Darwin Mounds Settlement Study

In May 2011, four short seabed moorings were deployed during RRS James Cook cruise 060 at the Darwin Mounds Marine Protected Area to serve as recruitment experiments. Two moorings were deployed in the western and two in the eastern Darwin Mound fields. In 2019, during the RRS Discovery cruise 108/9, the Hydraulic Benthic Interactive Sampler (HyBIS) was used to recover two of the four moorings; one mooring from each area Upon recovery, all colonized surfaces were photographed before the scleractinian corals on the settlement panels were carefully removed, photographed, and preserved in 96% ethanol. All remaining fouling was weighed (wet). All taxa from the representative mooring surface area were identified to species level (where possible), counted,and the wet mass of the larger and most abundant taxa was measured. Specimens have been retained in the Discovery Collections at the National Oceanography Centre, United Kingdom