Wading Through Research

This post was written by guest blogger Mike Bush, a grad student in FIU's aquatic ecology lab ( http://faculty.fiu.edu/~trexlerj/ ). __________________________________________________________________________ Boaters trying to push whales back to deep waters. Photo from CNN.com        This will be another post on some wide-ranging animals that only occasionally visit the Everglades.   Last time I talked about small songbirds, but I’ll scale up a bit for this round.  

  This post was written by Mike Bush, a grad student in the aquatic ecology lab ( http://faculty.fiu.edu/~trexlerj/ ) at FIU and an avid natural historian.  ___________________________________________________________________________ Male hooded warbler                In this post we’re going to move away from the Everglades proper and move to its borders, which in this case means the highly urbanized Miami/Ft Lauderdale megalopolis that lies immediately to the east of all that wild space.

  This post was written by guest blogger Emily Nodine, a PhD candidate in FIU's Periphyton Lab ( http://algae.fiu.edu/research/ ). When people think about today’s Everglades or the “River of Grass,” they generally think of Lake Okeechobee, Everglades National Park, and the canals and water control structures in between.  But the watershed is actually much larger than that.  Lake Okeechobee does serve as the headwaters of the Everglades; prior to human alteration, Lake Okeechobee would slowly overflow southward during very wet periods, forming the shallow, slow-flowing sheet of water that earned it the title “River of Grass.”  Today, the Hoover Dike prevents this and the water flow is strictly controlled, mostly released to the east and west coasts via the St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee Rivers, but also southward to the Everglades through an extensive system of canals and water control structures.  But the water in Lake Okeechobee came from somewhere else, too. Lake Okeecho