climatic gradients from north to south (observed in parameters such as temperature, wind intensity and precipitation; Silva et al., 1997; Leth et al., 2004). This dynamic environment has resulted in an extremely high biodiversity and endemism (Smith- Ramirez, 2004), yet this region is one of the least studied areas of the world. Both oceanographic (Arntz & Rios, 1999; Fernandez et al., 2000; Forsterra et al., 2005) and biological data are scarce (Arntz & Rios, 1999; Haussermann & Forsterra 2009) and only recently was it discovered that these fjords are one of the few areas in the world where deep-water fauna can survive in shallow-water habitats (Forsterra & Haussermann, 2003; Haussermann & Forsterra 2007). The specific goals of this project were - 1. Establish a year-long monitoring site at three populations of Desmophyllum dianthus in the Comau fjord in Northern Patagonia Two populations will be in areas unaffected with runoff, one population will be directly downstream of encroaching salmon farms These populations will have samples for histological analysis (see Waller et al., 2002 for methods) collected every 3 months, with samples for genetics (see Morrison et al., 2011 for methods) and TEM/SEM analysis (see Pradilla- Gamino et al., 2011 for methods) taken by the PI at the beginning and end of the project 2. Examine for recruitment at these three populations by placing recruitment panels both within and surrounding populations 3. Monitor environmental variables at each site Salinity, Temperature and Light monitors will be deployed at each sample site. Every three months data will be downloaded, sensors cleaned and redeployed to give a full year of data at each site. 4. Record general biodiversity and habitat characteristics of each population Each population will be photographed using scales to estimate age of population and number of corals and associated fauna. Benthic habitat will also be classified, as will areas surrounding the main population. 5. Examine other areas in the fjords to aid in our Chilean collaborators mission of adequately documenting locations of these fragile populations For initial and final field seasons, once samples from all sites for the main project have been obtained, remaining dive days will be used to pair with station divers to catalogue areas of coral abundance and enter data onto a GIS database of cold-water corals in South America

RAPID: Natural Laboratories in the Chilean Fjords: Studying Reproduction and Development in Emergent Deep-Sea Corals

Intellectual MeritThe northern Patagonian fjords lie on the interface between the high Andes Mountains in the east and the South Pacific Ocean, formed thousands of years ago through erosive glacial activity and tectonic sinking. Around 12,000 years ago the icefields in the Chiloé Interior Sea began to open, leaving behind over 15,000km2 of fjords, channels and gulfs. The waters within the fjords are influenced by strong tides, large volumes of freshwater runoff, and upwelling of deep-ocean waters as well as steep climatic gradients from north to south. This dynamic environment has resulted in extremely high biodiversity and endemism, yet this region is one of the least studied areas of the world. It was just a few years ago that deep-sea corals were found inhabiting this region at unusually shallow depths (less than 10m) and in extremely high densities (greater than 1500 individuals per m2). One species in particular, Desmophyllum dianthus, is one of the most widespread hard corals in deep-sea habitats around the globe, yet there have been no ecological studies because of the difficulty in sampling at depths below traditional SCUBA sampling. Cold-water corals are important structural engineers, creating habitat for thousands of associated invertebrates and fish, forming the principle foundation of many benthic ecosystems. These shallow fjord communities present a unique opportunity to form baseline data on ecological and population processes, acting as an accessible window into a deep-sea ecosystem. In recent years environmental and anthropogenic pressures in the northern Patagonian fjord region have mounted (particular from intense salmon farming) leading to a situation where these unique ecosystems may be lost before they can be documented and fully understood. Reproduction is a fundamental ecological process for which every species on the planet needs to undergo to survive through time, and is essential information to understanding recruitment, recolonization, population connectivity and recovery from damage. This project will study the reproductive ecology of the primary cold-water coral in this region, D. dianthus. This project will leverage research funded through a National Geographic Global Exploration Fund grant to establish year-long monitoring sites in three locations within the fjords. RAPID funding from NSF will add a significant ecological study to the National Geographic study. Broader ImpactsThe delicate and unique coral-based ecosystem of these fjord systems are threatened by increased fishing, tourism and intensified logging in conjunction with climate change. This project will contribute to and understanding of how anthropogenic influences are affecting basic life history processes in an important habitat forming species in the region and will provide a basis for more in-depth studies of the region\u27s benthic resources. The broader impacts also include undergraduate training through a 5 week internship to process samples in the Waller laboratory and a public outreach component consisting of a blog website, daily Twitter updates from the field from the PI\u27s Online Expeditions site and National Geographic website coverage. This project will also foster international collaborative work with Chilean researchers from the Fundación Huinay, their intimate knowledge of these ecosystems is an integral part of this project. Samples will also be supplied to other collaborators for population genetics and paleo-climate analysis

