Deepsea Giant

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Last month, a dive team of researchers off the coast of the Solomon Islands found something they weren’t expecting – the largest stand-alone coral ever recorded.

They were shocked.

It was like seeing a “cathedral underwater,” Manu San Felix, of National Geographic’s Pristine Seas team, told the BBC. “It’s very emotional. I felt this huge respect for something that’s stayed in one place and survived for hundreds of years.”

San Felix was part of a research team surveying how climate change is affecting remote parts of the Pacific Ocean when they stumbled upon the mega coral. The “behemoth” coral, bigger than a blue whale – the largest animal on Earth – is around 112 feet wide, 105 feet long, and 19 feet high, according to Science News.

It also dwarfs the world’s next largest-known coral, a 72-foot-wide coral in American Samoa known as Big Momma, the magazine wrote.

This massive structure is a shoulder-blade coral – named after the scapula-like ridges that make up its body – called Pavona clavus. It’s a collection of nearly a billion coral polyps, tiny creatures, each with its own body and mouth, that live together and build rigid outer skeletons made of calcium carbonate that fuse together to form one organism instead of a reef.

It’s estimated to be between 300 and 500 years old.

Meanwhile, the coral seems to be in good health, researchers say. This may be due to the fact that it lives in deeper waters than other coral reefs, protecting it from higher temperatures closer to the surface.

“While the nearby shallow reefs were degraded due to warmer seas, witnessing this large healthy coral oasis in slightly deeper waters is a beacon of hope,” Eric Brown, a coral scientist on the National Geographic trip, told the BBC.

Corals provide habitats for marine life, and this particular species, the P. clavus, provides a home for shrimps, crabs, fish, and other creatures. As a result, protecting coral in the wake of climate change is imperative to preserving marine ecosystems, researchers say.

“Coral reef ecosystems comprise only about 0.2 percent of the ocean’s area, yet they contain over 25 percent of the marine species on the planet,” Brown said.

Meanwhile, because of the age of the coral, it serves like a window into the history of oceanic conditions of the past, researchers said. Scientists hope to study it to learn more about how it has grown and what conditions it has faced over the centuries.