FIO Field Studies in Marine Science 2013: Keys Marine Lab

So far the Keys have by far been my favorite location for this course! I’ve lived in Florida my entire life and I’ve never been here. Sunday night after I had arrived, the whole group drove down to Key West to do a little exploring since a number of us have never been. I wish we could have spent a little more time there but it was still a lot of fun, and now I can say I’ve been to mile 0!

The group in Key West!

Monday morning we went out on the boat and went to a spot called the 11 foot mound where we did some snorkeling and observed many fish and coral species. Since we hadn’t had much actually classroom learning time we were doing a lot more just general observing than trying to indentify everything. Later we continued on to Long Key Ledge where we again did some snorkeling, but this area was very different form the first. The last stop we made on Monday was to a place called the Elbow where we did more snorkeling and observing. I was interesting to see how places that aren’t very far apart can be so different in terms of what kinds of fish and other organisms are there or the abundance of the fish and corals. When we came back to shore for the day we meet up in the classroom and attempted to learn a large amount of corals that are commonly found in the area. I know I’m going to have a hard time remembering all the scientific names for them but I’m trying my best.

I've become such a great snorkeler!

Southern stingray!

Oh hi there!

Jesse and Jessica diving!

Tuesday we did more snorkeling, but this time it wasn’t really over corals. We first stopped at Koch Key which was an island covered with mangroves. We swam around the entire island and observed the different habitat of mangroves. We also did some quadrant studies in nearby seagrass beds. As cool as I thought seagrasses were, that adventure made me question that! We were all getting stung up by little creatures living in and on the seagrasses and it was not very pleasant experience. But the second site we visited, which was an area out off shore from the marine lab, was another seagrass area which was quite shallow but with less unpleasant critters. We found a lot of cool things lurking around, we collected algae samples, which we looked at and identified today, we also collected some tiny invertebrates like hermit crabs and sea cucumbers. Ken and Laura even found a baby lobster, and an octopus was found crawling out of a sponge we had collected on board. Later in the afternoon we came back to the classroom and went over 50 fish species commonly found in the area. Luckily we don’t have to remember the scientific names of these fish but there are still a lot of them and I’ve never really studied fish before so it’s a little difficult to remember all the little tricks to each one.

Yummy!

Playing under the mangroves!

Today we switched things up a little bit and met in the classroom first this morning. We learned about algae and we went into the lab and looked at our samples we had collected yesterday. We also took a tour of some of the wet lab and got to see a lionfish that was just caught. My favorite part of our tour was playing with lobsters. After lunch we went back out to the boat for some more snorkeling, by the end of this trip I’m going to be a master snorkeler! The first stop was called Big Sponge and was fairly close to shore. There were a large abundance of big sponges there and lots of critters like lobsters and fish hiding out in the sponges and also in the corals. The second place we went to today was Hawk's Channel and it has been my favorite spot so far. Although we didn’t get to stay long, it was really cool there because it’s an artificial reef. They used pieces of an old bridge as a hard surface which corals could settle on and grow. There were also a lot of different fish I personally didn’t see at the other sites, including barracuda and a few other smaller fish. Other classmates even saw a 9 ft nurse shark. I was a little disappointed I wasn’t in the right place at the right time to see that, but we still have two more days here so I’m really hoping I get to see one!