24-25 JSK Floating Classroom: Snorkeling with Divers Paradise

Overview

On Tuesday, June 17th, 2025, SeaKeepers Education hosted nine of our Junior SeaKeepers 24-25 cohort students on a snorkel floating classroom in South Miami with Divers Paradise. To begin our day, we hopped aboard our vessel and briefly discussed safety and gave an introduction to coral reef ecology and some of the things they might find while snorkeling the reefs off of Miami. Once we arrived at the reef, students jumped in and used our Biscayne Bay ecosystem ID guides created in collaboration with Canvas of the Wild to identify some of the flora and fauna species that were present on the reef. Some highlights of the day included hundreds of gorgeous reef fish and some of the University of Miami Rosenstiel School's elkhorn and staghorn coral out planting trees! One additional thing that we noticed was that the water temperature in South Biscayne Bay was already quite high for the summer season, underlining the value of marine health and water quality monitoring like that the JSKs participated in for their research projects for preventing ecological disasters like algal blooms and fish kills.

By attending floating classroom outings, Junior SeaKeepers can take lessons they are learning from webinars, workshops, and cleanups and apply them directly to the local natural environment. In this floating classroom, we hope students were able to better understand the value that Biscayne Bay holds as a wildlife refuge that supports hundreds of unique South Florida species. As always, we aim for students to leave experiences with us with a better understanding of how their everyday choices impact the world around them, and, therefore, how their conscious actions every day can create a better natural world for their future.