For most of my childhood I lived on a small lake in downtown Orlando, and I spent a decent chunk of my free time in a canoe catching small fish. As a kid, I called them all bream or bluegill, not knowing that there was actually a huge diversity of species in the sunfish family. A couple weeks ago, I returned to those same fishing spots and caught a bunch of those same fish and started to identify the actual species with the help of charts from baitcasting reel. Turns out, I had about 5 different species of sunfish in the lake and almost all of them were in a single location. One of the great things about the Daily Species component of this project is that I am rediscovering the places I knew as a childhood and learning so many new things about the species I interacted with when I was growing up here.
Leave a Reply