Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary
The Flower Garden Banks (often simply the "Flower Gardens") is a U.S. National Marine Sanctuary in the northwestern Gulf of Mexico, located roughly 105 miles (170 km) south of Sabine Pass, Texas.
The formation of offshore salt domes in the warm waters of the Gulf provided a colonization site for coral, which arrived and began reef-building roughly ten to fifteen thousand years ago.
Two reefs, East Flower Garden Bank and West Flower Garden Bank, were part of the National Marine Sanctuary when it was created in 1992. In 1996, the smaller nearby Stetson Bank was added to the sanctuary.
Typical for coral reefs, the Flower Garden Banks contain a large number of aquatic species. Almost three hundred species of fish, twenty-one species of coral, several species of crustaceans, four dominant species of sponges, and a wide variety of sharks, skates, and rays. The loggerhead sea turtle is resident. Several resident whale sharks turn in frequent appearances; manta rays are also commonly sighted.
Read more about Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary: History
Famous quotes containing the words flower, garden, banks, national, marine and/or sanctuary:
“The country is holy: O bide in that country kind,
Know the green good,
Under the prayer wheeling moon in the rosy wood
Be shielded by chant and flower and gay may you
Lie in grace.”
—Dylan Thomas (1914–1953)
“We must cultivate our own garden.... When man was put in the garden of Eden he was put there so that he should work, which proves that man was not born to rest.”
—Voltaire [François Marie Arouet] (1694–1778)
“These, and such as these, must be our antiquities, for lack of human vestiges. The monuments of heroes and the temples of the gods which may once have stood on the banks of this river are now, at any rate, returned to dust and primitive soil. The murmur of unchronicled nations has died away along these shores, and once more Lowell and Manchester are on the trail of the Indian.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“We love the indomitable bellicose patriotism that sets you apart; we love the national pride that guides your muscularly courageous race; we love the potent individualism that doesn’t prevent you from opening your arms to individualists of every land, whether libertarians or anarchists.”
—Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944)
“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)
“Proverbs, like the sacred books of each nation, are the sanctuary of the intuitions. That which the droning world, chained to appearances, will not allow the realist to say in his own words, it will suffer him to say in proverbs without contradiction.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)