Southeast Coastal Ocean Report 45 Section 5.    Southeast Coastal Ocean Regional "News"   This section is intended to provide brief reports on SE Coastal Ocean programs and events that were not included in the main body of the Southeast Coastal Ocean Report.   The following item from the Florida Keys Marine Sanctuary provides an example of what is intended to be an expanded "news" section in future reports.    Some Coral Reef News Contributed by Brian Keller (Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, NOAA) In the summer of 2004, a team of researchers led by Jerry Ault (Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, University of Miami) surveyed reef fish populations in an area covering nearly 450 square nautical miles in the Tortugas Ecological Reserve- North (Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary), the adjacent section of the Tortugas Bank that remains open to commercial and recreational fishing, and in Dry Tortugas National Park, where commercial fishing has been banned since 1960. The Tortugas Ecological Reserve, which covers over 150 square nautical miles, is the largest “no-take” marine zone in U.S. waters. In addition to RSMAS/UM, the team included scientists from NOAA/NMFS, National Park Service, Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, and the UNC-Wilmington/National Undersea Research Center. They mapped nine types of benthic habitats and recorded the abundance and size of nearly 300 fish species. Results of the survey showed that pinnacle and reef terrace habitats had the highest diversity of fish species and that the Tortugas reserve and park had higher fish diversities than the fished section of the Tortugas Bank. The survey recorded greater abundances of red and black grouper than had been counted in 1999 and 2000, prior to implementation of the ecological reserve in 2001; black grouper abundance had increased four-to-five- fold over previous surveys in the same areas. The marine protected areas should not get sole credit for this upsurge in black grouper populations since there was also an increase in the legal-catch size in 1999. Ault concluded that “the system is moving in the right direction,” given these increases in diversity and abundance of reef fishes. Increases in heavily exploited reef fishes and spiny lobster have also been measured in the rest of the network of fully protected marine zones in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, implemented in 1997.