marine biology

Randall and David have traveled to Australia on visiting research appointments to study habitats like oyster reefs and seagrass beds that are at once familiar, yet quite a bit different and even a little dangerous.

What’s not to love about oysters? They clean the water, they’re delicious, and they have surprising economic value. Some members of the Kimbro lab found an oyster that seems to love them back.

If you want an activity that will take a lot of your time, go out onto your lawn and try to figure out which blades of grass belong to what individual plant. The grass in a salt marsh, like your lawn, is made up of various individuals, each with different characteristics that contribute to the success of a marsh. Dr. Randall Hughes’ new experiment looks at what makes habitat building cordgrass individuals successful.

Watch oysters grow! Tanya Rogers of the FSUCML has compiled time lapse imagery which shows baby oysters grow and form a shell over the course of a year.

When David Kimbro looks through his trick-or-treat bag, he doesn’t see candy, he sees oyster shells and periwinkle snails. Can predators trick periwinkles into not destroying marsh cordgrass? Or will they serve as tasty treats for blue crabs? David shares his data.

When Randall and David talk about their experiments on this blog, we don’t run a credits roll at the end to acknowledge everyone and everything that goes into getting that experiment up and running. In this post, Randall takes us step by step through planning an experiment, highlighting the people who help make her research possible.

Randall and David continue unraveling the mysteries of how predators affect their prey through fear. In this experiment, they look at how many oysters get eaten by mud crabs when the mud crabs think their predators are lurking around and eating their neighbors.

Hanna Garland spent her summer on oyster reefs north of the Matanzas Inlet, looking for the cause to an extremely localized crown conch infestation that is decimating the oyster population. Now she’s back in Tallahassee, getting used to desk work and pouring over the data she collected.

FSU Coastal & Marine Lab technician Tanya Rogers describes the building of what she calls “ecological art.” She is referring to the Kimbro lab’s summer experiment, for which several artificial oyster reefs with different combinations of animals was built near St. Augustine, FL.

Fiddler crabs benefit salt marshes. Ribbed mussels benefit salt marshes. But together, is their effect even greater, or do they cancel each other out? Dr. Randall Hughes of the FSU Coastal & Marine Lab looks to find out.