Everglades

When I started work in agriculture, my first boss, Steve White, had his own plane, and we used it to travel around Europe on business. After he returned to the U.S., I visited him, and he flew me for a weekend of fishing down to the Florida Everglades - a tropical wetland that, before drainage began, covered 10,000 square km. There we were joined his father Abe, with whom I had worked on bananas in Costa Rica.

Steering a boat through the mangroves allowed us to get close to some special local birds.

The Roseate Spoonbill (Ajaia ajaja) is a spectacular South American bird whose northern range extends up to the Gulf Coast. Its pink colour, as in the flamingo, comes from the carotenoid pigments in its food.

The White Ibis (Eudocimus albus) is at home in the Gulf Coast and the Caribbean islands. Although first described by Linneaus, it was given its current name in 1832 by the German ornithologist Johann Georg Wagler - who unfortuanately died at the age of 32 from an accidentally self-inflicted gunshot wound whilst hunting for specimens in Munich.

But the point of the trip was to catch fish - and a number were caught. The Sheepshead (Archosargus probatocephalus) crunches its way through bivales and crustaceans using human-like front teeth. It's found along the most of the west Atlantic coast (e.g. Sheepshead Bay in New York), but its highest concentration is around Florida.

This is a small Red Drum (Sciaenops ocellatus) - another fish of the west Atlantic...

...  and ths is a big one, with Steve for scale.

But the catch of the day had to be this Smalltooth Sawfish (Pristis pectinata). Florida is one of their few remaining strongholds. There are five species of sawfish in the world - two are classified as endangered, and three, including the smalltooth, critically endangered. Sawfish are rays with a long toothed saw projecting from their skulls. The saw contains thousands of sensory organs, called ampullae of Lorenzini, which can measure electric fields - and which the fish use to monitor movement in their surroundings, and even to create three dimensional images. Stefano Lorenzini was a physician and icthyologist who lived in Florence in the second half of the 17th century. He was an expert on sharks who had the misfortune to fall out with the Medici Duke, who imprisoned him.