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This diary shows you some of what I saw last Sunday (9/7) on our autumn pilgrimage to St Andrews State Park in Panama City, Florida. This is always a bit iffy for reasons explained below but this time we lucked out and had a splendid several hours of snorkeling.
All photos in lightbox - click to enlarge
What's so special about St Andrews? The state park is located on the west side of the channel that connects the Gulf of Mexico to St. Andrews bay. The edge of the channel entrance is reinforced with a rock jetty that acts as an artificial reef. Fish species that would otherwise be rare in the sandy and grassy marine habitats of the Florida coast are abundant here. The picture above shows three species that are super common on the jetty rocks but not to be seen elsewhere. The bright yellow and blue fish is a juvenile damsel fish - probably a Beau Gregory. The elongate brown and white striped fish is a young wrasse - probably a Slippery Dick. The other two, sitting on the rock, are blennies - the species has eluded my attempts at identification over the years.
Driving to St Andrews from Tallahassee takes 2 to 2.5 hours depending on route, traffic, tendency to obey speed limits, etc. Given the unpredictability of the weather in late summer it could have been entirely possible to show up for a thunderstorm. Or, as has happened previously, high winds that restrict snorkeling to the most sheltered areas. To make life even more difficult in order to get good water clarity you need to time snorkeling for around high tide. For some reason there appear to seldom be high tides in the middle of the day in autumn.
So last Sunday we left home at 6:40 so we could get to the park when it opened at 8 (central time) for a nine AM high tide. Fortunately everything worked out spectacularly well - it was calm and sunny with very clear water.
Bermuda Chub (large and dark) and Sergeant Majors grazing on rocks on the jetty.
The park offers five distinct areas for snorkeling, three on the jetty and two on sand. You can snorkel from the beach on the gulf to the west of the jetty. This area is full of stingrays and has schools of more open water fish. Unfortunately I have found that trying to photograph fast moving pale fish against a sandy background is a recipe for photographs that don't show very much. Example below.
Above is a school of ladyfish. We saw a few single individuals in the lagoon but this school was quite spectacular. Hundreds of them, each about a foot long, streaming past.
Above is a southern stingray, half buried in sand. I saw quite a few of these but mostly only after I scared them. This one was more tolerant. You could see the depressions where they had buried themselves everywhere.
Some detail on the stingray's head. I also saw a small school of cownose rays in this area but they were swimming rapidly away from me and my only photos show extremely indistinct dark blobs.
The other sandy habitat is the lagoon which is formed by the jetty cutting off a piece of the channel except at its northern (inland) end. This area is shallow and very calm. It is heavily used by people so marine life is sparse on the sand although I have seen stingrays there and larger rays have swum in for brief periods as well. I have also seen squid. I didn't spend much time in this area last week and have no photos.
The main action, at least as far as photography is concerned, is on or adjacent to the jetty itself. There are three distinct areas to snorkel. The most popular is to snorkel along the inside of the jetty, in the lagoon. This area has calm water. In particular the area where the jetty meets the beach is very shallow, calm, and clear. This represents a great place to snorkel for children, for those who are a bit uncertain about their comfort in the water, and for photography. This is a relatively small area and fish diversity is limited.
Above - Wrasse (Slippery Dick) these wrasses are sequential hermaphrodites - starting their lives as females and becoming males when they are larger. I suspect that there are other wrasses here as well (I've seen male blue headed wrasses a couple of times) and I am just not recognizing them. The changing color as the fishes grow is confusing.
Above - painted grunts. Both the grunts and the wrasses are abundant and can be seen around the rocks all over the jetty. They seem somewhat more tolerant of shallow water than many of the other species.
Some surprises can be found in the shallows as well. This baby barracuda (above) was lurking there consistently. Only about six inches long.
This beautiful black blenny showed itself briefly. It posed nicely for this photo and then vanished down a hole. It is the only individual of its species (whatever it is) I've seen.
The greatest diversity of fishes can be found in the other two areas: along the channel side of the jetty and along the jetty where it extends out into the gulf. I'm not going to distinguish between the two and just show photos from both areas combined.
Many of the fishes along the rocks are juveniles of reef fish species. Above are a pair of juvenile surgeonfish. In the past I have seen angelfish and butterfly fish along the jetty but none this time.
One of the more fascinating sights on the jetty are pairs of this small sea bass, called a belted sandfish. These fish are simultaneous hermaphrodites and form pairs and take turns acting as male and female if I remember the details correctly. Above is closeup of one and below is a pair. They are displaying and interacting with one another constantly and are about the only fish species that I see there that is always in pairs.
Probably my favorite fish on the jetty are these blennies. As I've said before they have eluded my attempts to ID as they don't seem to really match any of the species in my field guide. They are abundant but difficult to photograph because they like areas with moving water and their small size plus the surge makes getting them in sharp focus very difficult. I often discover when taking a picture of one or two that there are actually five or six in the photo. Above are two with the one in the foreground being about as clear an image as I ever get.
One fish species that was more common than usual this time were juvenile parrotfishes (probably stoplight parrotfishes) which could be seen grazing on algae (above).
Large schools of small fish, presumably herring or relatives, are a common sight and really fun to watch.
Above is a young sea turtle, I'm assuming a loggerhead. It was the first sea turtle I've seen while snorkeling in Florida although I have seen several from shore. Alas it didn't seem very healthy.
This is a gray snapper, a predator on the small fish.
Another predator, a needlefish. This was quite a large individual, at least two feet long. There were quite a few smaller ones as well. In deep water I tried to dive under them and take a photo from below but they wouldn't allow that.
Here are some small fish trying to stay out of the way of the snapper.
If you look deep you can often see some interesting things. Here are some jacks of some sort and one has a remora attached to it. I didn't notice when I took the picture. I did see some interesting things that were just a bit deeper but my camera wouldn't allow me to get clear images: adult barracuda, spadefish, and look downs.
Although the focus at St Andrews is usually on the abundant and diverse fish life there are a number of interesting invertebrates (and even non-animals) to be seen as well.
The sea urchins are particularly interesting. The black urchin is common on the jetty and appears to have a local 'boom/bust' cycle. They appear in large numbers on one area of the jetty, denude it of algae and then vanish to appear somewhere else. The paler sea urchin is more typical of sea grass habitat but there were a few here as well. I will look the species names up later.
Hermit crabs (above) are also more common in sandy and sea grass areas but I did see this one attractive specimen.
Not an animal but a kind of brown algae floating in mats on the surface. First time I'd seen it here. Photo (above) taken from underneath looking up.
I flipped this snail (conch?/whelk?) over to check that it was a living mollusk and not the home of another hermit crab. A wrasse rushed over to investigate and I hastily flipped the snail back upright before it became wrasse-chow.
Finally one of the most common animals in the area where these ctenophores (comb-jellies). Related to jellyfish but in a separate phylum these floating filter-feeders are completely harmless but a bit nerve wracking if you have been conditioned to avoid bumping into jellyfish.
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