Some Baby Pictures To Remind Us

These are just a sampling of the juvenile marine creatures that depend on the vast submerged prairies of seagrass that extend outward from our Big Bend region of Florida. My students netted these (and released them) on our recent field trip. It's only a minute sampling of the young creatures we saw that day.

The key word there is "YOUNG". The turtle grass, manatee grass, and shoal grass that coats the shallow bottom on this quiet coast is one vast nursery of sealife.

It's really quite incredible and so very productive.

The top picture is a full grown grass shrimp carrying her precious cargo of eggs beneath her abdomen.

My hand will provide the scale in these pics, so you can understand just how tiny these innocents are.

This young pipe fish, no bigger than a thread, is a seahorse cousin and is completely dependent on seagrasses for her entire life. She just can't survive anywhere else. Full grown, she will be all of 8 inches long. She's so dainty now ... just a wisp of a fish.

A young crab like the one above will spend it's youth in the deep grasses, hunting and trying to avoid ... well everything. Who doesn't like crab? Even if he moves out of the grass as an adult, he needs the sheltering blades to survive the very vulnerable early stages of his development.

To really understand how small this juvenile seatrout is, you have to realize that the crease in my finger (near her anal fin) is the joint crease at the distal phalange. She's so tiny that we can count the vertebrae in her transparent body. At this point in her life she needs the seagrass for shelter from predators and as a source of the tiny amphipods that she feeds upon.

Fully grown, she'll be a fearsome predator herself, hunting the seagrass prairie as a hawk might hunt a terrestrial grassland. No longer transparent, her disruptive pattern of spots will make her invisible to the shrimp and small fish that nervously hide among the blades.

Developers don't see this of course. They see dollars.

Shallow grassy water is just an obstacle to be dredged out of the way and they will not stop until this entire state is dredged, paved, and gated ...

...unless we stay vigilant and active. The terrain may be different where you live, but the need to speak on behalf of the innocents is no different.

Sometimes, baby pictures speak louder than words.