A species of deep-sea coral has been named after the beloved "Star Wars" character Chewbacca. Its long shape makes it look like it’s standing upright, and its extended, flexible branches resemble the famous character’s fur.
The Chewbacca coral, officially named Iridogorgia chewbacca, was originally found in 2006 by a crew on a research cruise off of Molokaʻi, but was not officially described and named until this year.
Les Watling, a professor emeritus at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and a part of the 2006 crew, said the name was obvious as soon as they found the specimen.
“We had settled on this idea of calling it Chewbacca almost right away because everybody agreed that’s what the specimen evoked in everyone's imagination. I had posted on my door a picture of the coral and a picture of Chewbacca, so it was there waiting, waiting, waiting, but it just took a while for the whole process,” he said.
Before a specimen can be officially described, researchers have to write a scientific paper about the specimen with enough details to allow someone else to identify it in the wild.
The paper includes details on the branching pattern, the movement patterns, and dissolving the tissue of individual polyps so that they can see and analyze the calcium carbonates. The structural build-up is photographed and used to create a holistic image of the specimen, which is then documented in a scientific paper.
“This coral sort of got pushed into a backlog with a lot of the other specimens we found during (that trip), but a lot of the ones we found have been through the process already but haven’t gotten this same reaction because they might have had more pedestrian names that weren’t as strange as this,” Watling said.
The Chewbacca coral has only been spotted a few times, which Watling attributes to the fact that it was found in the upper part of the deep sea, at roughly 660 meters. He said that most deep-sea exhibitions dive over 1,000 meters down, so many researchers may miss the area where this coral exists.
“This issue of rarity is an interesting thing in the deep sea because you kind of wonder where reproduction happens and if there’s some place with a mass of them somewhere, and so far, we just don’t know that answer,” Watling said.
“There’s a whole horde of new, undiscovered coral species and we’re still just kind of scratching the surface of biodiversity in the whole Hawaiian ridge area. We have no idea what could be found.”
