Vero Beach Magazine - August 2019

It was the phone call I’d been waiting for: “Meet me at my house and we can fish for pompano from South Beach.”

“I started coming up to Vero Beach to help a longtime friend who was renovating a property he inherited from his parents, and I remember thinking this is a really nice place. There was a wonderful museum, theater and not a lot of traffic. It was charming.”

Lakela’s mint is a severely endangered aromatic shrub whose only known habitat is a strip of land about 3 miles long and less than half a mile wide in northern St. Lucie and southern Indian River counties.

“We found the plan, the architecture — really the whole thing — intriguing, but this was long before we were even thinking of buying a house in Florida,” Lisa Segalas shares. “However, what we saw in the pictures sent to us stuck in our minds for a couple of decades.”

On a sunlit day on the Indian River Lagoon, scientists and students from the University of Central Florida’s Marine Turtle Research Group, working along with the Sea Turtle Conservancy, spend some time in field research. For them, the expedition is one day’s work in the midst of ongoing, long-term projects.