The red tree coral Primnoa pacifica is an important habitat forming octocoral in North Pacific waters. Given the prominence of this species in shelf and upper slope areas of the Gulf of Alaska where fishing disturbance can be high, it may be able to sustain healthy populations through adaptive reproductive processes. This study was designed to test this hypothesis, examining reproductive mode, seasonality and fecundity in both undamaged and simulated damaged colonies over the course of 16 months using a deepwater-emerged population in Tracy Arm Fjord.

Primnoa pacifica is a cold-water coral prevalent throughout Alaskan waters, while another species in the genus, Primnoa resedaeformis, is widely distributed in the Atlantic Ocean. This study examined the V4-V5 region of the 16S rRNA gene after amplifying and pyrosequencing bacterial DNA from samples of these species.

Red tree coral (Primnoa pacifica), a keystone species forms large thickets, creating habitat for many associated species, including economically valuable fishes and crabs, and so are important benthic suspension feeders in this region.

Massive, long-lived deep-sea red tree corals (Primnoa pacifica) are abundant on the outer continental shelf and upper slope of the Northeast Pacific, providing habitat for fish and invertebrates. Yet, their large size and arborescent morphology makes them susceptible to disturbance from fishing activities. A better understanding of their growth patterns will facilitate in-situ estimates of population age structure and biomass.

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cold-water corals; deep-sea; Eastern Pacific; reproduction; fecundity; octocoral; Swiftia

This study examined the reproductive ecology of eight Eastern Pacific deep-sea octocorals, collected from Washington to Southern California. The sexuality, reproductive mode, oocyte size, and fecundity of each species were identified using histological techniques.

model; habitat

The purpose of the analysis was to identify the most important abiotic habitat characteristics related to red tree coral presence and to determine if these characteristics could be used for the prediction of red tree corals in other areas. The purpose of the study, however, was of a broader scope: to demonstrate how hierarchical Bayesian logistic mixed-effects models can appropriately be applied to spatially autocorrelated observations on transects in fisheries and marine ecology studies.