Wetland and Aquatic Research Center

A map showing North America's tropical-to-temperate transition zone. Red, orange, and yellow depict the more tropical zones, and blues depict the more temperate zones, based on to the coldest recorded temperature for each area between 1980 and 2009. Photos show some cold-sensitive plants and animals with northern range limits governed by winter cold temperature extremes.

 Winter temperature extremes control the distributions of subtropical fishes. Common snook (Centropomus undecimalis), aggregate at a spring in northern Florida during winter. Snook are warm saltwater game fish, common in Florida, that have been moving further northward as extreme cold spells become less frequent and less intense.

To help study the biodiversity present in the deep sea, scientists collect sediment cores. These cores are about a foot long and provide a vertical profile of deep-sea sediment, or mud. USGS scientists at the Wetland and Aquatic Research Center identify and quantify the tiny animals found

 Two UNC mini landers, surrounded by Sablefish (Anoplopoma fimbria) and pink sea urchins, incubate seawater in situ to enable calculations of methane oxidation rates.

ROV SuBastian’s manipulator jaw stabilizes GEOMAR’s glowing bubble box that is capturing high-resolution images of methane bubbles rising from the seafloor.

Red plumes burst out from the tops of these chemosynthetic tubeworms, capturing hydrogen sulfide and oxygen from the surrounding water to feed their bacterial endosymbionts. The tubeworm tubes provide a habitat for several benthic animals, including the pale pink branching octocorals seen here

A female Kemp's ridley sea turtle, named Finley, shows off the popoff ADL (orange) and satellite tag (blue).

Mangrove forest in Pohnpei, Micronesia.

The USGS and partners are studying how mangrove forests in the Federated States of Micronesia may respond to sea-level rise over the coming century. Their projections will help Micronesian communities plan for the future.

The USGS Ecosystems Mission Area brings you Outstanding in the Field, a series of stories about our science, our adventures, and our efforts to better understand our fish and wildlife and the ecosystems that support them. In this episode we describe the USGS’s efforts to track frog populations in the southeast United States. 
 

See St. Joseph Bay in the Florida Panhandle through the eyes of two young adult female loggerheads as they swim, surface to breathe, dive, forage on underwater grasses and spend time with other sea turtles. Three species of threatened or endangered sea turtles congregate in St. Joseph Bay. They surface only briefly to breathe, and rarely come ashore except when females

Two red sea urchins (Mesocentrotus franciscanus) sit on the deck of the R/V Falkor. These sea urchins were collected during the #HuntingBubbles research cruise led by the USGS and Schmidt Ocean Institute, which focused on exploring and understanding methane seeps and the communities that depend on them along the Cascadia Margin. Read more about the cruise and its