Golden Trees Grow From a Carpet of Living Stars

Off Costa Rica's Isla del Coco, roughly 360 to 410 meters (1,180 to 1,350 feet) down, golden trees stand rooted in a living carpet of brittle stars. Some top a meter (3.3 feet). The carpet is thick enough to swallow their bases.

The trees are octocorals: branching colonies built around a protein core and fuzzed with yellow polyps up to 5 millimeters (0.2 inch) long. Researchers from the Smithsonian and Universidad de Costa Rica gathered specimens with the robotic submersible ROV SuBastian on expeditions in 2019 and 2023. Writing in ZooKeys, they named the coral Laurinque elenya and judged it distinct enough to need its own genus and an entirely new family, Laurinqueidae. Laurinque means golden tree in Quenya, an Elvish language J.R.R. Tolkien invented; elenya means starry, for the brittle stars below.

Placing that family on the tree of life proved harder. Three DNA markers commonly used to identify octocorals each told a separate story. One put the coral in a family of mat-forming soft corals with no central axis at all. Another filed it inside a family called Eunicellidae. The third would not commit. A genome-scale analysis finally gave strong backing to a close link with Eunicellidae, yet the newcomer's growth form and microscopic skeletal pieces set it well apart from that family's members.

The authors caution that one mitochondrial gene, used alone, can mislead at the family level. Other questions remain open. The gardens grow in water with extremely little oxygen, and lead author Odalisca Breedy has seen the coral off Panama and in the Galápagos, though those sightings still need confirmation.

Once preserved, the colonies fade to brown and tint their ethanol to match. Elvish trees, evidently, do not travel well.

Read the full story at ZooKeys, June 30, 2026

Hot Take: Three DNA tests couldn't agree on its family, but somebody knew enough Elvish to name it. Priorities are clearly in order.