Monday 14 December

Robots looking for Great Barrier Reef Dinosaurs

A team of German and Australian researchers left Townsville at the end of November on an expedition that will take them back in time, and deep into the waters off the Queensland coast.

Geobiologists from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich, the Natural History Museum at the Humboldt-Universität Berlin, the University of Göttingen, the Queensland Museum, University of Queensland and James Cook University will explore the deep fore-reef slopes of the Queensland Plateau and the Great Barrier Reef.

They are investigating ‘living fossils’ such as sponges, brachiopods, echinoderms and the famous cephalopods Nautilus. They also hope to find cold-water coral reefs in the deep.

“The deep-sea ecosystems on the slopes of the Queensland Plateau have remained largely unchanged for millions of years,” said Professor Gert Wörheide, a geobiologist from Munich, who leads the expedition together with Dr. Carsten Lüter (Natural History Museum Berlin) and Professor Joachim Reitner (University of Göttingen).

“As a consequence, organisms that had long been thought to be extinct have managed to survive in this area since the end of the Mesozoic, about 65 Million years ago.”

The 15 researchers will document marine life to depths of about 1000 metres. They will retrieve specimens for further research, including comparison with the fossil record, and with other contemporary organisms living in dark caves of shallow water reefs.

The expedition will use a remote-operated vehicle (an ROV) from the Centre for Marine Environmental Sciences in Bremen, Germany, to investigate deep-sea life.

“This is a really exciting opportunity to explore life in the deep seas off our coast,” said James Cook University geoscientist Dr Rob Beaman, whose seabed maps will help guide the expedition.

“Most of our knowledge of the Great Barrier Reef and the Coral Sea is limited to around 30 metres,” Dr Beaman said. “We know very little about life beyond these depths, so we can expect plenty of surprises when we send the ROV down as far as a kilometre.”

The German members of the research team originally discovered this deep-sea fauna on an expedition to the Coral Sea in the mid 1990s.

Deep Down Under, their current research project, will investigate the biodiversity around Flinders, Holmes, Bougainville and Osprey reefs off the coast of Port Douglas.

They will also conduct reef dives, detailed habitat mapping and environmental measurement of water masses during the three-week expedition.

The research partners in Australia are the Queensland Museum, the University of Queensland, as part of the Deep Ocean Australia project funded by the Australian Research Council, as well as the University of Sydney and James Cook University.

The research team will document the expedition in their blog at www.deepdownunder.de