Ireland has a "treasure chest" off its western seaboard, with some 60 per cent of European deepwater coral located in these waters. This was confirmed by a group of international scientists on board the German research ice-breaker, Polarstern, in Galway Bay yesterday.
However, the 40 marine scientists involved in the research detected damage to some of the coral mounds from trawling. "We will have to speed up our efforts to designated Special Areas of Conservation to protect this fragile environment," Dr Anthony Grehan of NUI, Galway, said. Dr Grehan is chairman of the Irish Coral Task Force.
Scientists from Ireland, Britain, Belgium, France and German participated in the research on the 188-metre ship. The €900,000 budget was funded largely by France and Germany, demonstrating the respective governments' commitment to deep water coral as a global resource, according to Dr Andy Wheeler of University College, Cork, who was deputy chief scientist on the trip. During the three week voyage, which set off from Brest in France, samples were collected from 100 square kilometres of seafloor in the Porcupine Seabight and west of the Porcupine Bank.
The samples were gathered by the French-owned remotely operated vehicle (ROV) Victor, as part of further mapping of deepwater corals and carbonate mounds. The underwater robot can reach depths of 6,000 metres and has remotely-operated cameras and manipulators to collect data.
This latest expedition is one of several which have recently focused on deepwater coral in Irish waters. A Franco-Irish expedition, also using the French ROV, Victor, took place on the French research ship Atalante in August 2001. The expedition involved scientists from the French marine research agency, IFREMER, and NUI, Galway. It yielded some of the first graphic images of carbonate mounts and cold-water coral, formed over thousands of years off the west Irish coast.
The Marine Institute, which welcomed the Polarstern on its first visit to Ireland yesterday, said that weather conditions over the last few weeks would have seriously curtailed the dive programme on a smaller ship. However, the Polarstern permitted a series of dives to take place.