He said a fisherman provided an early hint of the potential locked in the
corals. "He hopped a fence at a wharf a couple years ago, went to a trawler
and grabbed a specimen out of their net," he said. "He shipped it to me and
it turned out it was 500 years old. That fisherman started getting death
threats. And that piece was one-and-a-half inches in diameter. We hear
stories of corals as big around as your leg. Some of these things may live
thousands of years."
    At the first international conference on deep sea corals, held this
summer in Halifax, Nova Scotia, nearly 100 biologists and geologists
compared notes and issued a statement calling for the expansion of marine
protected areas to shield deep corals. So far only Norway and Australia have
begun to do so.
    "Most scientists are rather cautious types, but at the conference there
was a very strong feeling that we have to step out from the closet of
science and do something to protect them," said Dr. Martin Willison, a
biologist at Dalhousie University in Halifax, who helped organize the
conference.
    The joint statement said, "It is essential that existing national laws
and international conventions for the protection of biodiversity and the
regulation of fisheries be extended to cover these unique and vulnerable
deep-water habitats."
    In a recent interview, Dr. Willison marveled at how knowledge of deep
corals had exploded in the last couple of decades. Scientists have now
mapped them in the Gulf of Mexico and Mediterranean, along continental
shelves on both sides of the Pacific and Atlantic, and from Tasmania to the
Arctic.
    "I can get under my belt the idea of coral reefs in northern waters,"
Dr. Willison said, "but to think of them above the Arctic Circle was really
quite spectacular."
    Shallow-water corals are colonies of two organisms--a plankton-eating
polyp and sun-dependent algae called zooxanthellae. Unlike them, the deep
corals have only the carnivorous polyps, which use sticky mucus or stinging
arms to capture zooplankton meals. This trait has allowed them, over tens of
milions of years, to break free of dependence on light.
    Fossil evidence show some similar kinds of deep-sea mounds dating from
400 million years ago. geologists say. Reefs in different places are
dominated by different forms. Bulbous colonies of Lophelia pertusa are
typical in Northern Europe. The sea bottom off Nova Scotia and eastern Maine
is more likely to hold forests of treelike pink Paragorgia corals, nicknamed
"bubble gum tree" by Canadian fishermen, and Primnoa, a genus that has finer
branches and is more bushlike.
    Generally, scientists say, the deep corals seem to thrive in places
where a hard rock bottom protrudes from the silt, providing a firm anchor,
and a place for plankton to thrive--sites like the waters off the Bay of
Fundy or areas around sea mounts, submerged mountains whose peaks reach
within a thousand feet or so of the surface. They also tend to grow in
places with strong, turbulent bottom currents, like ridges on the
continental shelf off Norway that were left behind by the retreating
glaciers of the last ice age. Sula Ridge off Norway is one such formation.
    One theory is that the corals are binge eaters, relying on a spring rain
of zooplankton from the surface that is then swept along the bottom by
strong currents, said Dr. Andre Freiwald, a geologist at the University of
Tubingen in Germany, who last week began a three-week trip using side-scan
sonar to map corals in waters from Norway to Spain.
    But there are other theories, Dr. Martin Hovland, a marine geologists,
who surveys pipeline routes from Statoil, Norway's state-owned oil company,
first mapped some of the country's extensive offshore corals nearly 20 years
ago. He said many of the mounds seemed to be over areas of sea floor seeping
hydrocarbons, which could be providing sustenance for plankton and creating
a food chain supporting the deep reefs.
    The diversity of life in the interstices of the corals mounds is
dizzying, and just beginning to be appreciated. Several years ago, Andreas
Jensen and Rune Frederiksen, from the Zoological Museum of the University of
Copenhagen, dissected 40 pounds of coral hunks retrieved from a reef near
the Faroe Islands, east of Iceland. They counted 4626 orgainisms belonging
to 256 species, with 42 other species in loose coral rubble that came up
with the pieces.
    Nearly 100 species had never been recorded from that region before. And
when the scientists compared the creatures with those from coral samples
taken from reefs in Norway and Bay of Biscay, there were only a few
overlaps, indicating just how variegated this deep-sea quilt is.
    Surprises continue to pop up. At the Halifax conference, Sanford Atwood,
a longtime hook-and-line fisherman from The Hawk, a Nova Scotia village,
showed some visiting scientists a few of the small, pillow-shaped corals he
had collected. They were eight or nine inches across and were called "hard
hats" by the locals because of their shape.
    "Some experts there said the chance of hauling that up where you said
you did is the same chance as finding something in our forest that belongs
in a rain forest," said Mr. Atwood, who recently shifted to lobster fishing
because of declines in stocks of haddock, cod and other fin fish. He said
the destruction from trawling could well be contributing to the drop in fish
populations.
    At the Hell Hole, a spot favored for generations by Nova Scotia
long-liners, he said, the corals were always a well-known feature of the
bottom. But now they appear to be mostly knocked down, he said, and the
fishing suffers.
    "I'm not an expert when it comes to science, but I do know how to go
fishing and what fish depend on," he said, adding that it made no sense to
let the destruction of the corals ontinue. "We take and take and take but
never give. It's about time we did something for the ocean."