Biscayne National Park Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
50 free Biscayne National Park trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Biscayne National Park trivia quiz covers the watery park just south of Miami, where 95 percent of the acreage is Biscayne Bay and the northern end of the Florida Reef. Questions range across the four ecosystems (mangrove shoreline, bay, coral limestone keys and offshore reef), the wildlife (manatees, American crocodiles, sea turtles, Schaus' swallowtail, the elkhorn and staghorn corals) and the geology of the keys. The human story is stranger than most parks: the Tequesta, 44 documented shipwrecks and the only underwater archaeological trail in the park system, the Jones family lime plantations, the Cocolobo Cay Club and its four presidential guests, Bebe Rebozo's parking ticket that got a Park Service director fired, CIA training camps for the Bay of Pigs, Stiltsville's shacks on the flats, Mark Honeywell's ornamental lighthouse, the paper city of Islandia and the six-lane 'Spite Highway' bulldozed down Elliott Key to sabotage the monument. Questions run from easy to expert with the difficulty shown on each one. Every answer was checked against a reference page and each question carries its citation. If you enjoy this one, try our Everglades and US National Parks quizzes next.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Biscayne National Park is in which US state?
Florida
Florida. The park, at the top of the Keys, was created in 1968 after plans to link its wild islands by causeway and line them with hotels set off a conservation backlash.
Q 02Roughly what share of Biscayne National Park, mostly bay and ocean, is dry land?
About 5 percent
About 5 percent. The park was drawn to protect a bay and the sea beyond its islands, so the islands and the mainland fringe come to only some 9,000 of its 173,000 acres.
Q 03What did Israel Jones, a farmer on Biscayne's Porgy Key, name the elder brother of his son Sir Lancelot?
King Arthur
King Arthur. King Arthur Lafayette Jones was born in 1897 and Sir Lancelot Garfield Jones the next year; the brothers ran the family groves, then spent decades as fishing guides to the rich and powerful.
Q 04Whose Overseas Railroad, finished in 1912, bypassed Biscayne's keys and left them without a road or rail link?
Henry Flagler
Henry Flagler. His line left the mainland south of Elliott Key, so the islands above it stayed roadless and wild while the rest of the chain opened up to tourists.
Q 05Which venomous Indo-Pacific fish, an invader with few natural predators, has spread through Biscayne's waters since about 2010?
Lionfish
Lionfish. A popular story blames home aquariums smashed by a 1992 hurricane, but one was caught off the coast as early as 1985; pets dumped by their owners are the likelier origin.
Q 06Besides farming and salvaging wrecks, what did Elliott Key's pioneers gather from Biscayne Bay's shallows to sell?
Sponges
Sponges. Lancelot Jones, the last of the old settlers, was still gathering and selling them in the 1980s, and gave visiting schoolchildren sponge talks into his nineties.
Q 07Which people, who lived by fishing rather than farming, held the shores of Biscayne Bay when Spanish explorers arrived?
The Tequesta
The Tequesta. The sea fed them so well that they never took up farming, but diseases brought by Europeans had all but wiped them out by the mid-1700s, before the Seminole moved in.
Q 08The name Biscayne is often traced to a shipwrecked sailor from which region of Spain?
The Basque Country
The Basque Country. Biscay is a Basque province, and an early Spanish account tells of a castaway from there, 'the Viscayno', who lived on this coast; a rival theory credits the Bay of Biscay itself.
Q 09Which port grew rich on wrecks from reefs like Biscayne's?
Key West
Key West. Until an 1825 law made wreckers land their salvage at a US port, much of it had been carried abroad for sale; the crews then settled in the Keys, and salvage made the town rich.
Q 10Which Royal Navy warship, lost in the park in 1748, gave its name to the rocks where Biscayne's offshore lighthouse stands?
HMS Fowey
HMS Fowey. The rocks carry its name, yet the wreck that archaeologists identified as the ship lies some way to the south, in Legare Anchorage.
Q 11What kind of trail is Biscayne National Park's Maritime Heritage Trail?
An underwater shipwreck trail
An underwater shipwreck trail. Snorkelers and divers follow it between six wrecks; one, a steamer, ran aground in 1878 a few hundred yards from the men building the lighthouse meant to warn ships away.
Q 12Two legendary pirates said to have hidden out on Biscayne's Elliott Key shared which name?
Black Caesar
Black Caesar. Both are said to have slipped away from pursuers through the creek south of Elliott Key that still carries the name, though no record from their day confirms the tales.
Q 13Which future Confederate general surveyed Biscayne Bay in 1849 to judge where forts might be built?
Q 21During Prohibition, rumrunners hid among Biscayne's keys while waiting to land liquor brought from which nearby islands?
