This is the first time that deep-sea corals have been included globally on the IUCN Red List.
This is the first time that deep-sea corals have been included globally on the latest version of the IUCN Red List for conservation, recently published. Among them are two octocorals assessed by CIIMAR member Íris Sampaio.
It was as part of a workshop funded by the Senckenberg Ocean Species Alliance (SOSA) Project promoted by the Senckenberg Research Institute, which leads the IUCN Marine Invertebrate Red List Authority (MIRLA) that Íris Sampaio carried out an evaluation study of deep-sea octocorals for the IUCN. Of the octocorals assessed, two species have now been published in the latest version of the Red List of Threatened Species published on October 28th, joining the growing list of new species that reinforce the phenomenon of our planet’s latest mass extinction.
Deep-sea corals on the Red List for the first time
Despite being little known, deep-sea corals are key species in shaping habitats and are home to a great diversity of species in the reefs and coral gardens they form. Among the organisms assessed, the octocoral species Gyrophyllum hirondellei Studer, 1891 and Paragorgia johnsoni Gray, 1862 were selected for the Red List of Threatened Species and were assessed with global conservation statuses of “least concern” and “near threatened”, respectively. Both species inhabit the Portuguese Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), one of which forms coral gardens on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge near the Azores.
The current status of the octocoral species analyzed was not known until now. Most of the animals on the IUCN Red List were marine vertebrates and invertebrates such as tropical corals. Thus, this “is the first time that deep-sea marine invertebrates, with the exception of molluscs, have been included on the IUCN Red List for conservation on a global scale”, explains Íris Sampaio.
In the context of the SOSA workshop, the group of researchers involved carried out a total of thirty-four assessments of marine invertebrates selected for the Red List. In addition to the two octocorals assessed with the collaboration of CIIMAR, another 20 deep-sea corals and 12 species of giant clams are on this list.
Check the press release here.
