Coastal lagoons

• LCoastal lagoons are marine-coastal environments of great ecological and commercial value, since they have a variety of fauna, part of which can be exploited rationally, such as, for example, shrimp, mullets, and striped mullets. In Venezuela there are widely-known lagoons such as Unare, Píritu, Tacarigua, and La Restinga; the last two are national parks. The coastal lagoons are characterized for having variations in the salt contents (salinity) of their waters, since some, such as Unare and Tacarigua, have a fresh water supply, thanks to rivers, and a salt water supply due to mouths that occasionally open up to the sea.
  The La Restinga lagoon has no fresh water supply and it always has a mouth open to the sea, therefore, it is usually hypersaline. A characteristic of coastal lagoons is the presence of great extensions of mangroves and, in some cases, as this one, of seagrass meadows. In La Restinga starfish are very abundant, and among the fish, Lined Seahorses (Hippocampus erectus), which live on the roots of the mangroves, attract much attention; among the commercially important species you can find White Mullets (Mugil curema), Striped Mojarras (Eugerres plumieri), and Common Snooks (Centropomus undecimalis), among others.

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