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Discovering the depths of the Coral Sea

Transcript

Yi-Kai Tea from the Australian Museum says many people don't know that coral reefs go deeper than what you see when snorkelling.

Coral reefs actually go down to about 150 to 180 meters where it gets really dark.

It's like the opposite of coral reefs, very quiet but full of life if you look closely.

I'm a taxonomist, I name and describe new animal species, and I'm studying fish diversity in the Coral Sea.

The Coral Sea is between Australia's northeast coast and New Caledonia, making it the second largest marine park.

We dived 140 meters deep, the deepest in Australia, to document these fish.

For every minute down, you need hours to decompress.

One of the longest dives was four or five hours, but only three or four minutes were spent at the bottom.

You have to identify what you see, decide if it's new, and collect it quickly.

I'm on the boat with a team of scientists who photograph, document, and take DNA samples of the specimens.

We found 62 new species in the Coral Sea, four new to the southern hemisphere, and 21 potentially new to science.

When we bring the fish up, they're very colorful in the sunlight.

I described and named the Pintail Fairy Wrasse, it has a triangular tail with black pigment.

Naming species is stressful because the name stays forever.

I've named species after pop culture, like Sycorax from Dr. Who and Wakanda from Black Panther.

When we return from expeditions, the specimens are stored and the collection grows.

We try to preserve the fish nicely, but old specimens can be fixed in awkward positions.

If you ask someone how many fish live on the Great Barrier Reef, they might not know, and neither do I.

The problem is we don't know what we're losing.

We've seen coral bleaching and pollution in deep parts of the Coral Sea and Great Barrier Reef.

There's a rush to understand these ecosystems before we lose them.

The oceans cover 70% of the world, but we know more about the moon than the underwater abyss.

Scientists from the Australian Museum did deep dives in the Coral Sea and found new fish species.

Australia

Marine Biology

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