Collaborative Research: Historic Perspectives on Climate and Biogeography from Deep-sea Corals in the Drake Passage

Polar oceans are the main sites of deep-water formation and are critical to the exchange of heat and carbon between the deep ocean and the atmosphere. This award Historic perspectives on climate and biogeography from deep-sea corals in the Drake Passage will address the following specific research questions: What was the radiocarbon content of the Southern Ocean during the last glacial maximum and during past rapid climate change events? and What are the major controls on the past and present distribution of cold-water corals within the Drake Passage and adjacent continental shelves? Testing these overall questions will allow the researchers to better understand how processes in the Southern Ocean are linked to climate change over millennia. This award is being funded by the Antarctic Earth Sciences Program of NSF?s Office of Polar Programs, Antarctic Division. INTELLECTUAL MERIT: The skeletons of deep-sea corals are abundant in the Southern Ocean, and can be dated using U-series techniques making them a useful archive of oceanographic history. By pairing U-series and radiocarbon analyses the awardees can reconstruct the radiocarbon content of seawater in the past, allowing them to address the research questions raised above. Collection of living deep-sea corals along with environmental data will allow them to address the broader biogeography questions posed above as well. The awardees are uniquely qualified to answer these questions in their respective labs via cutting edge technologies, and they have shown promising results from a preliminary pilot cruise to the area in 2008.BROADER IMPACTS: Societal Relevance: The proposed paleoclimate research will make significant advances toward constraining the Southern Ocean?s influence on global climate, specifically it should help set the bounds for the upper limits on how fast the ocean circulation might change in this region of the world, which is of high societal relevance in this era of changing climate. Education and Outreach (E/O): These activities are grouped into four categories: i) increasing student participation in polar research by fully integrating undergraduate through post-doctoral students into research programs; ii) promotion of K-12 teaching and learning programs by providing information via a cruise website and in-school talks, iii) making the data collected available to the wider research community via data archives such as Seamounts Online and the Seamount Biogeographic Network and iv) reaching a larger public audience through such venues as interviews in the popular media

Reproductive morphology of three species of deep-water precious corals from the Hawaiian Archipelago : Gerardia Sp., Corallium secundum, and Corallium lauuense

Author Posting. © University of Miami - Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, 2007. This article is posted here by permission of University of Miami - Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Bulletin of Marine Science 81 (2007): 533-542.Three species of deep-sea corals were collected from several locations in the Hawaiian Archipelago. These species have been called "precious corals" because of their extensive use in the jewelry industry. Two octocorals Corallium lauuense Bayer, 1956 (red coral) and Corallium secundum Dana, 1846 (pink coral), and a zoanthid, Gerardia sp. (gold coral) collected between August and November in 1998-2004, were all histologically analysed for reproductive tissues. All three species of precious corals appear to be gonochoric (both males and females of all species being identified—though with C. lauuense more reproductive polyps are needed to conclusively confirm this), with the two species of Corallium having reproductive material contained within siphonozooids rather than the main polyp (autozoid). Maximum oocyte sizes were: Gerardia sp. ∼300 μm, C. secundum ∼600 μm, and C. lauuense ∼660 μm. All three species are hypothesized to have spawned during the collection season. Gerardia was observed spawning during collection, and histological sections of the two Corallium species show areas where gametes appear to be missing. Gerardia sp. has a single cohort of gametes developing, which may suggest seasonal reproduction, and the two Corallium species show multiple sizes present in single individuals, suggesting a periodic or quasi-continuous reproductive periodicity.This project was supported by ship time grants from the Hawaii Undersea Research Laboratory and Hawaii SeaGrant as well as National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Office of Ocean Exploration Award No. NA03OAR4600108. A.R.B. received support from an EPA STAR graduate research fellowship and a Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution postdoctoral scholarship

