The Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary is a U.S. National Marine Sanctuary in the Florida Keys. It includes the Florida Reef, the only barrier coral reef in North America and the third-largest coral barrier reef in the world. It also has extensive mangrove forest and seagrass fields. The marine sanctuary includes a 2,800 square nautical mile (9,600 km²) area surrounding the Keys and reaching into the Atlantic Ocean, Florida Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. The sanctuary was established in 1990.
Covering much of the ocean floor are beds of seagrass that are of vital importance to the coral reef ecosystem. It is the largest known seagrass bed in the world.
Read more about Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary: Human Impact, Reefs
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“In Florida consider the flamingo,
Its color passion but its neck a question.”
—Robert Penn Warren (1905–1989)
“Thou hast the keys of Paradise, O just, subtle, and mighty opium!”
—Thomas De Quincey (1785–1859)
“The American, if he has a spark of national feeling, will be humiliated by the very prospect of a foreigner’s visit to Congress—these, for the most part, illiterate hacks whose fancy vests are spotted with gravy, and whose speeches, hypocritical, unctuous, and slovenly, are spotted also with the gravy of political patronage, these persons are a reflection on the democratic process rather than of it; they expose it in its process rather than of it; they expose it in its underwear.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“God has a hard-on for a Marine because we kill everything we see. He plays His game, we play ours.”
—Stanley Kubrick (b. 1928)
“If the veil were withdrawn from the sanctuary of domestic life, and man could look upon the fear, the loathing, the detestations which his tyranny and reckless gratification of self has caused to take the place of confiding love, which placed a woman in his power, he would shudder at the hideous wrong of the present regulations of the domestic abode.”
—Lydia Jane Pierson, U.S. women’s rights activist and corresponding editor of The Woman’s Advocate. The Woman’s Advocate, represented in The Lily, pp. 117-8 (1855-1858 or 1860)