04/17/2026
It’s Friday! You know what that means…let’s get into the field with this week’s Fieldwork Friday feature!
Move over giant marine megafauna (we’re looking at you sharks), time to give some attention to the little guys of the ocean. The Rose Lab , headed by Dr. Emily Rose, investigates how changes in an ecosystem can affect its resident’s populations over time, especially mating systems. And what better group of animals to study mating systems, than the Family Syngnathidae - seahorses, pipefishes, and sea dragons!
The lives (and love lives) of these fishes are intricately tied with their habitats. And with unique behaviors like male pregnancy and sex-role reversal, they make an excellent model species for the Rose Lab to answer these questions! In fact, these scientific questions led to the establishment of Seahorse National Park in the Bahamas with Dr. Heather Mason at The University of Tampa to protect an isolated population of seahorses in a Bahamian saltwater lake. Check out the last slide to see the cover of the team’s recent National Geographic feature!
Dr. Rose and Dr. Mason are not only advancing our knowledge of the ecology, evolution, and environmental biology of syngnathid fishes, but bring it all into the classroom to train the next generation of scientists. Students at New College of Florida and The University of Tampa get to assist with real fieldwork in courses like Molecular Ecology, Marine Biology, and Animal Behavior! (Sign us up for next semester!)
Check out these wonderful pictures of both labs in action, including their recent attempts to use Baited Remote Underwater Video (BRUV) to observe seahorses in seagrass beds in Tampa and Sarasota Bay! And as they proudly told us, they’ve been doing all this amazing work in Waterlust gear since 2017 💪 Thanks for bringing us along for the ride!
*All activities were conducted under an Florida Fish and Wildlife (FWC permit)