Ancient DNA techniques : applications for deep-water corals

Author Posting. © University of Miami - Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, 2007. This article is posted here by permission of University of Miami - Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Bulletin of Marine Science 81 (2007): 351-359.The potential applications of ancient DNA (aDNA) techniques have been realized relatively recently, and have been revolutionized by the advent of pCR techniques in the mid 1980s. Although these techniques have been proven valuable in ancient specimens of up to 100,000 yrs old, their use in the marine realm has been largely limited to mammals and fish. Using modifications of techniques developed for skeletons of whales and mammals, we have produced a method for extracting and amplifying aDNA from sub-fossil (not embedded in rock) deep-water corals that has been successful in yielding 351 base pairs of the ITS2 region in sub-fossil Desmophyllum dianthus (Esper, 1794) and Lophelia pertusa (Linnaeus, 1758). The comparison of DNA sequences from fossil and live specimens resulted in clustering by species, demonstrating the validity of this new aDNA method. Sub-fossil scler-actinian corals are readily dated using U-series techniques, and so the abundance of directly-dateable skeletons in the world's oceans, provides an extremely useful archive for investigating the interactions of environmental pressures (in particular ocean circulation, climate change) on the past distribution, and the evolution of deep-water corals across the globe.Support for this project was provided by National Science Foundation grants OCE 0096373 (JFA), OCE 0095331 (Daniel Scheirer, USGS), OCE 0136871 [D. Yoerger (WH OI) and (TMS)], OCE 0624627 (TMS and RGW) and NOAA’s Office of Exploration grant NA05OAR4601054 (TMS, RGW, and JFA). We are also grateful for the enabling support of the Ocean Life Institute and the Ocean and Climate Change Institute of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institutio

Deep-sea scleractinian coral age and depth distributions in the northwest Atlantic for the last 225,000 years

Author Posting. © University of Miami - Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, 2007. This article is posted here by permission of University of Miami - Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Bulletin of Marine Science 81 (2007): 371-391.Deep-sea corals have grown for over 200,000 yrs on the New England Seamounts in the northwest Atlantic, and this paper describes their distribution both with respect to depth and time. Many thousands of fossil scleractinian corals were collected on a series of cruises from 2003-2005; by contrast, live ones were scarce. On these seamounts, the depth distribution of fossil Desmophyllum dianthus (Esper, 1794) is markedly different to that of the colonial scleractinian corals, extending 750 m deeper in the water column to a distinct cut-off at 2500 m. This cut-off is likely to be controlled by the maximum depth of a notch-shaped feature in the seamount morphology. The ages of D. dianthus corals as determined by U-series measurements range from modern to older than 200,000 yrs. The age distribution is not constant over time, and most corals have ages from the last glacial period. Within the glacial period, increases in coral population density at Muir and Manning Sea-mounts coincided with times at which large-scale ocean circulation changes have been documented in the deep North Atlantic. Ocean circulation changes have an effect on coral distributions, but the cause of the link is not known.We gratefully acknowledge the support of The Comer Foundation for Abrupt Climate Change, The Henry Luce Foundation, The American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund, NSF Grant Numbers OCE-0096373 and OCE-0095331, and NOAA OE Grant Number A05OAR4601054

Individual and Population Level Variation in the Reproductive Potential of Deep-Sea Corals From Different Regions Within the Gulf of Maine

Deep-sea corals are of conservation concern in the North Atlantic due to prolonged disturbances associated with the exploitation of natural resources and a changing environment. As a result, two research cruises in the Gulf of Maine region during 2014 and 2017 collected samples of two locally dominant coral species, Primnoa resedaeformis and Paramuricea placomus, at six locations to investigate reproductive ecology. Remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) were used to collect specimens that were examined via paraffin histology, and coincident video surveys were used to determine size class distributions. Both species were identified as gonochoristic, and sampled locations exhibited dissimilarities in spermatocyst development and oocyte size except for those in close geographic proximity. Fecundities exhibited substantial ranges across sample locations and average oocyte sizes (±SD) were 140 ± 117 μm for P. resedaeformis and 64 ± 46 μm for P. placomus. In addition, colony size distributions were also significantly different across sampling locations. Notably, the Outer Schoodic Ridge sample location, with larger colony and oocyte sizes, was identified as a potential key source population of reproductive material in the Gulf of Maine. These data were used to calculate differences in reproductive potential based on relationships between colony morphology and reproductive output using height as a predictive proxy. Furthermore, calculated age at first reproduction, 7.6–19.8 years for P. resedaeformis and 20.7–37 years for P. placomus, which may be dependent on sex of the colony, provides a metric for estimating the amount of time these coral habitats will take to recover. This investigation, in response to historical population impacts and environmental change, links reproductive and morphometric relationships to inform population scale reproductive models, while also establishing an understanding of regional scale gametogenic variability within the Gulf of Maine region

Mineralogy of Deep-Sea Coral Aragonites as a Function of Aragonite Saturation State

