Undersea Mountain Photos: Brittlestar Swarm, More Found

Spawning School

In 2008, a dense school of orange roughy fish gather above a seamount in New Zealand's Chatham Rise to spawn.

Fishers who harvest orange roughy have traditionally gathered at seamounts during spawning season to catch large numbers of the fish at once. (Related: "Weird Creatures Found on Deep-Sea 'Mountain Range.'")

But such seamount communities are very disturbed by fishing and are slow to recover, CenSeam researchers have demonstrated for the first time.

"It was pretty obvious that bottom-trawling was going to have a substantial impact on seamount communities, but it hadn't been scientifically proven," CenSeam's Stock said.

For example, in one study, CenSeam scientists compared photographs of seamounts that had been trawled by commercial fishing with those of unfished seamounts.

They found that about 20 percent of the unfished seamounts were covered by coral, while fished seamounts had less than one percent of coral coverage.

Published October 1, 2010