Question: What is the most endangered species you have studied?

James Bell answered on 27 Jun 2014:

Deep-sea biologists often study areas of the deep sea that nobody has ever studied before. This means that its very hard to say what animals are endangered because we have not much idea of where they are and how many there are.

We know that some species are vulnerable to human impacts and so work to protect them, even if we don’t know much about their global extent. Deep-sea corals are a good example – they grow very slowly and are most at risking from deep-sea trawlers (fishermen that scour the bottom of the oceans) so once we have found a deep-sea coral reef, we can set up protected areas around them to stop them from being damaged by the fishing industry