Florida Museum of Natural History invertebrate zoology curator Gustav Paulay discusses his mission to fully document the marine biodiversity of Florida’s Gulf Coast. Originally developed as a “before-and-after” resource for future environmental disasters, Gustav explains the project also led to some surprising discoveries about Florida’s biodiversity.
Interview and videos produced by Ricky Telg for Explore Research at the University of Florida.
Transcript
Gustav Paulay: Florida has a very diverse marine biota, probably the most diverse of all of the U.S. states other than Hawaii, and that’s partly because it’s so tropical. Diversity increases through the tropics, and partly because the coastline is so huge and the number of marine environments are diverse, and yet despite this we have a very limited knowledge of what lives in the state and this came home really clearly when, of course, the BP oil spill happened in the Gulf and we didn’t know what impact it had because we had no before data.
So when funding became available we applied with a proposal to document what’s out in the Gulf today so that for future problems we will not be caught literally with our pants down, biologically speaking, not knowing what’s there so we have nothing to evaluate the impact against. So we started this project and it involves several components. One is to document as much of the hard grounds of the Gulf Coast as possible. They are ‘hard’ because of reefs that live there or otherwise rocks that used to be reefs in the past or rocks that maybe weren’t reefs, but anyhow, are exposed at ocean depths, allowing life that attaches to the bottom to flourish. And yet we know very little about what lives on them. We documented probably about 500 species, several — quite a few of which, were either never seen in Florida before or were not thought to range as far north as we found them. It was very surprising. It was extremely rich, really beautiful diving.
Right now we are trying to assemble all this information and with smaller boats go out and document more of it and get a better understanding of what lives here. Once that is in place, we will be putting out sites, both in North-Central, and South Florida where we can monitor these habitats. So we will be marking areas on the bottom and following the life of the organisms that live there seeing who comes, who goes, how they grow, how they die, over time and that will give us an idea about the dynamics and fast things turnover and change and set the stage for evaluating future impacts.
Learn more about Invertebrate zoology at the Florida Museum.