Off the coast of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, the Gulf Stream transports approximately 100 million cubic meters of seawater northward per second. Dwelling within this, the world’s most powerful ocean current, is a diverse ecosystem of resident, transient, and planktonic marine life. Among the plankton community of the Gulf Stream are eggs and larvae of marine animals that were spawned on distant coral reefs and continental shelf waters from the Caribbean Islands to the Carolinas. Many of these animals are destined to never encounter a suitable habitat, but for one poorly studied group of fishes, it means being deposited along a temperate shoreline during the summer, where water temperatures are high enough to support them for only a few months of each year. For 30 years, Todd Gardner has been collecting and cataloging tropical fish species in the waters around Long Island, New York. In that time he has recorded more than 100 species of tropical marine fish here and made some observations that demand further attention. Join Gardner, a professor of marine biology at Suffolk County Community College in Riverhead, and recipient of the prestigious Aquarist of the Year Award from the Marine Aquarium Society of North America, as he discusses collection and husbandry techniques as well as the fate and ecology of these tropical drifters.
