Human Impact
The primary human impact on deep-water corals is from deep-water trawling. Trawlers drag nets across the ocean floor, disturbing sediments, breaking and destroying deep-water corals. Another harmful method is long line fishing.
Oil and gas exploration also damage deep-water coral.
Deep-water corals grow slowly, so recovery takes much longer than in shallow waters where nutrients and food-providing zooxanthellae are far more abundant.
In a study during 2001 to 2003, a study of a reef of Lophelia pertusa in the Atlantic off Canada found that the corals were often broken in unnatural ways. And the ocean floor displayed scars and overturned boulders from trawling.
Read more about this topic: Deep-water Coral
Famous quotes containing the words human and/or impact:
“And what is an authentic madman? It is a man who preferred to become mad, in the socially accepted sense of the word, rather than forfeit a certain superior idea of human honor. So society has strangled in its asylums all those it wanted to get rid of or protect itself from, because they refused to become its accomplices in certain great nastinesses. For a madman is also a man whom society did not want to hear and whom it wanted to prevent from uttering certain intolerable truths.”
—Antonin Artaud (1896–1948)
“The question confronting the Church today is not any longer whether the man in the street can grasp a religious message, but how to employ the communications media so as to let him have the full impact of the Gospel message.”
—Pope John Paul II (b. 1920)