ABSTRACT
Molluscan ecological research in the Florida Keys and adjacent areas Although the ecosystems and biodiversity of the Florida Keys, Dry Tortugas, and Florida Bay have been studied for nearly 200 years, the molluscan ecology of these areas is still virtually unexplored. Since the 1960s, marine ecologists have concentrated primarily on the ecology of sea grass beds (Dawes, 1987; Frankovich and Zieman, 1994); coral reefs (Dunstan, 1985; Goldberg, 1973; Jaap, 1984; Shinn et al., 1989); and mangrove forests (Davis, 1940), and only preliminary molluscan ecological surveys have ever been conducted. Some of these included brief descriptions of local bivalve ecology (Dame, 2011; Mikkelsen and Bieler, 2008); the geology of the vermetid gastropod reefs of the Ten Thousand Islands (Shier, 1969); and the general molluscan ecology of the mangrove forests (Coomans, 1969). Updated systematic and taxonomic lists, including aspects of molluscan ecology, have also been published within the past two decades. Primary among these were the species lists given by Lyons and Quinn (1995) for the mollusks of the Florida Keys Marine Sanctuary and Levy et al. (1996) for the infaunal and epifaunal mollusks of Florida Bay and the Florida Keys. The taxonomy used in both of these major works, however, is now outdated, and the species lists are incomplete, lacking many of the endemic taxa that are now known to occur in these areas.
