these colonies are home to starfish sea urchins lots of different fish and countless other kinds of animal. that's why i'm here in our cold water corals are called the bio engineers of the deep with a hundred many species of fish including ones at a commercial. we fish to use these coral reefs as spawning grounds as a place to feed and also this shelter so they play an important role in shaping the deep sea ecosystem in nets you see researchers have identified four thousand six hundred species that live in cold water coral reef ecosystems that each expedition uncovers more but how cold water corals reproduce is still something of a mystery. the world down there in the depths is astoundingly diverse and passing it would be terrible if it were lost before we managed to understand it.