WaterNotes

While browsing the incredible array of offerings over at ThinkGeek.com I stumbled into the R2 Fish Training School. Most marine educators already have fish swimming in their classrooms. How fantastic would it be to impress your students with this training program? I think I need it. My clownfish – Starsky and Hutch – are awesome [...]

Normally I only peruse AskMen.com if I’m looking for a window into the modern male mind (though frequently the answers I find are more perplexing than my original questions). Imagine my shock and amusement then when I found an email at the ‘Notes inbox detailing a great roundup of videos posted at AskMen.com for the [...]

This past Tuesday lionfish successfully leaped into the Florida Keys. A recreational diver spotted a lionfish on the Benwood Ledge, just off of Key Largo’s coastline, and reported the sighting, along with a digital image to confirm identity, that quickly prompted a recovery operation. A team from REEF, NOAA, and FKNMS were able to recover [...]

I’ve always loved the life history quirks of the mangrove rivulus. Unfortunately its a little too quirky for the likes of my regular students who are certainly too young or too silly to hear the scoop. And why am I intrigued by them? Well, most of the little fish – found in the IRL system [...]

Hundreds of ocean predators take advantage of a natural tendency of swarms to coalesce and to behave as a large synchronized group despite a lack of higher ordered thought or direction.  Steven Strogatz gave a beautiful presentation about this natural patterning in fireflies, swallows, and so many schools of fish, particularly as they evade predators.  [...]

Camouflague anyone?  The spires, spines and cirri on this little sargassumfish are hard to spot out of the water but he’s beautifully adapted to living within floating mats of Sargassum macroalgae out in the Gulf of Mexico and in the Sargasso Sea off of Florida’s coastline.  Its not terribly common to spot these beauties in [...]

Spotted seatrout are a prized gamefish in the Indian River Lagoon system, even supporting several tournaments during the year.  But they, like so many others, start out life at a terribly small size.