Search results for

David Rahahę·tih Webb was born in Southwest Florida and grew up on Sanibel Island, which puts him in a relatively small group of people compared to this area’s current population. But, his family roots go back for generations and their connections to life on Sanibel are both broad and deep. His ‘pioneer’ side goes back eight generations on Sanibel and his Seminole side goes back past recorded history. His direct ancestors were Spanish Seminole members of the Sanibel Island Rancho. Ranchos were small, tight-knit communities settled by Europeans centuries ago. They were essentially fishing camps with as many as 600 residents, most of which were Seminole. And, David is a 4th generation Ding Darling employee — his great grandfather was the first refuge employee; the admin building was dedicated to his grandmother, who worked there for 33 years; his mother worked there when she was pregnant with him and he worked there while serving in AmeriCorps in the mid 1990s.

In January of 1742, while sailing around waters south of Florida in search of Spanish vessels to "sink, burn or destroy" the British Royal Navy’s HMS Tyger ran aground at Garden Key in what’s now Dry Tortugas National Park. What unfolded after the Tyger ran aground at Garden Key is a fascinating narrative that is compiled in a new paper published in the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology titled “Hunting HMS Tyger, 1742: Identifying a Ship-of-the-Line in Dry Tortugas National Park” co-authored by Andrew Van Slyke & Joshua Marano. To get a sense of the Tyger and its crew's story, and the archeological efforts that go into this kind of identification, we talk with the team lead for the HMS Tyger identification effort.

For large mammals like the Florida panther and Florida black bear, large tracts of contiguous land are crucial to their ability to live and thrive. To that end, in 2021 the Florida legislature passed — with bipartisan support — the Florida Wildlife Corridor Act, and Governor Ron DeSantis signed it into law. The Act outlines about 18-million acres of land in the state that comprise a corridor of sorts stretching from the Everglades to the panhandle that would support animals like the Florida panther. About 10-million of those acres are already preserved, so the goal is to encourage the owners of the remaining 8-million acres to either sell their land to the state or an organization that would protect it, or get a conservation easement that would allow them to continue farming or ranching operations, but ensure the land isn’t developed. We talk with investigative journalist, Jimmy Tobias, to try to understand the Florida Wildlife Corridor Act better.

Right now our public debt is about 97% of our GDP. The last time we had a ratio that high was around World War II. A key number that economists are focused on right now is how much interest the U.S. Government is paying to manage the national debt. Right now, we’re paying almost $1 trillion dollars per year in interest. That is more than we spend on the military budget and almost as much as we spend on healthcare, including Medicare and Medicaid, every year. So, in order to get an overview of how the U.S. national debt works, how the government borrows money to service the debt or even pay it back, how we’ve found ourselves in a place with such a high debt to GDPT ratio, and how concerned we all should be, we talk with the author of a recent piece in The Journalist’s Resource titled “The national debt: How and why the US government borrows money.”

In January of 1742, while sailing around waters south of Florida in search of Spanish vessels to "sink, burn or destroy" the British Royal Navy’s HMS Tyger ran aground at Garden Key in what’s now Dry Tortugas National Park. What unfolded after the Tyger ran aground at Garden Key is a fascinating narrative that is compiled in a new paper published in the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology titled “Hunting HMS Tyger, 1742: Identifying a Ship-of-the-Line in Dry Tortugas National Park” co-authored by Andrew Van Slyke & Joshua Marano. To get a sense of the Tyger and its crew's story, and the archeological efforts that go into this kind of identification, we talk with the team lead for the HMS Tyger identification effort.

A project for the milling and resurfacing of Periwinkle Way on Sanibel Island is set to start Sept. 15 and run about four months.The stretch of Periwinkle included in the project is from 500 feet west of Casa Ybel Road to approximately one-third of a mile east of Donax Street.

When author and educator Carole Burns’ father Frank passed away earlier this year she found a small, simple notebook amongst his things that he’d carried with him during his time as a volunteer at the slough, where he’d led tours since 2001. She wrote an essay about finding that notebook and sent it our way, so we thought it would be a good reason to have a conversation about what the slough meant to her father, and what finding that notebook meant to her — and what the Six Mile Cypress Slough Preserve has meant, and means, to so many of the people who’ve visited it over the past nearly half-century.

The seventeenth Florida panther death was reported Friday by the Florida Wildlife Commission. It was the sixteenth big cat death by vehicle impact in 2025.

December 2025 passenger numbers were down by slightly less than 20,000 at Southwest Florida International Airport, but that didn’t stop the year from being a record breaker for such traffic.

Information from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ monthly jobs report released Wednesday shows that for all of 2024, total nonfarm jobs in the Cape Coral-Fort Myers metro area increased by 1.9 percent or 5,900 jobs.The Cape Coral-Fort Myers metro area led other metro areas in the southwest Florida area in annual job growth over that time. The Cape Coral-Fort Myers numbers compare to an increase of 1.4 percent in the nation as a whole and 1.5 percent in the state of Florida.