Did you know that some deep-sea coral live to be over 4,000 years old? Did you know we still have large coral and sponge colonies off the coast of California that support rich communities of fish? They need our protection.

Join Dirk Rosen, founder and executive director of MARE (Marine Applied Research & Exploration), at the 5th Annual MARE Soirée and learn more about exploring and protecting deep-sea corals, the old growth forests of the ocean.

WHEN: Thurs., Nov. 16 – 6-9pm

WHERE: Waterbar, 399 The Embarcadero in San Francisco

WHAT: Enjoy drinks and sustainable seafood with MARE’s Executive Director Dirk Rosen, their Board of Directors, staff and supporters as you learn more about exploring and protecting deep-sea corals. Waterbar is the perfect setting on the waterfront because they continue to set new standards of sustainability, variety and excellence in the sourcing, preparation and presentation of food from the sea.

Don’t wait, ticket prices go up on Nov. 7th! Tickets

Photo/MARE

Every ticket helps fund the discovery of uncharted deep coral ecosystems, and provides the scientific basis for their protection. 

About MARE

MARE’s mission is to explore and document the world’s oceans ​​to support their conservation and management. Recently in collaboration with Oceana and the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary, MARE explored conducted a scientific expedition to “never before explored” waters in Southern CA. The group documented the living seafloor (more than 14,000 invertebrates, including 4,786 corals, sponges and sea pens) off Southern California along with species that rely upon healthy coral gardens, sponge beds, and rocky reefs for habitat, breeding, feeding, nurseries and survival. In their report they urged federal fishery managers to safeguard these special places from destructive bottom trawl fishing.

MARE works collaboratively with state and federal agencies, academic institutions, and other non-governmental organizations.  To date, MARE has documented over 2,700 kilometers of seafloor off California’s coast alone—much of which had never been viewed before. MARE also designs, builds, upgrades and repairs underwater robotic vehicles and offers post-survey data processing and analysis.

Photo/MARE

About Dirk Rosen, MARE founder and executive director

Dirk has over 25 years of deep-water engineering experience. He was president and director of Deep Ocean Engineering before selling the company in 2000. At DOE, he was project manager and test pilot for all three Deep Rover 1,000 meter-rated manned submersibles, and a designer/operator of the Phantom and Bandit ROV systems. At Hawkes Ocean Technologies he served as project manager for the 11,000 meter rated Challenger, a manned submersible designed to go to the deepest point in the ocean, the Marianas Trench. He served on the board of Save the Bay for nine years. MARE is located in Brickyard Cove in Richmond, CA.

About Corals

• Deep-sea corals and sponges create large structures that support rich and abundant communities of fish and other invertebrates, many of commercial importance.
• Deep-sea corals and sponges grow slowly and live a long time – a black coral was found to be over 4,200 years old and thousand year-old individuals are common.
• These “old-growth forests of the deep ocean” are very vulnerable to bottom-contact fishing, especially trawling, which can destroy an ecosystem that has been in place for millennia.
• The waters off the US West Coast still contain large colonies of corals and sponges, along with a myriad of other organisms that depend on them. The challenge is to find these communities before they’re destroyed.
• To help protect the remaining coral and sponge habitats of the Pacific coast, MARE is combining their existing exploration capability with sophisticated machine learning algorithms to pioneer efficient new methods of locating and documenting these vital ocean places.