Saturday, October 15, 2011

Purple sponges cover reef off English coast

The world's largest chalk reef - a reef carved out by the action of water in a chalk formation rather than built up by tiny tropical organisms - lies only 100m in some places off the coast of Norfolk. On in, amateur divers found large numbers of a purple sponge that might seem more at home in the oceans of Europa than Europe. It is indeed a new species, just offshore from a teeming coast in a heavily fished area, and somehow either no one found it or everyone ignored it.
COMMENT: Have I said enough times that discoveries are often right under our noses, if only we are alert to them?

No comments: