Boy is Florida lush! It's so hot and humid. But apparently, many of God's creatures like it that way.
Our favorite place so far is a bridge over the intercoastal waterway (translation: an estuary river running parallel to the ocean.) The first time we went, we saw some fish and a mother and baby manatee swim by, cool! This web picture SORTA looks like what we saw, only with a baby and there weren't all those fish.
The next time we went to the bridge, we saw some fish. But a minute later, we saw a pair of dark, 2-foot wide stingrays glide by. Wow!
Here, during certain times of the year, thousands of small pale green fish that "flow" constantly around the bridge pilings.
I stood on the rocks below the bridge for these pictures. The fish swam as close as 4 feet away. There are needle fish, which are thin, pointy fish who jump out of the water so quickly, they occasionally impale things. There are little crabs everywhere.
There are fat peach snappers and little dark fishies and huge mottled groupers. In this picture there are tiny yellow-striped fish and a spotted fish (on left) with a "uni-fin", and a red head with crossed eyes on top.
It's hard to tell the floating leaves from the little fishies, but they are some in the background.
It's one of those things I hadn't thought through before. Like the fact that seashells are made by living animals--I always thought of them as, well, rocks. And the fact that when Mommy is kissing Santa Claus underneath the mistletoe, she's kissing Daddy, dressed up. Go figure.
The babies hatch at night from July to September. We can't wait to see them. Left is someone else's nice picture from the internet.
It's either for the bugs, or maybe they like to retire here too, like people from New Jersey.
Can you see him, on the coconut limb, sticking out his pink throat? When I say everywhere, I mean when you walk by the bushes, they rustle as the lizards hide. It startles you at first! When you walk down the sidewalk, they scatter. I bought some houseplants, with some stowaways, I think, cause a week later we've found 2 in our house. The bigger gecko we saw wriggling across our ceiling is still in our house somewhere. I just hope we don't step on him!
This is on the coconut tree behind our house, where these young coconuts are low enough to pick off by hand when they're ready.
Reef picture. I think the fish in front is a porkfish. Stripey yellow and black fish are sergeant-majors.
For more Key West pictures, see the e-Scrapbook page of Key West.
Dave and Liz Robertson
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