With over 95 percent of Biscayne National Park covered by turquoise-hued salt water, there’s a world of colorful corals, fish, and other life waiting beneath the depths for you to explore with your scuba or snorkeling gear. There’s even shipwrecks to investigate along the Maritime Heritage Trail, an underwater route taking the diver or snorkeler to the remains of six submerged sailing vessels dating from 1878 to 1966.
What makes Biscayne so special when it comes to diving and snorkeling? For one thing, it’s a part of the Florida Reef, which stretches about 350 miles (563 kilometers), from about 150 miles (241 kilometers) north of Biscayne National Park south to Dry Tortugas National Park. Though viewed as a single reef, it's comprised of thousands of smaller reefs.
The reef system at Biscayne supports over 600 species of fish, in addition to a large variety of corals, sponges, and invertebrates. This diversity is the hallmark feature of reefs. Among all this planet’s major ecosystems, only the tropical rain forest is more biologically diversified. To drive this point home, conservationists often refer to reefs as the “rain forests of the sea.”
Stick your head into the water here and you’ll be introduced to an array of sea life including stingrays skimming the sandy bottom, rainbow parrotfish, blennies, grouper, neon blue-and-gold angelfish, and bright yellow grunts named for the noises they make. Beneath the briny depths, life here makes their homes and searches for food in and among the elkhorn, purple sea fans, brightly-colored sponges, sea grass, and stony corals upon which you might see the bright yellow fringed screw of a Christmas tree worm. You might even spy a nurse shark gliding through the reef.
Use of a guided service to this explosion of underwater color and life is not necessarily required, but if you are a scuba diver and haven’t dove in over a year, it’s highly recommended and often required by commercial dive operators to use a guided service. Guided, Eco-Adventure tours are available through the Biscayne National Park Institute, including snorkeling and diving tours of the shipwrecks along the Maritime Heritage Trail.
The park also offers a list of other scuba and snorkeling guides authorized to operate within the park.
- Ace Diving - snorkeling and scuba diving charters, 786-241-3194 E-Mail
- Coastal Runners - Boat tours, SCUBA, Snorkeling, Fishing
- Cool Cruising - sightseeing boat tours and snorkeling charters, 305-714-2121 E-Mail
- Diver's Paradise - scuba diving and snorkeling charters, 305-361-3483 E-Mail
- South Dade Charters LLC- sightseeing and snorkeling charters, 786-277-4491
While it’s best to bring your own scuba or snorkeling gear, you can also rent it for tours from the Biscayne National Park Institute.
What is the Florida Reef and why is it so very important?
Featured In The National Parks Traveler
What Is The Florida Reef?
Stretching nearly 350 miles and forming a major part of both Biscayne and Dry Tortugas national parks, the Florida Reef is the only coral barrier bank reef in the continental United States and the third-largest in the world.
This dynamic underwater ecosystem, with biodiversity rivaling that of tropical rainforests, supports more than 1,400 species of plants and animals. Among them are a third of Florida’s threatened and endangered species, including elkhorn and staghorn corals, green sea turtles, Nassau grouper, and humphead wrasse.
The reef is approximately 10,000 years old, having developed when sea levels rose following the last ice age. But its building blocks date back some 200,000 years to when sandbars in what are now the lower Florida Keys were shaped by tidal currents flowing between Florida Bay and the Atlantic Ocean. Coral reefs that dated to the same time period died when water levels dropped around 100,000 years ago. After sea levels stabilized following the ice age, corals began to grow on the former reefs.
To read more of this article, head over to this page.
Key Species Of The Florida Reef
The Florida Reef supports more than 1,400 species of plants and animals along its 350 miles, including many corals, turtles and fish that are designated as threatened or endangered on the federal Endangered Species Act list.
This diversity helps the reef maintain balance, researchers have found. For example, wrasses, parrotfish, sea urchins, and other herbivores help corals by grazing on algae, which can otherwise overgrow the reef. Larger predators, such as snappers, groupers, barracudas and sharks, also have important roles in the ecosystem and help maintain biodiversity.
Like any complex ecosystem, that of the reef relies on a delicate balance of its many diverse species that each play an important role. Here’s a look at several key reef species and how they both depend on the reef and contribute to its overall health.
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Florida's Reef, Highly Valued And Harshly Impacted
Captain Slate’s Scuba Adventures offers tourists a familiar suite of snorkeling, diving, and scuba certification opportunities in the colorful underwater world off the Florida Keys. On special occasions like weddings the captain, Spencer Slate, goes the extra watery mile. For “two grand or less” people can tie the knot amidst the natural beauty of Florida’s coral reef.
“They say their vows, take their regulators out, and kiss. We do the ring exchange, and we film it,” said Slate.
Then the newlyweds celebrate — and so does Slate. Like the more than 4,000 businesses making money in these stunning waters off Monroe County in southeast Florida, Slate’s dive shop depends on tourism to pay the bills.
It’s not surprising that the Florida Reef, with its 6,000 marine species, including rainbow-colored fish, green sea turtles, shark, and barracuda, along with shipwrecks to swim through, is a moneymaker — not just for the businesses involved but also for state and local governments, including coastal communities that would flood without the reef’s protective barrier during storms.
To read more of this article, head over to this page.
A Rocky Mountain Refuge For Florida Reef Corals
Down the hall from thousands of butterflies, next to a room crawling with arachnids, and a mile above sea level, the small aquarium helps preserve the future of the Florida Reef 2,000 miles away in the Atlantic Ocean.
For nearly 200 years, glass-walled aquariums have been used to keep freshwater and marine life within reach, whether for study or enjoyment. But the aquarium at the Butterfly Pavilion, a nonprofit invertebrate zoo 15 minutes from downtown Denver, carries a more ambitious objective.
While corals still attached to the Florida Reef are dying from stony coral tissue loss disease (SCTLD), climate-change impacts, pollution, and damage from anchors and trawlers, the corals in the wall aquarium here at the Butterfly Pavilion offer hope.
To read more of this article, head over to this page.
Florida's Ailing Reef
The Florida Reef, heralded in tourist come-ons as a “world-class natural wonderland waiting to be discovered,” is a vast and vibrant underwater world, extending from Atlantic Ocean waters north of Biscayne National Park, arcing south around the bottom of Florida, and swinging into the Gulf of Mexico where Dry Tortugas National Park is mostly submerged.
Its 350-mile length —also bordering Everglades National Park— make this the world’s third-largest barrier reef ecosystem, and the only living coral barrier bank reef in the continental United States. The corals create vital habitat for biodiversity, harboring complex structures that nourish, protect, and provide breeding areas for thousands of marine organisms. The submerged panorama is an economic powerhouse for the state of Florida, drawing millions of visitors to South Florida each year to swim, boat, and fish its waters.
But there’s a caveat: The Florida Reef, thousands of years in the making, is in trouble.
To read more of this article, head over to this page.
- By Rebecca Latson - March 10th, 2026 8:28am
