Help Save the Living Dock!
The world famous Living Dock is no longer living after being battered by Hurricane Hermine and a powerful tornado following in her wake.
The Living Dock is much more than wooden pilings and a place to tie up boats. It’s a learning platform for thousands of school children, marine biology and aquaculture students. It’s a hotspot of medical and scientific research and a place where marine specimens used extensively in teaching and research flourish.
Made famous by Jack Rudloe’s 1984 book of the same name, The Living Dock is home to a vast number of sea creatures flourishing on its pilings. It’s where a new species of fiddler crab was discovered in the 1970’s and many a rehabbed sea turtles released over the last fifty years.
“Without the Living Dock, students will not get to see the diversity of life on field trips,” Jack Rudloe said. “Researchers won’t have specimens to study in their zoology classes. Biomedical institutions won’t have access to marine life in their quest for the next cancer cure,” Rudloe said.
Gulf Specimen Marine Lab and Aquarium is a 501(c)(3) corporation. Their mission is educating the public, and particularly, school children, about marine life and the value of the fragile ecosystems supporting them.
For more information, please contact Jack Rudloe (850-445-6786). To help rebuild The Living Dock, please contribute to Gulf Specimen’s Tilt fundraising campaign. http://tinyurl.com/LivingDock