A bright yellow coral that grows like a small tree on the flanks of Costa Rica’s underwater mountains has turned out to be so unlike anything else in the ocean that scientists had to build a new branch of the coral family tree to hold it. The animal has been named Laurinque elenya, and its formal description does something researchers rarely get to do in a single paper. It establishes a new species, a new genus and an entirely new family, Laurinqueidae, all at once.
The study was published in the open-access journal ZooKeys in late June and announced by the publisher this week. It was led by Odalisca Breedy, an octocoral specialist at the Universidad de Costa Rica, working with an international team that included researchers from the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History.
The colonies grow to more than a meter (3.3 feet) tall and were collected between 360 and 529 meters (1,180 and 1,735 feet) below the surface. That is far below the reach of any recreational diver, in a stretch of the Pacific that has been surveyed only a handful of times. Specimens came up during two expeditions, in 2019 and 2023, using the remotely operated vehicle SuBastian deployed from the research vessels Falkor and Falkor (too), both operated by the Schmidt Ocean Institute.
The dives covered seamounts off the insular shelf of Isla del Coco and three geological features along Costa Rica’s Pacific margin. What the cameras found on those rocky outcrops is the reason for the coral’s unusual name. The rock was almost completely carpeted in brittle stars, and the golden colonies rose out of that shimmering layer like lit-up trees.
Breedy and her co-authors turned to Quenya, the Elvish language J.R.R. Tolkien invented for The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion. The genus name comes from Laurinquë, meaning golden tree, for the colonies’ color and branching shape. The species name, elenya, means stellar or of the stars, a reference to the brittle star fields the coral was growing in.
Placing the coral in the tree of life proved considerably harder than naming it. The team sequenced three genes routinely used to sort octocorals into families, and each one pointed to a different, unrelated family, an unusually stark disagreement. To break the tie, the researchers ran a phylogenomic analysis using hundreds of genes at once. That result was unambiguous.
The coral sits in its own lineage, closest to the family Eunicellidae but different enough in both genetics and anatomy that neither that family nor any other could accommodate it. Breedy said she first saw the octocoral garden in 2019 and was struck by the beauty of the landscape, which later inspired the Elvish name. Her early look at the specimens’ physical structure told her something was off.
She said “it was something very different that I could not match” against known groups, and only the molecular work done after the 2023 collection settled where it belonged. The expeditions were supported by the Schmidt Ocean Institute and a National Geographic Society research grant. The find lands in waters that already carry heavy conservation weight.
Isla del Coco is a national park and a UNESCO World Heritage site, and the government significantly enlarged the protected area around it at the end of 2021. Deep coral gardens like this one are classified as vulnerable marine ecosystems. They build complex three-dimensional structure on otherwise bare rock, which becomes habitat for a wide range of other deep-sea animals, and they recover very slowly from physical damage such as bottom contact from fishing gear.
The discovery adds to a lengthening list of species being pulled out of Costa Rican waters for the first time. In June, researchers described a new deep-sea ghost shark from the Pacific, and in May a jaguar-patterned marine worm was named from a beach in Santa Rosa National Park.
On land the pace has been similar, with a new frog described from the streams of the Los Santos coffee region and a new tree species added to the national record from the Guanacaste mountains.
Roughly two-thirds of the planet’s surface lies under deep ocean, and the overwhelming majority of it has never been looked at directly. For a country that has built much of its international identity on biodiversity, the coral is a reminder that a significant share of that biodiversity sits hundreds of kilometers offshore and hundreds of meters down, in places almost nobody has seen.
