Chris Crowder is a 2025 Florida Sea Grant Man Harvey Fellow. He’s a Ph.D. candidate in integrative and conservation biology on the College of Central Florida. He joined Florida Sea Grant as a 2024 graduate analysis fellow for his work in Dr. Geoffrey Cook dinner’s Marine Ecology and Conservation Lab in UCF’s Biology Division.
Crowder holding a Sheepshead in Mosquito Lagoon. Picture by Chris Crowder.
When biology college students are first launched to the scientific technique, they’re typically inspired to look at the pure world and ask, “Why is it that manner?” From there, the method sometimes includes background studying, amassing information, and performing information evaluation to uncover potential solutions. My present analysis adopted that actual trajectory: it started with a discipline remark and ended with a mountain of information.
From 2019 to 2021 I used to be scaring child fish at Ball State College to grasp how simulated predation threat might influence the behaviors of embryonic and larval prey fish. After this, I used to be lucky to affix Dr. Geoffrey Cook dinner’s Marine Ecology and Conservation Lab on the College of Central Florida. Throughout the first yr of my PhD, the lab was conducting fish sampling in Mosquito Lagoon, a part of the bigger Indian River Lagoon system. I seen one thing intriguing: one pattern website on an oyster reef had an abundance of fish, whereas one other website simply 50 ft away had only a few. I needed to grasp what may trigger such stark variation in fish abundance over such a small distance.
Wholesome fish habitat, like oyster reefs, is the muse of a wholesome fishery. Florida’s fisheries can assist a wide range of leisure actions for numerous teams of people whereas concurrently benefiting the native and state economies. Guaranteeing the sustained manufacturing of those ecosystem providers and leisure alternatives for future generations would require a greater understanding of benthic habitat and broader environmental pressures throughout a number of trophic ranges of fish and spatiotemporal scales.
Crowder presenting analysis outcomes on the 2024 Ocean Sciences Convention in New Orleans, LA. Picture by Chris Crowder.
It’s difficult to pin down precisely what attracts or repels fish from a selected location. Components like water temperature, salinity, habitat kind, or prey availability all play a job. However fish may reply to circumstances not instantly seen on the time and place of sampling. I needed to ask: Are the fish right here due to one thing they like? Are they avoiding one thing they don’t like? Or are they right here just by probability? Gaining perception into these questions can advance our understanding of how environmental components, prey species, and predator species interactions change all through time and house.
To reply these questions, I turned to a number of state companies for assist. I’ve collaborated with the FWC Fish and Wildlife Analysis Institute’s Fisheries-Unbiased Monitoring (FIM) Program which has fish group monitoring information that’s really unmatched when it comes to information high quality protocols in addition to spatial and temporal protection. I chosen a number of sport fish taxa that have been comparatively frequent and are a favourite amongst sportfishers: Snook, Snapper, Trout, Crimson Drum, and Crevalle Jack. I then chosen the highest 9 prey taxa representing roughly 80% of the fish weight loss program from the game fish. I then mixed the FIM information with habitat information from the Southwest Florida Water Administration District for Tampa Bay and the St. John’s River Water Administration District for the Indian River Lagoon.
