Florida State University : Research in Review

A Florida Love Story

A transplant from Brooklyn who grew up in Lanark Village—a nearby retirement community—Jack settled in Panacea in 1962 as a teenager. Fresh out of FSU, where, according to family lore, Jack's academic career fizzled after about three months, he was eking out a living shrimping—a job that allowed him to hang around and keep species the local fishermen considered trash.

At first, the little marine lab subsisted on the proverbial shoestring-actually on a lot less the way Anne Rudloe tells it. "Jack owned a used station wagon, a bucket and a dog," she says. "He lived on the property in a house trailer with his mom."

The couple met in 1971 by chance at a gas station in Panacea. In truth, the meeting was chance laced with a lucky thread of connection. As an undergraduate studying biology at Mary Washington College in Virginia, Anne remembers seeing deliveries of scallop specimens from a place in Florida she'd never heard of.

"We used to get these boxes up there that said 'Gulf Specimen' and 'Panacea, Florida' and there was always this joke about 'what could a town like Panacea possibly be like?'"

The day Anne stopped in Panacea to gas up, she was actually finishing a course at the U.S. Naval base in Panama City where she was studying underwater research and diving techniques for her master's in oceanography.

"We were all on the Navy base and we all wore jumpsuits with these big arm patches that said: 'Scientists in the Sea,'" Anne remembers. "When the class finished I was coming down to FSU's marine lab one day and I pulled into the gas station, wearing my little zoot suit and you know, I'm not the most feminine looking person. Jack sees me and says: 'Is that a man or a woman?' So he came over and we started talking."

Anne told Jack she had once been a customer of the lab and that she was working on a thesis that involved collecting animals that live in sea grass beds.

"I had to identify everything, which is one of the absurdities of graduate students because you are expected to do taxonomy on everything that's in a habitat," she recalls. "I was having a terrible time with the tunicates—I couldn't identify them. Jack said 'I've got tunicates.' I said: 'You know what they are?'

"It wasn't 'come see my etchings,' it was 'come see my tunicates.' That's when I met him. I've been here ever since."

The Rudloes live down the street from the lab in a stilt house cobbled together from a World War II barracks building they once bought for $500. Jack chronicled the house in his book, The Living Dock (2003, Great Outdoors Publishing Company).

"Everyone in town laughed at us," Jack recalls.

Inside, it's plain and unpretentious, with upholstered chairs as worn as old sweatshirts, nests that Anne likes to curl up on while she reads or pecks away on her laptop and her cat sleeps nearby. In late April, an afternoon breeze sails through the rooms and the view through old, salt-misted windows is like heaven, a Wolf Kahn painting of bay and blue sky that seems to go on forever.

Steinbeck and Specimens

Jack got his first break in the early 1960s, when an FSU biology professor asked him to send horseshoe crabs to an exhibit at the World's Fair in Seattle. He packed the creatures in sawdust—"not such a good idea," he recalls in retrospect—and shipped them airfreight across the country. Despite his distaste for formal schooling, Jack maintained a keen interest in both biology and literature.

A second—and unlikely—break came when he struck up a correspondence with author John Steinbeck, himself an amateur marine biologist, who, over a span of eight years in the 1960s, wrote long, advice-filled letters to the young marine collector. For both men, the friendship was sincere and mutual. Jack gave Steinbeck a flat rock with four sea whips he found while snorkeling. Steinbeck gave Jack the valuable, original artwork from his 1941 book, the Sea of Cortez, which the Rudloes have since loaned to FSU's Strozier Library.

Over the years, Jack continued supplying live marine animals to academic scientists, eventually growing the establishment to serve 1,300 clients annually, mostly university science departments who use the specimens for education and research. A small staff of long-time employees run the lab now, trawling for specimens in the aquarium's 26-foot customized collecting boat, the Beagle, named after Darwin's ship, and then packing specimens in clear, plastic bags of water (think high-tech versions of that goldfish won at the school fair) and shipping them around the world.

In many ways, the stories of Anne and Jack Rudloe go hand-in-hand. They are both mavericks, passionate naturalists, specimen collectors and scientists (albeit Jack's encyclopedic knowledge of local marine life was amassed from years of self-study). They've also shared a lifelong devotion to environmental activism, waging so many battles that, according to some locals, Jack likes to joke, "the streets would have been paved in gold and there would have been endless prosperity if it hadn't been for us."

Anne's career, though, has been more tightly tethered to FSU. Teaching just comes naturally to her, and transforming the lab from a marine specimen outfit into a kid-friendly, educational attraction was her idea. After earning a master's degree in oceanography in 1972—and in '78 a Ph.D. in biology—from Florida State, she began a career as an FSU adjunct professor in biological science. She's been at it almost non-stop since, sharing with students her love of Florida's coastal upland and spring ecosystems, and marine biology in general.

