Mike Kiniry

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.

Dr. Aysegul Timur officially took the reins in her new role as president of Florida Gulf Coast University on July 1, 2023. Prior to serving as president she was Assistant Vice President of Strategic Initiatives, Strategy and Program Innovation. Overall, she’s been a part of the FGCU community since 2019. Dr. Timur is the FGCU’s fifth president, and she is the university’s first female president since its founding in 1997. We sit down with her as she approaches her first year as president to get an update on how things are going so far.

Governor Ron DeSantis signed legislation last week that prohibits the manufacture for sale or distribution, or selling of, cultivated or so-called or “lab-grown” meat in Florida. Now that it’s law, SB 1084 makes it a second-degree misdemeanor to sell or manufacture cultivated meat in the state. While the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) approved lab-grown meat cultivation in June of last year, it’s far from hitting the grocery store shelves or restaurant plates. To get some context on this new food science industry, and why Florida is already banning it, we talk with Dr. Jennifer Martin, she’s an meat science and safety expert at Colorado State University.

The Gulf Coast Citrus Growers Association, which represented growers in Charlotte, Collier, Glades, Hendry and Lee counties, announced it was closing down last month. It’s another sign of the decline of Florida’s citrus industry, which once produced about 80% of the nation’s citrus, but right now produces less than 17%. For context, in 2003–2004, the state's growers had a record crop of more than 240 million 90-pound boxes of oranges. Based on the latest forecast, they'll produce about 18 million boxes this season. We discuss what the Gulf Coast Citrus Growers Association was, and to try and look into the future of Florida’s citrus industry.

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.

When we do something — when we think we’ve made a decision about how to act or behave — are we always consciously aware of why we made that particular decision? That is just one part of the field of research our guest today has spent the past three decades investigating. Dr. Sandra Schneider is a Professor in Cognition, Neuroscience, and Social Psychology in the Department of Psychology at the University of South Florida in Tampa. And she founded the USF Judgment and Decision Making Lab in the early 90s.

Carrie Sun spent several years at an extremely successful hedge fund, then wrote a memoir about it. Hear her discuss Private Equity.

A Lee County Mosquito Control helicopter treats mosquitoes in the county recently.

When Dr. Nadine "Deanie" Singh founded Premier Mobil Health Services in 2018 as a mobile clinic operating out of an RV she bought with her own money on eBay. They serve uninsured and underinsured children, families and individuals at multiple locations across Lee County, as well as at a walk-in, bricks-and-mortar clinic in Fort Myers. Dr. Singh recently traveled to Boston to attend an executive education course for nonprofits at the Harvard Business School — which was supported by a scholarship from the Harvard Club of Naples — so we brought her into the studio to talk about her path that led to founding Premier Mobile Health Services, the work they do, and what she took away from her trip to Boston.