Return to the Graveyard
Return to the Graveyard
Seamounts, knolls, and hills are prominent features of underwater topography in the New Zealand region, and indeed globally. They are often sites of high productivity, and the focus of important commercial fisheries. High levels of biodiversity, endemism, and new species records are often reported.
However, seamounts can also comprise fragile habitat. Faunal communities on deepwater seamounts in the orange roughy depth range are commonly based on extensive coral growths, which are readily impacted by heavy bottom trawl gear. These corals may be long-lived and slow-growing, meaning their recovery from trawling could be slow.
Since 1999, MFish and FRST have synergistically supported a research programme investigating biodiversity and human impacts on seamount features in the New Zealand region. This has included some sampling on seamounts on the NW Chatham Rise to compare biodiversity and changes in biodiversity on fished seamounts and seamounts closed to fishing.
The Chatham Rise is a region that has been heavily fished since the early 1990s, but effort has concentrated on a small number of features, which enables study of seamounts in close proximity with similar physical characteristics, that have been fished to varying degrees.
On this voyage biodiversity on the Graveyard seamounts (see image below) will be surveyed for a third time to monitor changes, and compared with a similar, but distant, suite of seamounts east of the Chatham Rise, known as the Andes. Although there is a large amount of fish information, little is known about the benthic invertebrate biodiversity of seamounts on the Chatham Rise.
Faunal variation can be high between seamounts around the New Zealand EEZ, and it is expected that sampling a new area, such as the Andes, will reveal a different fauna from the Graveyard seamounts, as well as a strong likelihood of discovering new species or new records of animals from the EEZ.