In an ocean with rapidly changing chemistry, studies have assessed coral skeletal health under projected ocean acidification (OA) scenarios by characterizing morphological distortions in skeletal architecture and measuring bulk properties, such as net calcification and dissolution. Few studies offer more detailed information on skeletal mineralogy. Since aragonite crystallography will at least partially govern the material properties of coral skeletons, such as solubility and strength, it is important to understand how it is influenced by environmental stressors. Here, we take a mineralogical approach using micro X-ray diffraction (XRD) and whole pattern Rietveld refinement analysis to track crystallographic shifts in deep-sea coral Lophelia pertusa samples collected along a natural seawater aragonite saturation state gradient (Ωsw = 1.15–1.44) in the Gulf of Mexico. Our results reveal statistically significant linear relationships between rising Ωsw and increasing unit cell volume driven by an anisotropic lengthening along the b-axis. These structural changes are similarly observed in synthetic aragonites precipitated under various saturation states, indicating that these changes are inherent to the crystallography of aragonite. Increased crystallographic disorder via widening of the full width at half maximum of the main (111) XRD peaks trend with increased Ba substitutions for Ca, however, trace substitutions by Ba, Sr, and Mg do not trend with crystal lattice parameters in our samples. Instead, we observe a significant trend of increasing calcite content as a function of both decreasing unit cell parameters as well as decreasing Ωsw. This may make calcite incorporation an important factor to consider in coral crystallography, especially under varying aragonite saturation states (ΩAr). Finally, by defining crystallography-based linear relationships between ΩAr of synthetic aragonite analogs and lattice parameters, we predict internal calcifying fluid saturation state (Ωcf = 11.1–17.3 calculated from b-axis lengths; 15.2–25.2 calculated from unit cell volumes) for L. pertusa, which may allow this species to calcify despite the local seawater conditions. This study will ideally pave the way for future studies to utilize quantitative XRD in exploring the impact of physical and chemical stressors on biominerals

Cold-water coral distributions in the Drake Passage area from towed camera observations – initial interpretations

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Public Domain. The definitive version was published in PLoS One 6 (2011): e16153, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0016153.Seamounts are unique deep-sea features that create habitats thought to have high levels of endemic fauna, productive fisheries and benthic communities vulnerable to anthropogenic impacts. Many seamounts are isolated features, occurring in the high seas, where access is limited and thus biological data scarce. There are numerous seamounts within the Drake Passage (Southern Ocean), yet high winds, frequent storms and strong currents make seafloor sampling particularly difficult. As a result, few attempts to collect biological data have been made, leading to a paucity of information on benthic habitats or fauna in this area, particularly those on primarily hard-bottom seamounts and ridges. During a research cruise in 2008 six locations were examined (two on the Antarctic margin, one on the Shackleton Fracture Zone, and three on seamounts within the Drake Passage), using a towed camera with onboard instruments to measure conductivity, temperature, depth and turbidity. Dominant fauna and bottom type were categorized from 200 randomized photos from each location. Cold-water corals were present in high numbers in habitats both on the Antarctic margin and on the current swept seamounts of the Drake Passage, though the diversity of orders varied. Though the Scleractinia (hard corals) were abundant on the sedimented margin, they were poorly represented in the primarily hard-bottom areas of the central Drake Passage. The two seamount sites and the Shackleton Fracture Zone showed high numbers of stylasterid (lace) and alcyonacean (soft) corals, as well as large numbers of sponges. Though data are preliminary, the geological and environmental variability (particularly in temperature) between sample sites may be influencing cold-water coral biogeography in this region. Each area observed also showed little similarity in faunal diversity with other sites examined for this study within all phyla counted. This manuscript highlights how little is understood of these isolated features, particularly in Polar regions.This work was funded by the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Earth Sciences Program (ANT0636787 awarded to LFR and RGW) and a CenSeam minigrant (awarded to RGW), and RGW is supported by a SOEST Young Investigator Fellowship from the University of Hawaii at Manoa

Genetic risk and a primary role for cell-mediated immune mechanisms in multiple sclerosis.

Multiple sclerosis is a common disease of the central nervous system in which the interplay between inflammatory and neurodegenerative processes typically results in intermittent neurological disturbance followed by progressive accumulation of disability. Epidemiological studies have shown that genetic factors are primarily responsible for the substantially increased frequency of the disease seen in the relatives of affected individuals, and systematic attempts to identify linkage in multiplex families have confirmed that variation within the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) exerts the greatest individual effect on risk. Modestly powered genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have enabled more than 20 additional risk loci to be identified and have shown that multiple variants exerting modest individual effects have a key role in disease susceptibility. Most of the genetic architecture underlying susceptibility to the disease remains to be defined and is anticipated to require the analysis of sample sizes that are beyond the numbers currently available to individual research groups. In a collaborative GWAS involving 9,772 cases of European descent collected by 23 research groups working in 15 different countries, we have replicated almost all of the previously suggested associations and identified at least a further 29 novel susceptibility loci. Within the MHC we have refined the identity of the HLA-DRB1 risk alleles and confirmed that variation in the HLA-A gene underlies the independent protective effect attributable to the class I region. Immunologically relevant genes are significantly overrepresented among those mapping close to the identified loci and particularly implicate T-helper-cell differentiation in the pathogenesis of multiple sclerosis