Scientists discovered a new 600-mile coral reef

[Anemone]

Scientists discovered a new 600-mile coral reef. It’s at the mouth of the Amazon River, home to some of the world’s muddiest water.

http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/04/scientists-discover-a-new-coral-reef-at-the-amazons-mouth/479259/

[SunWyrm]

Very cool.



One of the early coral specimens retrieved by the researchers (Patricia Yager)



That caption tho   

[Origami]

Very cool.

 

 

One of the early coral specimens retrieved by the researchers (Patricia Yager)

 

 

 

That caption tho   

 

I saw that, too. Call it a Queen Conch coral.

[dave w]

OK, so all I've seen pictures of so far are sponges, barnacles and conchs.  You can certainly have sponge reefs and shellfish reefs without reef building corals, and I'd guess you can have lots of nps corals in a high nutrient area like this.  But it seems unlikely that you have reef building corals under all that sediment, unless they live on the edges of the sediment plume coming from the mouth of the Amazon.

 

I hope to be proven wrong, this is just my conjecture.

[Anemone]

There's a lot more detail in the research article in Science about what they found and what they didn't find.

 

http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/4/e1501252.full

[dave w]

My layman's understanding of the article confirms that this reef is mostly sponge based.  I didn't see anything about hard corals, unless I missed the scientific names.  Which is entirely possible.

[YHSublime]

My layman's understanding of the article confirms that this reef is mostly sponge based.  I didn't see anything about hard corals, unless I missed the scientific names.  Which is entirely possible.

 

 

I guess that just goes to show that a reef can be more than one thing. I don't have any SPS in my tank, but I still consider it a reef tank.