Pre-Visit Activities : Reefs : Procedures
Sixth - Eighth Grade Online Curriculum : Watersheds

Materials 

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Procedure

  1. The teacher will give the students a mini-lesson on hardbottom reefs off the South Carolina coast. The teacher will give them brief information on where the reefs are located, what type of organisms live in them and what the habitat is like. The teacher will tell the students they will do research to determine how inland watersheds impact these animals.
  2. Each student will be assigned a reef fish species. Students will research the species to determine their habitat and food requirements, where larvae and juveniles of the species live and what watersheds may impact both the adults and juveniles.

    Species:
    gag grouper
    warsaw grouper
    jewfish
    speckled hind
    Nassau grouper
    red snapper
    wreckfish
    black sea bass    		 snowy grouper
    scamp
    blueline tilefish
    tripletail
    tomtate
    yellowtail snapper
    vermillon snapper
    gray triggerfish    		 white grunt
    red porgy
    king mackerel
    Atlantic spadefish
    great barracuda
    hogfish
    greater amberjack
    sheepshead
  3. From this information, students will create a real estate pamphlet that is geared towards their particular species of fish. The pamphlet will describe a home (the type of habitat the fish is most likely to live in and thus most likely to appeal it), local restaurants and the food they serve (food that fish would eat) and nurseries that would be used by the young of the species (the places where the young of the species go to mature and why these places are beneficial to them). The location in the coastal waters of these habitats will be described. 
  4. The last page of the pamphlet will be used to describe potential problems with the habitats they are describing. For adult fish habitats, students should describe things such as fishing pressures the fish may have to deal with. As many juveniles use salt marshes as nursery grounds, the students will describe the water quality of the salt marsh they have chosen as a nursery, the watershed that flows in to it and potential sources of pollution that may be flowing in with the watershed.

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Follow-up questions