The word excited means many things to many people.
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It could be a new home, new baby, getting married, going on a holiday or buying a new car.
Aquatic ecologist, Dr Keith Bishop is excited with his discovery of an undescribed new species of soft coral Erythropodium sp.A.
Discovered in Seal Rocks, Dr Bishop became aware of the new species in September 2016 before sharing his photographs with marine experts.
First on the hit list was Forster-based marine ecologist, Suzanne Fiebig, then DPI Fisheries, the Australian Museum, Townsville-based Australian Institute of Marine Sciences, and eventually the CSIRO Laboratory in Hobart.
“With a great deal of persistence, eventually a specialist in CSIRO, Dr Phil Alderslade, got quite excited so I sent him a small sample,” Dr Bishop said.
“To confirm it was a new species he had to extract microscopic (aka sclerites) spicules from the polyps, which was not a small amount of work.
“When the polyps are out it is devilishly hard to find as it blends in so well given the brownish-yellow colour of the polyps.”
The spicules ranged in size from roughly 1/100 to 1/10 of a millimetre and came in the most intriguing shapes and forms, he said.
“I was very excited when I heard that it was a new species.”
Dr Bishop said the discovery showed how little was known about our oceans in 2017, given that something like this could turn up so close to the shore along a well populated part of the Australian coastline.
The discovery, which covered almost two square metres, was found at just one site on the wave-sheltered side of two boulders about 1-2 metres below the surface about 400m from the beach on the sheltered side of Statis Island
“It appears to be growing quite fast and is smothering rock-attached barnacles and shellfish,” he said.
According to Wikipedea, the Alcyonacea, or soft corals, are an order of corals which do not produce external calcium carbonate skeletons.
Instead, soft corals contain minute, spiny skeletal elements called sclerites, useful in species identification.
Sclerites give these corals some degree of support and give their flesh a spiky, grainy texture that deters predators.
In the past soft corals were thought to be unable to lay new foundations for future corals, but recent findings suggest that colonies of the leather-coral genus Sinularia are able to cement sclerites and consolidate them at their base into alcyonarian spiculite,thus making them reef builders.
Dr Bishop settled in Bungwahl after leaving Kakadu National Park, NT in 1989 where he had been working for the Commonwealth Government studying the ecology of freshwater fish for more than 10 years.
“During that time I surveyed fishes along the length of streams draining the Arnhem Land escarpment, then flowing past the tailings dam of the Ranger Uranium Mine.”