For Les Watling, ecologist and professor emeritus at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, the name for a new species of deep-sea coral — Iridogorgia chewbacca — was intuitive from the start.
Everyone who saw photos of the coral agreed it looked like the furry Wookiee character from the “Star Wars” film franchise.
“That was their first reaction,” he said.
Watling, 79, was part of a team of researchers that discovered the new coral species while surveying deep-sea canyons just a few miles off the northern coast of Molokai in 2006. The team dived down about 660 meters, or nearly a half-mile, and there it was, distinct in appearance on the ocean floor.
The lone-standing coral had long, flexible and hairy-looking branches that immediately evoked an image of Chewbacca, who was Han Solo’s copilot and best friend.
While many corals are fanlike and stand straight up in the water, Watling said this one was very unusual.
“Normally the branches are stiff and they stick out from the central axis of the coral,” he said. “This one, they’re not. They’re flexible and that’s why they hang down like that.”
The coral belongs to the genus Iridogorgia, a group of deep-sea corals with long, spiraling structures.
Just to be clear, however, what looks like hair is actually branches that can grow up to 15 inches long.
“Those are branches of the coral colony, and on those branches are the little coral polyps,” Watling said. “Once you get in and look closely at it, I mean, you can really tell it’s coral and not some other weird thing — not some Wookiee that got lost under the ocean or something.”
Thousands of these tiny polyps work together to form the larger structure. Despite its size, the coral species usually occurs by itself, scattered across rocky ocean bottoms.
Watling, who retired from UH-Manoa two years ago, has made close to 100 discoveries of new species during hundreds of dives and expeditions with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration but says it’s always exciting to make a new find.
The team took photos of the 4-foot-tall specimen found off Molokai and collected a small piece to do genetic work.
Watling put up a photo of the Iridogorgia chewbacca on his office door at Edmondson Hall at the UH School of Life Sciences but did not publish anything on it as he was working on identifying other deep-sea corals.
Ten years later, in 2016, the same coral species found off Molokai was spotted on a seamount near the Mariana Trench, he said. That specimen measured about 20 inches.
It was only this year that an article on the new species of coral was published in Zootaxa, a peer-reviewed scientific journal for animal taxonomists.
Watling co-authored the piece, which details the diversity of Iridogorgia coral species, with Chinese colleagues Yu Xu, Sifeng Zhan and Kuidong Xu. While reviewing their research, he realized it was the same coral.
The study examines the physical characteristics and genetic analysis of the corals to describe two new species: Iridogorgia chewbacca and Iridogorgia curva.
It also documents 14 other known species of Iridogorgia, with 12 of them in the Pacific. Of the dozen, 10 were found in the tropical Western Pacific.
Source: The Garden Island