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As awareness of deep-sea corals increases, global efforts to conserve them are increasing as well. Oceana, a non-governmental conservation organization that merged with the American Oceans Campaign in 2002, is focusing significant attention and resources on the conservation of deep-sea coral communities in United States’ waters. Oceana is carrying out a number of activities as part of its deep-sea coral campaign. These include: • Working to pass legislation that would ban the use of particularly destructive bottom trawls in all U.S. waters in collaboration with the Marine Conservation Biology Institute;• Working to pass legislation that would specifically protect known deep-sea coral and sponge areas and establish a process for future protections;• Working to protect deep-sea coral and sponge habitats in the U.S. through the regional fishery management councils;• Developing educational materials for decision-makers, the media, and the general public;• Developing a petition to achieve threatened or endangered species status for Oculina varicosa. The goal of Oceana’s deep-sea coral protection activities is to ban bottom trawling in all U.S. waters containing significant amounts of deep-sea corals and sponges by the end of 2006. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the activities that Oceana is engaged in to achieve this goal. As Oceana’s capacity develops in other parts of the world, its efforts to protect coral in other regions (especially Europe and South America) will increase as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A database of deep-water alcyonacean records has been assembled using information that reaches back to the work of A.E. Verrill from the 1800s. These database records fall into two time periods, those from 1874 to 1920, and from 1950 to 2001. A total of 25 species in 10 families are so far known from the northeastern U.S. Most of these species are common in deeper waters of the continental shelf, with a few being restricted to the canyons and other slope environments. A comparison of western and eastern North Atlantic records indicates there is little similarity between the regions. In the cold-temperate to boreal part of the region there is about 41 % similarity of the “stoloniferous” and “massive body” soft coral species, but only about 28 % similarity amongst all the “gorgonian” species. In the warm temperate part of the region the similarity for all groups is less than 10 %. Deep-water alcyonaceans are strongly impacted by bottom fishing gear so it is likely that modern distributional records will not be exactly similar to those from deep in the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In general, fossils of corals are rare within Eocene and Oligocene marine strata that accumulated in a deep-water, convergent-margin setting and are now exposed in western Oregon and Washington, northwestern USA. At some localities, however, specimens of a few coral taxa are relatively abundant and associated with authigenic limestone deposits. Recently, these highly-localized limestone deposits were recognized as having precipitated due to the microbial oxidation of methane at seeps, areas where hydrocarbon-rich fluids were vented to the sea floor because of the tectonic compression and faulting of underlying sediments. As at modern methane-seeps, the ancient seeps supported dense invertebrate communities, in most cases dominated by tube-dwelling worms and bivalve mollusks, but they can also include gastropods, polyplacophorans, sponges, and corals. A few methaneseep assemblages in Eocene and Oligocene rocks of the Lincoln Creek Formation include the corals Caryophyllia wynoocheensis Durham, and an undescribed Flabellum (Ulocyathus) species. A new species of Deltocyathus appears to be restricted to a single methane-seep site. The corals Stephanocyathus holcombensis Durham, and Flabellum hertleini Durham have been reported from what may be methane-seeps sites in the Lincoln Creek Formation near Holcomb, Washington, and associated with an unusual crinoid-rich bioherm in the Keasey Formation near Mist, Oregon. Other corals, Flabellum (Ulocyathus) n. sp., Archohelia? sp., Caryophyllia wynoocheensis, and Dendrophyllia hannibali Nomland, are reported from a Lincoln Creek Formation locality that includes methane-seep related assemblages near Knappton, Washington. Although widespread in the deep sea today, none of the genera found in the ancient seeps in Washington and Oregon have yet been reported from modern seeps, and corals have rarely been reported from pre-Tertiary methane-seep deposits. It is unlikely that any of these corals, like the bivalves and tubeworms found at methane-seeps, hosted and derived nutrients from endosymbiotic chemotrophic bacteria that were capable of metabolizing some of the reduced compounds in the seeping fluids. More likely, the corals probably were attracted to the greater amount of food at seeps relative to the surrounding deep sea, or to the attachment sites provided by hardgrounds of methane-derived carbonate deposits on the muddy seafloor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]