Gulf Specimen Marine Laboratory in Wakulla County, Florida

Photograph: Gulf Specimen Marine Laboratory and Aquarium.jpg by The Bushranger · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Restored from the credited Wikimedia Commons file, normalized to the consistent attraction-card frame and converted to WebP by 1stFlorida.com. Portrait originals retain their complete composition over a softly blurred extension of the same photograph.

Wakulla County attraction

Gulf Specimen Marine Laboratory

Wakulla County · Panhandle & Emerald Coast

A working marine laboratory in Panacea that opened its tanks to the public in 1990.

ABOUT THIS PLACE

Jack Rudloe, a writer and naturalist, and Anne Rudloe, a marine biologist, started it in 1963 as a company supplying live marine specimens to scientists. It became a not-for-profit organization in 1980, and their son Cypress Rudloe has been executive director since 2010. The lab still ships animals to researchers around the world, including to NASA, and its staff have published more than forty peer-reviewed papers on horseshoe crabs, sea turtles and other subjects. About twelve thousand children a year come through in some four hundred school groups, and a traveling program called the Sea Mobile goes out to groups that cannot get here. The public aquarium draws more than twenty thousand visitors a year. The touch tanks are the heart of it, several of them at different sizes, where a visitor picks up what is in the water instead of looking at it through glass. The lab is one of twenty-three permitted sea turtle rehabilitation centers in Florida and the northernmost of them, doing rescue, treatment and surgery

GETTING THERE

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