Exotic Pet Amnesty Day set for Oct. 3 in Fort Walton Beach
Do you have any exotic pets you can no longer care for? Would you like the opportunity to surrender those pets without any penalties or fines? Then join the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) and Gulfarium Marine Adventure Park for an Exotic Pet...
National Estuaries Week! – What We Can Do
In the last edition in this series we discussed some of the issues and problems our estuaries are facing. For the final edition for National Estuaries Week we want to leave you with some ideas on you can help improve things. The first issue we dealt with was...
National Estuaries Week! – Problems in Our Bays
I don’t want this to sound like a “Debbie Downer”… but there are problems with our estuaries and panhandle residents should be aware of them. There are things you can do to correct them – which we will discuss in the final issues of this series – but you need to...
National Estuaries Week! – Sea Level Rise and Climate Change
As we come towards the end of National Estuaries Week we will now look at some issues our estuaries are facing. Sea level rise is one that generates a variety of responses from the public. For some it is of concern, something we need to be planning for and need to...
National Estuaries Week! – Our Ports
Many may not know that one of the reasons the Spanish selected Pensacola as the site of for their first settlement in the Gulf of Mexico was the deep water port. As mentioned in the first issue in this series, the estuaries of the Gulf of Mexico are drowned river...
Panhandle Outdoors LIVE – Aucilla River Sinks Hike
A portion of the Aucilla River flows through a landscape of dramatic and unusual geologic formations. Join us for this tour to see an amazing sequence of sinks and river rises, created as the river alternately disappears into the underlying karst and resurfaces....
National Estuaries Week! – Ecotourism
A couple of years a few agencies in south Alabama put together something they called the Alabama Birding Trail. It was a relatively simple idea really – they developed a brochure that marked different locations where visitors could enjoy birding in the two county...
National Estuaries Week! – Seafood
Yea, seafood… who doesn’t like seafood… actually, based on a small scale survey I conducted with marine science students over the last 28 years I have found a slight increase in the number of those who do not. Curious about this, I followed up by asking whether their...
National Estuaries Week! – What is an Estuary?
Welcome to National Estuaries Week! Each year in the fall NOAA and other agencies try to educate residents about estuaries. The vast majority of humans on our planet live on, or near, an estuary – many not realizing the importance those bodies of water have on our...
Record Year for NOAA Shark Survey in North Carolina
Most of us remember the string of shark attacks that occurred this past summer in North Carolina; as a matter of fact, according to the International Shark Attack File, it was a record year for that region. Since 2001 there have been 34 shark attacks in North...