The Bahamas
The Bahamas. A fast boat could cross from Bimini in a few hours, so smugglers waited among the keys and their mangrove creeks for a clear run to the mainland.
Q 22What did Elliott Key's landowners name the city they incorporated around 1960 to push for development in Biscayne Bay?
Islandia
Islandia. The paper city never had more than a handful of residents, most of them in later years park staff, and the county finally abolished it in 2012.
Q 23How did developers try to spoil Biscayne's Elliott Key as a site for a national monument?
Bulldozed a road down its middle
Robert E. Lee
Robert E. Lee. Then an Army engineer, he toured the coast on the orders of General Joseph Totten, the chief of engineers whose name one of the park's keys still bears.
Q 14Which former US vice president, beaten by Lincoln in 1860, spent two nights in Biscayne Bay while fleeing to Cuba in 1865?
John C. Breckinridge
John C. Breckinridge. Buchanan's vice president, by 1865 the Confederate secretary of war, slipped down the coast in a small boat with a handful of companions and reached Cuba four days later.
Q 15Israel Lafayette Jones, a Black farmer who settled in Biscayne's southern islands in 1897, became a leading grower of which crops?
Key limes and pineapples
Key limes and pineapples. He paid $300 for his first island, cleared it by hand, and later sold land he had bought for a dollar an acre for $250,000.
Q 16What did Lancelot Jones keep when he sold his Biscayne islands to the Park Service?
A life estate on three acres
A life estate on three acres. The first islander to sell, he took about a third of what developers might have paid rather than see the keys built over, and lived on there until a 1992 hurricane.
Q 17Which developer built the Cocolobo Cay Club, a retreat for the rich on Biscayne's Adams Key?
Carl G. Fisher
Carl G. Fisher. The promoter who turned a mangrove sandbar into Miami Beach took tycoons and politicians fishing from the club, until the 1929 crash wiped out his fortune.
Q 18Which former president fished Biscayne's waters with the Jones brothers?
Herbert Hoover
Herbert Hoover. By Lancelot Jones's account he came to fish between November and April for over seven years in the 1940s; the brothers also guided several senators who later reached the White House.
Q 19Nixon fired Park Service chief George Hartzog in 1972 after his friend Bebe Rebozo clashed with Biscayne staff over what?
Docking his boat
Docking his boat. Accounts differ on whether rangers ticketed him or cancelled his permit to tie up at a Park Service dock; Nixon replaced Hartzog with the aide who had run his travel arrangements.
Q 20Which agency ran secret commando training and infiltration missions from Biscayne's Elliott Key in the early 1960s?
The CIA
The CIA. It trained Cuban exiles there in the Bay of Pigs era, using a hidden dock and a safe house, and as late as 1988 exiles were arrested staging a mock invasion on the key.
Bulldozed a road down its middle. The six-lane swath earned the name Spite Highway, but the forest has closed back over it, and today it is the island's main hiking trail.
Q 24What was to be built at Seadade, the seaport a shipping billionaire planned for Biscayne Bay?
An oil refinery
An oil refinery. Its tankers would have needed a deep channel dredged across the shallow bay and cut through the reef, and the fight to stop it grew into the campaign for a national park.
Q 25Which president signed the law creating Biscayne National Monument in October 1968?
Lyndon B. Johnson
Lyndon B. Johnson. Congress had been won over by a lobbying campaign that a vacuum-cleaner heir paid for, and Johnson signed the bill in his final months in office.
Q 26Which animal dug up nearly every sea turtle nest on Biscayne's keys in bad years, before rangers began screening them?
Raccoons
Raccoons. Rangers now walk the beaches early each morning to find fresh nests before the raccoons do, and lay mesh over them that is lifted in time for the hatchlings to leave.
Q 27Biscayne Bay was originally meant to be part of which other national park?
Everglades
Everglades. Ernest Coe's first plan for that park took in the bay, its keys and Key Largo, but they were cut to win agreement on the smaller park that opened in 1947.
Q 28Which marine mammal is seen in Biscayne Bay's sheltered waters most often in the colder months?
Manatee
Manatee. Unable to stand cold water, manatees move into warm, sheltered spots before winter's coldest months, and are sometimes seen grazing right beside the park's visitor center.
Q 29Which Spanish explorer sailed past Biscayne Bay in 1513 and named the keys Los Mártires, 'the Martyrs'?
Juan Ponce de León
Juan Ponce de León. Seen from the sea, the chain of low rocky islets is said to have looked to him like men in torment, so he named it for the martyrs.
Q 30Which 1992 hurricane crossed Biscayne National Park, wrecking most of Stiltsville and driving Lancelot Jones off Porgy Key?
Andrew
Andrew. Its eye passed directly over the park; Jones, aged 93 and used to riding out storms at home, was lifted off just before it struck and never moved back.