When Chris Taylor presses play, footage of blue wrasse and greater amberjack fills the screen. The fish whirl and spin against a vivid backdrop of corals, sponges, and algae. When Taylor, an ecologist at NOAA's National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science in Beaufort, North Carolina, asks visitors to the Centers where they think the video was taken, he’s not surprised to hear the Florida Keys or the Caribbean. But the guesses are invariably wrong.

“These highly structured reefs are right off our coast,” Taylor says. “There are all of these brightly colored fishes that defy expectations.”

A new study in Nature Communications Biology by Taylor and Avery Paxton, a marine ecologist who divides her time between NOAA and the