On 1 July 2025, NIWA merged with GNS Science to become Earth Sciences New Zealand.

Cup coral sea floor

DTIS NIWA / Oceans Survey 20/20 Challenger Plateau
The nearby sea floor from where the cup coral above was collected. Typically, we see cup corals attached to hard substrates such as bed rock or cobbles (see below) but the area surveyed here was all soft sediments. It looks like the little round blobs in the image could actually be our cup corals, finding a way to hold their own in mud, usually not favored by filter feeding organisms.