Blogs & Ecology

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Bombed out reefs might not immediately come to mind as areas that could harbor large aggregations of healthy corals. Yet that's exactly what Bernhard Riegl, a scientist at Florida's Nova Southeastern University, found in the waters off Puerto Rico's Vieques island, which has been used as a U.S. Navy training ground for the past 6 decades.

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It may not be quite old enough to earn the distinction of being the world's oldest living organism - that "honor" goes to the bristlecone pine tree (aged 5,000 years) - but, at 4,000 years of age, Leiopathes glaberrima, a deep-water coral species, does set the record for being the oldest animal living under the sea.