Her hands-on teaching techniques were inspired by an unorthodox botany class she took in graduate school that made her wonder "how stress and watching the clock in a lecture hall ever got identified as a valid educational technique in the first place."

She's taught her "experiential" classes everywhere from FSU's Panama City campus to the university's Claude Pepper Center and Center for Professional Development on the main campus in Tallahassee, as well as for the university's departments of oceanography and urban and regional planning. Her favorite classroom, though, was almost always offbeat, most notably perhaps, the aft deck of a research boat in the Gulf. It wasn't uncommon to find her with students 12 miles offshore at 3 a.m., enjoying a field trip in her popular course "Coastal Environments of the Big Bend."

"We slog through marshes, pull beach seines, snorkel in sea grass meadows, hike across barrier islands, go down the watershed of an undeveloped estuary, and discover the rare, endemic wildflowers blooming in the globally endangered longleaf pine forests that grow behind the salt marshes," she wrote in the 2002 spring issue of FSU's marine lab newsletter. "The professor of record—me—is often upstaged by the real teachers of this class-the land and sea themselves."

On a recent spring morning, Kevin O'Connell, dean of students at St. James Episcopal School in Ormond Beach, accompanied the Rudloes and his class on a trek through a nearby saltmarsh. "This is the finest marine lab I've been associated with in 20 years of education," he said. "It's very hands-on, the staff is very educated and the kids are always so engaged." O'Connell sees the lab as more than just a run-of-the-mill field trip; he sees it as a visceral learning experience kids won't soon forget.

One of the lab's most popular exhibits, "Monsters of the Deep," is the product of a specimen-collecting trip the Rudloes organized for the New York Aquarium. Although educational, it recalls the old-school roadside sightseeing spectacle that colored Florida tourism in the mid-20th century. A series of brass portholes with preserved deep-sea animals inside, the "monster" is actually a foot-long sea roach—the largest isopod (a type of crustacean) in the world: "Isopods are really roly-poly bugs," Anne explains. "Most of them aren't very big, but this species is huge."

Giant sea roaches normally live in 1,200 feet of water at the edge of the continental shelf. Anne and Jack say they were the first to bring a really big one back alive from the deep Gulf, though "since then they've become quite the thing," Anne says. "You see them all over the Internet and a lot of aquariums have them. But we had the first ones. The kids love this exhibit because it hand cranks and it's so interactive."

Naming the Beasts

As naturalists, the Rudloes solidly share a philosophy about biological research: no matter how much money is behind it, research done in a lab can never be a substitute for observation in the field. Both staunchly adhere to the old-school principles of taxonomy, the science—and sometimes art—of classifying living things.

Once the dominant tool of biologists, taxonomy as a discipline has lost much of its luster since the 1950s, when scientists began acquiring the genetic tools and skills in biochemistry to sort through life at the molecular level. As a consequence, entire fields of biological inquiry—dozens of "ologies" that focus on specific groups of plants and animals—have all but disappeared. From herpetology (the study of snakes and amphibians) to lepidopterology (the study of butterflies and moths), specialists in the nomenclature, classification and life histories of living organisms have become an endangered species of biologist.

As a stalwart defender of the taxonomic approach to studying living organisms, Anne is passionate about the subject. She believes (as does world-renowned biologist E.O. Wilson) that identifying plants and animals in a lab, without understanding how they co-exist in the wild, is pointless if the goal is to understand how environments work. "The differences among organisms are often very small. It takes an expert. Taxonomy is the key to everything in ecology," she says flatly.

Over the years, Anne and Jack have seen their skills in taxonomy pay off, and often in unexpected ways. They've been able to observe evolution at work, for example, right out their back door. They have observed first-hand the (previously discovered) mutations in closely related species living on both of Florida's coasts, giving rise to new sibling species of such organisms as toadfish and sea pansies. They've marveled at how some invertebrate species vary geographically, notably in the Panacea fiddler crab (Uca panacea) and its close cousin, the sand fiddler (Uca pugilator).

Anne has also devoted considerable research into the behavioral ecology of the horseshoe crab (Limulus polyphemus), one of the oldest marine invertebrates on the planet. By the early 1980s, she had become a recognized authority on the behavior of the crab's larval stages, and how juveniles and adults adapted them to the different environments they inhabit. Her work looked at the way tidal rhythms of activity allow these odd-looking creatures to avoid predators.

Interestingly, horseshoe crab larvae emerge from their nests in much the same way that baby sea turtles do, she notes, "digging their way to the surface at the highest full moon high tides." The hatchlings emerge at night and orient themselves by moonlight to stay at the surface as the surf sweeps them seaward. Adults later orient to the breeding beaches by the motion of wave surge, she said.

