Report of the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries Biological Laboratory, St. Petersburg Beach, Florida, Fiscal Year 1967

The major goals of the Laboratory are to explore the relatively unknown scope of biological productivity in the coastal zone of the eastern Gulf of Mexico, to measure the effect of changes in that zone, and to develop methods of increasing estuarine fishery resources. The report describes current research on projects in the Estuarine and Red-Tide Programs. The projects include studies of sediments and organisms in bay bottoms, plankton crops and fishes residing in and transferring between estuaries and the Gulf of Mexico, toxicity of the red-tide organism, and experimental rearing of pompano in an impounded lagoon. A physical, hydrological, biological, and sedimentological inventory of Florida estuaries is also in progress as part of a cooperative effort with the National Oceanographic Data Center and the States of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana.