The Beautiful Blue Tang
Story by Dana Lawson

Next time you snorkel over the reefs of the Florida Keys, look carefully for the beautiful blue tang.  This fish will dazzle your eyes with its brilliant blue color.  Occasionally they swim alone but more often in schools over one hundred! 

The blue tang is one of three species of surgeonfish found in the Atlantic Ocean.  The surgeonfish family earned this bizarre name because of their primary defense mechanism. 
Look carefully and you will see a lightly colored spine across the caudal peduncle.  This spine normally lays flat,  but when the surgeonfish feels threatened, they extend the spine. 
It happens to be as sharp as a surgeon's scalpel, hence the name, surgeonfish!  The blue tang is also capable of darting into narrow crevices when danger is near.  Their narrow,
compressed body enables the tang to maneuver into small areas.  The blue tang is an omnivore, nibbling on algae, mollusks, worms, and small crustaceans.  Once again, the compressed body aids the tang in sneaking into tiny hiding places of their prey.  The blue tang primarily uses its pectoral fins versus its caudal fin for locomotion.  The pectoral fins
aid in hovering above algal patches, braking, and reversing out of those small crevices.

A school of blue tangs swimming beneath you is sure to catch your breath.  Although the tangs may benefit from safety in numbers, their primary reason for schooling is cooperative hunting.  You may have read about the damselfish in our last edition of Online
Critter Review.  The damselfish secures its food source by guarding its garden of algae on the reef.  Unfortunately for the damselfish, a school of 100 plus blue tangs is no match. The tangs descend upon the algal patch, scour the garden, and are gone again in a blink of an eye! Their sheer numbers intimidate the damselfish right off its garden.

Tangs are not always found in schools.  Actually, the juveniles are quite hostile toward each other.  They recognize one another by their vibrant yellow color.  As they grow, their bodies begin to turn blue, but their caudal fin remains yellow.  Finally, the adults achieve a
brilliant blue color and a much more modest disposition.  The blue tang is sure to catch your eye in all stages of life.
 

Our MarineLab Advanced Program, designed for students who are attending their second year at MarineLab, was field-tested this past summer by two different schools.

St. Elizabeth Seton School (Naples, FL) and Merton School (Merton, WI) participated in pilot versions of the advanced programs.  After a brief review of ecology concepts covered in standard MarineLab programs, these students conducted more in-depth investigations of the reefs and other bottom communities around Key Largo. 

Students prepared a map, using data gathered from on-site investigations, of the benthic community surrounding Rodriguez Key; studied fouling organisms on the pilings of the lagoon; conducted fish counts for the Reef Environmental Education Foundation (REEF); and learned about coral reef restoration techniques, culminating with a visit to a grounding site currently undergoing restoration attempts.

Advanced programs are offered only to groups of students who have already attended MarineLab.  For more information on how you can schedule an Advanced program, please call Linda or Ginette at (800) 741-1139. 

Advanced Diving/ Undersea Research Techniques Program Story by Chris Olstad During the third week of June, ten students and their instructors from Valparaiso High School in Indiana participated (for the second year) in Marine Resources' advanced diving/ undersea research techniques program.  The students spent a majority of their six days offshore, conducting transect surveys while submerged on SCUBA along Key Largo's spur-and-groove reef. Coral, fish, and invertebrate data was collected during these survey dives to support the efforts of an international reef monitoring project managed by Reefkeeper International and the Nature Conservancy of the Florida Keys. Other activities later in the week involved submerged studies conducted from the MarineLab Undersea Laboratory and surface-supplied training/excursion dives from a diving bell system.

"Real" Science
MarineLab Students and Instructors Actively Collecting Data for Several Projects
MarineLab students and instructors are out on the water almost every day of the year, usually visiting the same general areas.  This kind of daily observation is invaluable to some local organizations in providing baseline data.  MarineLab now collects data for the following organizations:
The Dolphin Ecology Project, a new organization based in the Keys, is collecting data on the bottlenosed dolphin population of the Keys.  MarineLab instructors and students complete sighting reports, including location and number of dolphin calves, whenever they see dolphins or have a dolphin encounter.
The Great American Fish Count  MarineLab students learn to identify the most common species of reef fish as part of their regular MarineLab program.   Some groups, however, actually conduct fish counts on targeted reefs and complete data sheets on the numbers of fish from different species.  This data is sent to the Reef Environmental Education Foundation (REEF) and compiled with data from all over the world to help assess fish populations.