On this coral, some apparently living tissue can be seen at the top right and areas covered by brown material on the left. To see a series of high-resolution images associated with this story, click on the photo above.
On a research ship in the Gulf of Mexico on Tuesday, Nov. 2, seven miles south-west of the site of the Deep Water Horizon oil-spill, a team of scientists discovered a community of corals that includes many recently dead colonies and others that clearly are dying. "We discovered a community of coral that has been impacted fairly recently by something very toxic," said the chief scientist on the cruise, Charles Fisher, who is a professor of biology at Penn State and a member of the research team that selected the site for study. Fisher said the research team encountered a colony of the hard coral species Madrepora that appeared to be unhealthy on Nov. 2, at a depth of 1,400 meters. "Although some branches of the coral colony appeared normal, other branches clearly were covered in a brown material, apparently sloughing tissue, and were producing abundant mucous," Fisher said. The scientists sampled pieces of this hard coral and of its immediate environment then, about 400 meters away, they found a seriously stricken community of soft corals.
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