Definitions

Very nice site, Puffer. Lot of hard work obviously. Temperate Reef, nice name too.
I was wondering, what you'd call the marine environment we have here in Panama City Beach Florida.
While the temperature gets to 85 or even more during the summer, and the reefs include butterflies, surgeonfish and angels, in the winter most of the reef fish disappear as the temperature gets down to 45-50 degrees!
Maybe it's "Sub-tropical", but just wondered what you thought about it.
Interestingly, it has some of the traits and creatures of your temperate reefs, but also the tropical reefs. In other ways, it certainly harsher than many places with such a large temperature range.

That's a very interesting question. However i would have to say that most of the world would consider it tropical. However it is a stretch but you could call the region seasonal however that tends to apply to regions more north or south. For example the northern atlantic and the southern pacific south of australia.

Yardboy wrote:Very nice site, Puffer. Lot of hard work obviously. Temperate Reef, nice name too.
I was wondering, what you'd call the marine environment we have here in Panama City Beach Florida.
While the temperature gets to 85 or even more during the summer, and the reefs include butterflies, surgeonfish and angels, in the winter most of the reef fish disappear as the temperature gets down to 45-50 degrees!
Maybe it's "Sub-tropical", but just wondered what you thought about it.
Interestingly, it has some of the traits and creatures of your temperate reefs, but also the tropical reefs. In other ways, it certainly harsher than many places with such a large temperature range.

I've always seen this area referred to as subtropical. These waters are (of course with some differences) analogous to those off S. Cal.
Of course, these fluctuations do become greater towards the midlatitudes (temperate zone), where seasonal extremes of both high and low temps are the norm.

I agree coolwaves, after some research I believe it would be labelled sub-tropical. On the other hand, I'm not sure it'd be analogous to southern California. I remember going swimming in the Pacific in Los Angeles and the darn water in August nearly froze me to death. BayWatch was such a lie!

Water in california is most definitely temperate! I lived there for 14 years!

To me temerate means "darn cold"!

Just about. Except a lot of times in the summer a wet suit isn't needed.

I think we got this solved but i was browsing and i found this. It defines Florida as subtropical.

http://www.wetwebmedia.com/FWSubWebIndex/subtroptks.htm?h=

hmmm...

Yes?

yeah, yes..

lol.

florida has many awesome tropical SW stuff too...