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Hours: Monday - Friday 9 AM to 5 PM • Saturday 10 AM to 4 PM+ • Sunday 12 Noon to 4 PM+
Aquarium is closed to the public on Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's Day
Admission: $7.50 for adults age 12+ • $6.00 Seniors (65 & older) • $5.00 children 3 - 11 yrs. • No charge for members & children under 3
Directions to Gulf Specimen Marine Lab
Watch our videos:
Watch All 17 of Our Videos • Visit Gulf Specimen Marine Lab • Where The Sea Reveals Its Secrets • All About Wakulla County, Florida
In recent years our facility has served as an educational exhibit for
increasing numbers of schools in the Florida panhandle. It is now
open to the public, enabling people to see many local marine animals
for the first time.
Most of us have never seen what lives in a sea grass meadow or on a limestone outcrop - the tiny green shrimp and scarlet sponges, the crystal and glittering comb jellyfish. The very existence of most of these thousands of different life forms is unknown to all but a few
scientists. Or if we do see a picture of one of them, its bizarre
body form makes it hard to understand and relate to it. As they
slowly fade away due to our carelessness, it pretty much goes
unnoticed.
Click on Image to Enlarge
At Gulf Specimen Marine Laboratory in Panacea, you begin to get a better sense of what's really there. On a quiet back street between the highway and the bay. We house a collection of sea water tanks and aquariums. Water bubbles and flows in a swirl that sustains unique collections of the bizarre and the beautiful. Unlike most big public aquariums that emphasize porpoises and big fishes, we focus on seahorses and hermit crabs, emerald eyed spiny box fish, electric rays and red and white spotted calico crabs - all the endless living treasure of north Florida's still shining coast.
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Before eating a fresh seafood dinner at the coast, we thought people would enjoy meeting some of the other residents of the coast, have a good time and make a new connection with the planet while keeping their feet dry.
Seahorses hide in the seaweed, their black and bronze heads dusted with gold flecks. Starfish glide effortlessly across the sand and sometimes an octopus will come out of its burrow. Red hermit crabs with bright blue eyes carry waving sea anemones on their shells. Together with animals that look like plants and plants unlike any on land, they challenge our concepts of what it means to be an animal, of what it means to be alive.
The people looking at them are delighted to finally see a live seahorse or to find out what a shrimp actually is before it ends up on a dinner plate or better yet to learn what that funny looking blob on the beach that they have wondered about for years really is in our aquariums. Water tables and holding tanks range from 10,000 gallons, the largest, to 3,000 gallons and many touch tanks that are 500 gallons and under.
All together over 30,000 gallons of sea water is contained in a large
number of aquariums and special touch tanks.
At any given time, between one and two hundred species are present. Invertebrates are our specialty. They make up the overwhelming majority of life in the ocean, and you'll be able to see a wide array of sponges, anemones, starfish, sea cucumbers, crabs, lobsters and tunicates. There are also fish-a-plenty: small sharks, skates, sting rays, electric ray, moray eels, and black sea bass. Often we have sea turtles that are being held for rehabilitation. Unlike the large public aquariums, these are not static exhibits. Shrimpers, crabbers, gill-net fishermen, and our own collecting staff bring in a constant flow of new creatures.
Visitors can see and handle life forms that they have never before encountered, such as sea anemones, urchins, octopuses, shrimp and estuarine fish. We invite you to pick up and touch all the starfish, sea pansies, sand dollars, whelks, clams, etc. that are in the shallow trays and tanks, bearing in mind that crabs can pinch.
The touch tanks, developed by Gulf Specimen Marine Laboratories, present a unique opportunity to pick up and handle harmless animals (or ones with claws if you're brave). You can watch living creatures dig into the sand and disappear just as they do in nature.
Children must be supervised. The big concrete tanks are off limits to touching. Feel free to look into the concrete tanks at the swarms of trigger fish, black sea bass, drum, sheepshead, spiny boxfish, and other species, but do not put your finger in. Some are aggressive, associate fingers with food and have sharp teeth.
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