As for her most recent research, she laments the lack of a long-term trajectory, but knows this often is the life of adjunct researchers. This isn't always a bad thing career-wise, she said. "I've jumped around from horseshoe crabs to electric rays to mysid shrimp to sea turtles. In a way it's good because it's much more diverse and broad-based than if I had worked on one species my whole career."

For the past few years, she and Jack have been working on a cooperative research venture between Florida State's Coastal and Marine Laboratory and their organization. The goal is to amass an annotated checklist of the marine flora and fauna of the Northeastern Gulf of Mexico—an inventory of all that lives in the region.

The first checklist of the area was created in 1949 by the late Winston Menzel, an oceanography professor at FSU who was known for his pioneering research on crabs and mollusks. Menzel's list was last revised and updated in 1957, says Jack, who, along with Anne, contributed updates to that version over the years. It's a huge—and hugely important—project because it can provide baseline information for documenting long-term changes in the northern Gulf, where Anne says tropical species of marine fauna are becoming as common as native species.

Panacea Peace

During the first decade of her career, though, Anne struggled with the issue of whether she should stay or leave the seaside rhythms of her Panacea niche.

Though she's seemingly well adjusted, making the decision to accept college adjunct teaching—a low-paying job without health or retirement benefits—as her lot in life, didn't come easily. The dilemma haunts many academics who can't get a full-time tenure track position at the same institution where they earned their doctorate. And it sent Anne on a spiritual search that lasted years.

"You generally do not stay where you get your Ph.D.— at least not at most universities, and certainly not at FSU," says Anne, who after a lot of soul searching, ultimately decided to stay put in Panacea.

"I wanted to become a college professor. And I had all these delusions that I could stay here and overcome that. It didn't happen, so it's been a struggle personally," she says.

Her struggle eventually led her down a new path, a road to spirituality. For some years now, she's been one of the few practicing Buddhists in Wakulla County.

"The reason I got interested in Zen meditation was trying to cope with the ego disappointments of not succeeding in becoming a college professor. It's very simple. I finally realized I wasn't going to make the mountain come to Mohammed and I had to make the choice whether to stay here or whether to move and try to have a conventional career and become an academic."

These days, she's known around academia as both serious scientist and serious Buddhist, a pairing, she insists, that isn't incongruous.

"Buddhism talks about the interdependence of all beings. And evolution is a reflection of that," she says. "Buddhism extends it to the world of consciousness, but it doesn't have any dogmatic prescriptions."

The path to spirituality helped her face the truth about her own career path, one that veered off course and never quite got back on again. But Anne soon discovered it helped her in a completely unexpected way. Among those who know her—and a lot who don't—it's no secret that for the past four years she's waged a ferocious battle with colon cancer.

The story is out there on a YouTube video . Against a woodsy, breathtaking backdrop of the North Florida coast, Anne talks about the cancer and her views on life and death—a performance that's serenely eloquent yet unscripted. The diagnosis came after a routine colonoscopy revealed a tumor that she later learned had metastasized. Long trips to Tampa for second opinions at H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center followed. Months of chemotherapy made her so sick she landed in the hospital. After the cancer spread to her liver, an experimental treatment at a hospital in Thomasville has kept her alive.

Back in the 1980s, she and Jack paid $9,000 for a patch of cypress swamp that elbows St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge, 25 miles south of Tallahassee. A few years ago, they built a tiny "meditation" shed on the property. It's all wood and glass and too small even for a bathroom. The only amenities are a portable, camping toilet, a mattress and a folding canvas chair. The view is all the décor Anne needs. From the wrap-around porch it's as if a visitor has stepped into a Clyde Butcher photograph of cypress trees and black swamp water.

"I spend as much time as I can here in meditation," she says. "The traditional retreat schedule used in the Zen school that I'm part of is too strenuous for me now—so I spend a lot of time here meditating in the woods alone. It can be challenging with all the bugs we have around here at this time of year."

She worries a lot about the future of Gulf Specimen, about who will see to the logistics of an operation that requires constant attention to details—the kind that keeps the doors open—from grants to permitting to "paying the electric bill."

Their youngest son, Cypress, now 25 and a student at FSU, works at the lab full-time and is interested in mastering the enterprise's day-to-day operations. It's a glimmer of hope for Anne and Jack, who would love to know their "old-time mom-and-pop" Florida tourist aquarium has a future.

Late on a fine, Florida spring afternoon, the last of a gaggle of school children trail out of the lab compound and head for their bus. The Gulf Coast light is warm and honey-gold and natives know that it can make a person serene and content if taken in large doses. Anne helps lock up the gift shop and prepares to head down the road to the old stilt house, a place she's got no intention of leaving. She's in the moment and exactly where she wants to be.

"I made the decision to stay here because it's such a rich area biologically. I love this area. This is one of the last, great places. A person could spend a lifetime here exploring."