With the support of the NH Fall Travel Award 2024, I journeyed to Key Largo, FL to attend REEF Fest. REEF Fest is an annual, four day celebration of the marine reef ecosystem. Hundreds of REEF members participate in diving, snorkeling, and kayaking. Members and the public attend free ocean seminars centered on reef conservation.

For my invited seminar, I presented: “The Reef Fishes of Gainesville, FL: How the Florida Museum Fish Collection informs our understanding of reef fish communities.”

Driving from Gainesville to REEF Fest – I detoured to the Frost Museum of Science in downtown Miami. Coincidental to my travel plans, Ms. Kristen Adsit of the Frost had asked to borrow Florida Museum shark jaw specimens for a shark-bite-science display at the Frost. In the spirit of forging another partnership, rather than ship the specimens, I hand-delivered two excellent examples from the Florida Museum’s vast collection and met Kristen in person.

The jaws of a large Tiger Shark, Galeocerdo cuvier (Péron & Lesueur 1822) and Bull Shark, Carcharhinus leucas (Valenciennes 1839), with full attribution given to the Florida Museum, are sure to please Frost Science guests for years to come.

Fig 1 Author at Frost Oculus
The Frost Museum of Science’s “Oculus” aquarium has brain-sucker like properties that only the most intelligent ichthyologists can resist (photo from 2019 visit to the Frost).

Easing away from the Frost into late afternoon, soul-crushing, downtown and Kendall-adjacent traffic, I considered all that had changed since I left Miami, land of my youth, thirty years ago. Traffic is off the scale bad. Certainly, the skyline is more developed than I ever imagined it would be. But overnighting with a friend in the City of Pinecrest, the neighborhood I grew up in, I encountered a profound peace. Having taken two excruciating hours to travel the thirty-one miles from downtown to this tiny zone of quiet tranquility, I could not help but muse on the nature of paradoxes.

The following morning, I drove to Key Largo, that “largo-est” of the Florida Keys. The good people of REEF put me up at the 2-acre, scenic, campus-like “Louisiana Purchase house” on Florida Bay. This rented property is the base of their activities for REEF Fest each year. Here I had lunch by myself on a little private beach until a stoutly comported Northern Curly Tail lizard, Leiocephalus carinatus Gray 1827, joined me and we bonded over our shared love of seasoned taco rice.

After a day and a half of attending events, practicing my delivery, and getting to know my hosts and audience, it was time to present at the Murray Government Center, the seat of Key Largo local government. The final seminar of Friday night, I believe my core message hit the mark with most. I asserted that without properly preserved and maintained, whole specimens and their data, like those in the Florida Museum, there can be no real understanding of what organisms constitute an ecosystem. Nor can there be scientifically testable baselines for detecting changes in an ecosystem, I stated confidently. This is especially true of reefs and reef fishes, said I. Most importantly, I snuck in the obligatory photo of my dogs.

Fig 5 author presents
The author talks about his dogs at museum expense.

Link to Reef Fest 2024 seminar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0aK5IUivBM

How convinced were the attendees that the information locked inside museum specimens can help reverse environmental ills? I cannot say. Perhaps it was instead an unspoken truth that united us all. As we stress the natural world to ever greater extents, and ourselves in the process, whatever course corrections we make, better to do them soon.

Fig. 6 Skepticism builds among attendees
Reef Fest Ocean Seminar attendees rightly begin to question what the author’s dogs have to do with Reef conservation.

So concluded my journey to REEF Fest. Still to come was the awful drive back (Et tu, Ocala!?!?) and with it the long hours musing about the truly unanswerable. Such as, are the sum tolls of the Florida Turnpike monetary or metaphorical? Financial or metaphysical? Will I ever willingly return to south Florida by non-volant automobile? How much taco rice can one introduced lizard eat? As with all things at this stage of life, I am frustratingly, none the wiser.

I thank Christy Semmens of REEF for the invitation to speak and thank the NH 2024 Travel Awards committee for supporting my opportunity to attend REEF Fest 2024.

Fig. 7 Sunset over Florida Bay final figure
Key Largo sunset over a windy Florida Bay.

Rob Robins is the Collection Manager of Ichthyology at the Florida Museum of Natural History.

The CMSS & Postdoc 2024 Fall Travel Awards are funded with the support of the FLMNH Directors Office and the Department of Natural History.