Collaborative Research: Recovery of Seamount Precious Coral Beds From Heavy Trawling Disturbance

恢复力和恢复的相关概念提供了对生态系统功能、连通性和演替的见解。在海洋领域，大多数复原力研究都集中在浅水生态系统上，但深海人为影响的增加使得深海复原力和恢复的研究具有时间紧迫性，而深海硬基质栖息地和大规模干扰受到的关注最少。具有讽刺意味的是，对海底的关键人为影响之一，拖网捕鱼，提供了一个实验设计来理解从大规模干扰中恢复的过程。海山具有高比例的硬基质栖息地，取样地点谨慎，以及拖网捕鱼的广泛干扰，为研究恢复力方面的恢复提供了一个很好的自然实验室。此外，海山上的深海珊瑚丰富、数量优势、高生物量和多样性使它们成为这些研究的理想模式生物。该项目的目标是研究夏威夷西北群岛（NWHI）和皇帝海山链（ESC）的一系列地点，以解决一个假设，该假设基于对受干扰海山的低弹性和十年恢复时间的预测，即尽管30多年前拖网捕鱼结束，但NWHI的深海珊瑚床仍未恢复。为了验证这一假设，pi将在三个级别的拖网捕鱼强度下调查一系列复制的海底山，使用自主和远程水下航行器进行调查，并对海底山动物群，特别是深海珊瑚进行有针对性的采样。pi将重点关注海底山群落的三个具体方面：群落结构，使用验证的大小年龄曲线的珍贵珊瑚的年龄结构，以及使用DNA微卫星的珍贵珊瑚的遗传结构。使用这些方法，pi将能够预测珊瑚在任何特定海底山上定居的时间，以及最近殖民者的来源种群。这些海底山代表了自专属经济区建立以来的自然实验，并为在十年时间尺度上解决海底山恢复问题提供了无与伦比的机会。老化工具和微型卫星的强大组合将使pi不仅可以限制深海珊瑚殖民的时间尺度，还可以限制殖民者的招募率和来源。这些结果将为海底山的关键生态过程提供重要的见解，从而为进一步的科学和管理提供信息。该提案将支持两名处于职业生涯早期阶段的STEM科学家。它还将通过培训两名研究生和本科生作为研究实习，为培养具有竞争力的STEM劳动力做出贡献。除了主要的科学研究外，pi还将获得样本和基因数据，这些数据将分别通过博物馆和公共数据库提供给其他研究人员。

Resilience, and the related concept of recovery, provides insights into ecosystem function, connectivity, and succession. In the marine realm, most resilience studies have focused on shallow-water ecosystems but increasing anthropogenic impacts in the deep-sea are making studies of resilience and recovery in the deep-sea time-critical, with deep-sea hard-substrate habitats and large-scale disturbances having received the least attention. Ironically one of the key anthropogenic impacts to the seafloor, fish trawling, provides an experimental design to understand processes of recovery from large-scale disturbance. Seamounts, with a high proportion of hard-substrate habitat, discreet locations for sampling, and extensive disturbance from fish trawling, provide an excellent natural laboratory to study the recovery aspect of resilience. Additionally, the abundance, numerical dominance, high biomass, and diversity of deep-sea corals on seamounts make them ideal model organisms for these studies.The goal of this project is to examine a series of locations in the far Northwestern Hawaiian Islands (NWHI) and the Emperor Seamount Chain (ESC) to address the hypothesis, based on predictions of low resilience and decadal recovery times for disturbed seamounts, that deep-sea coral beds in the NWHI have not recovered despite the end of trawling 30+ years ago. To test this hypothesis, the PIs will survey a series of replicate seamounts at three levels of fish trawling intensity using autonomous and remote underwater vehicles to conduct surveys and targeted sampling of the seamount fauna and especially deep-sea corals. The PIs will focus on three specific aspects of the seamount communities: community structure, age structure of precious corals using a verified size-age curve, and genetic structure of precious corals using DNA microsatellites. Using these methods the PIs will be able to predict the time since coral colonization on any particular seamount as well as source populations of the recent colonizers.These seamounts represent a natural experiment with the added factor of time since the establishment of the exclusive economic zone, and provide an unparalleled opportunity to address seamount recovery on decadal time scales. The powerful combination of aging tools and microsatellites will allow the PIs not only to constrain time scales of deep sea coral colonization, but also rates of recruitment and source of the colonizers. The results will provide significant insights into key ecological processes on seamounts, thus serving to inform further science as well as management. This proposal will support two STEM scientists in the early stages of their careers. It will also contribute to developing a competitive STEM workforce through training of two graduate students as well as undergraduate students as research internships. Besides the primary science, the PIs will also obtain samples and genetic data that will be made accessible to other researchers through museums and public databases, respectively.