Paula M. Mikkelsen - Seashells of Southern Florida: Living Marine Mollusks of the Florida Keys and Adjacent Regions: Bivalves

Seashells of Southern Florida

Bivalves

SEASHELLS
of Southern Florida

LIVING MARINE MOLLUSKS OF THE

FLORIDA KEYS AND ADJACENT REGIONS

Bivalves

Paula M. Mikkelsen and Rdiger Bieler

Princeton University PressPrinceton and Oxford

Copyright 2008 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 3 Market Place, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1SY

All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mikkelsen, Paula M.
Seashells of southern Florida : living marine mollusks of the Florida keys and adjacent regions. Bivalves / Paula M. Mikkelsen and Rdiger Bieler.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-691-11606-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-691-11606-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. BivalviaFloridaFlorida Keys. I. Bieler, Rdiger. II. Title.
QL430.6.M546 2007
594.40975941dc22 2007001051

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

eISBN 978-0-691-23945-3

R0

Preface

T he crescent-shaped archipelago of the Florida Keys, a chain of low-lying islands at the southernmost tip of Florida, stretches southwestward from Miami into the Gulf of Mexico. In addition to the major string of 30 inhabited limestone islands connected by road bridges and causeways from Key Largo to Key West, the Keys are composed of many hundreds of mangrove mud islands, sandy islands, and rocks of the reef tract.

The Florida Keys lie in the subtropics between 24 and 25 degrees north latitude and their near-tropical climate and environment are closer to that of the Caribbean than to peninsular Florida. Recognized as one of the great recreational and environmental resources of the United States, the region is visited by more than three million visitors per year. A significant part of the attraction is sportfishing, diving, snorkeling, and boating around the coral reefs of the oceanside and in the mangrove-fringed back country of the bayside. This region, where the Gulf of Mexico, Atlantic Ocean, and Caribbean Sea meet, is home to the only shallow-water, tropical coral reef ecosystem on the continental shelf of North America. Together with the numerous other marine habitats such as extensive seagrass meadows and hard-bottom regions, the Keys are host to an amazingly diverse marine fauna.

Although not as visible as corals and fish, the various groups of mollusks, particularly gastropods and bivalves, make up a large part of this diversity. None of the many clams, mussels, oysters, or other bivalves has come close to the iconic status of the regions most well-known gastropod, the Queen Conch. There are no commercial clam or mussel fisheries in the area. If it were not for the ubiquitous mangrove oysters on intertidal roots, docks, and seawalls, few casual observers would even think about bivalves as a substantive part of the Keys faunal diversity.

Although the Keys have long been a popular region for shell collectors, there have only been occasional (and largely unillustrated) attempts to document the bivalve fauna. With the installation in 1990 of the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, which forms a marine protected area encompassing all of the marine waters surrounding the islands of the Keys, a more formal interest was generated in recognizingand ultimately monitoringmarine biodiversity of the region. Intensive survey and taxonomic work over the past decade by the authors has resulted in the recognition of nearly 400 Florida Keys bivalve species in water depths of less than 300 m. Many of these results were summarized and discussed in a recent technical volume of Bivalve Studies in the Florida Keys(Bieler & Mikkelsen, 2004a), which also provides a critical species catalog and an annotated bibliography to regional bivalve literature. Still missing was an illustratedmonograph for this part of the American coastline that showed the entire bivalve diversity, from intertidal oysters to deepwater little white clams, in readily comparable photographs, regardless of shell size, habitat accessibility, or rarity.

This book is thus foremost an illustrated monograph of the bivalves of southernmost Florida.