Cat's South Florida Winterim, Part 1

At Cat's school, the three weeks immediately following Winter Break are called Winterim.  Students have the options to either stay at school and choose a topic they want to study in a classroom/field trip arrangement with a teacher, or complete a research paper and project on a topic of their choosing and use that time to learn about that topic in a more in-depth way.  Cat and her two friends, sisters Kylie and Ella, wanted to study coral reefs and coastal marine life.  Ben was kind enough to offer to take care of the kids for a week while I had the pleasure of enjoying the sunshine, scenery, and wonder of South Florida with three happy, intelligent, and good-natured teenage girls.  I was a bit daunted by being the sole responsible adult and driver in cities that were completely new to me, but the girls were patient with me and everything worked out just fine.

Day 1: Tuesday

After our late-night airport pickup and drive back to Florida City, everyone agreed to sleep in the next day.  We drove to nearby Everglades National Park, arriving around 11:30am.  The girls tested the water in the various ecosystems within the park, we spotted wildlife, walked a few trails, took a boat ride up the Buttonwood Canal through Coot Bay to Bear Lake, and enjoyed the scenery.  We stayed until about 6:30 then introduced our Utah friends to Waffle House.

This 5ish-foot alligator was basking in the sun right beside the walking path.

From top left: manatee, Florida softshell turtle, Anhinga, and (a small) American crocodile

We walked along the boardwalk around Mahogany Hammock -
we learned that Mahogany trees used to be abundant in the Everglades but
were almost completely removed by the Spanish.  Since they are such slow-growing
trees, the only Mahogany trees left in the area are the ones the Spanish couldn't get
to for one reason or another, and they're mostly in this little spot.

Day 2: Wednesday

We had just a couple of hours at Biscayne National Park, the country's biggest marine park, but it didn't work out for us to get on the water so we learned about the park and its ecosystems and history by completing the "Reef Ranger" packet in the visitors center and walking around on the shoreline for a while.

Did you know that the Keys are actually fossilized coral reefs?  The islands are
very rocky, and there are almost no sandy beaches.  And there are several places
where you can see the fossilized coral in the rocks that came from the islands.
The above rocks were decorative barriers at Biscayne.

Then we headed south to Key Largo, grabbing a quick lunch at a grocery store before checking in at MarineLab.  MarineLab is a marine biology field program that typically hosts school groups (Ben actually attended his senior year of high school!) but transitioned to "Family EcoAdventures" when Covid hit.  We were so excited we could take advantage of the opportunity to learn about coral reefs and other coastal ecosystems from actual marine biologists.  Our first day there, we took a swim test, snorkeled in the little lagoon adjacent to campus, did a water quality lab and a zooplankton lab, and learned about coral reef ecology.

A couple of big-mamma iguanas hanging out in the mangrove trees along the lagoon shore.
They would crawl out onto a branch, sun, and then plop into the water.
I'm not sure if it was intentional or if they were falling asleep in the sun.

We collected zooplankton by running jars with mesh cloth attached along the surface
of the lagoon for several minutes.  Then we poured out the water and scraped as much
of the leftover stuff out as we could and put droppers of it onto microscope slides.
It was amazing to see how many tiny organisms there were!

We went into the classroom to put some of the organisms up on the big screen.
It was fun to see Cat's tiny little shrimp she caught, who actually jumped out of her container.

Megan was our instructor all day Wednesday.

Day 3: Thursday

We learned about the fish who live in coral reefs and did two reef snorkels, one before lunch and one after.  On our snorkels we saw tons of fish, two sharks, and good examples of both healthy and damaged coral.  At our second site we saw "Christ of the Abyss," a bronze statue that was submerged in 1962. The girls tried out the giant Jenga game during the lunch break.

Identifying fish after the first snorkel.

From top left: nurse shark, yellowtail snapper, stoplight parrotfish, and barracuda.

Selfies are a little harder with a GoPro.

That night we did the invertebrate diversity lab.  This is also called "the rock shake lab" because our instructor, Pat, literally grabbed two algae-laden rocks from the shoreline and put each in a bin with some ocean water.  We brought the rocks back to the classroom and shook them out in a different bin with a little water in it and identified all the species of invertebrates that fell out.  It was amazing!