Exploring Marine Ecosystems and Native Plants: Insights from Coral Reefs to Backyard Gardens
I had been volunteering at MOTE for a while before I finally saw the calico crab in the grassflats exhibit. This is normal though since these small crabs only grow up to about 3 inches and prefer to bury themselves in the sandy or muddy substrate of their habitat so only their eyes are exposed. This behavior, along with their coloring helps them hide from predators.
Everytime I visit the Keys, I always try to work in some time learning about and doing coral restoration. On this trip, the Coral Restoration Foundation team was able to accomodate my family for the morning learning session.
The Florida keys Aquarium offers a great selection of truly amazing and unique hands-on experiences for families to learn about and interact with marine life. We signed up for the Coral Reef Snorkel Encounter where we got to get into the huge saltwater aquarium with all kinds of reef fish to snorkel and feed the animals. In preparation for this encounter, we had gone to the beach the day before to test out and practice with our snorkel gear. I'm glad we did this because it made this day much smoother and our snorkel experience was more focused on the animals we got to see rather than the functional aspects of snorkeling.
I finally finished a working-draft of the fish coloring book! What began as a simple idea to make a kid-friendly version of my fish journal has morphed into a massive - and ongoing - project that I hope to improve upon over time. At the end of this post, you'll find two downloadable versions of the most recent edition of the coloring book: a printable version and one for digital use.
I think the first time I saw a wild scrawled filefish was at Molasses Reef near Key Largo. Before then I had only seen White Spotted Filefish and Orange Spot Filefish. Now that I am diving and snorkeling mostly in the Keys, I see these beautiful fish almost every single time. So it just makes sense to include this fish in the fish coloring book.
Erica Lauer Vose 