The American Pickers TV Show is looking for leads and would love to explore your hidden treasure. If you or someone you know has a large, private collection or accumulation of antiques that the pickers can spend the better part of the day looking through, why not contact them? It’s worth a shot. American Pickers currently does not pick stores, flea markets, malls, auction businesses, museums or anything open to the public. If interested, send your name, phone number, location and description of the collection with photos to: americanpickers@cineflix.com or call (646) 493-2184. They can be reached on facebook, @GotAPick.

According to the last U.S. Census Bureau statistics, the Lee County portion of Gasparilla Island has 1,130 homestead-exempt people living here, which is a 41.8 percent decrease since 2020. The same area recorded 1,720 people in 2010, 1,500 in 2000 and 777 in 1990. If you go back to the 1980 figures above, that means 1980 was the last year for an increase in population that the Lee County portion of the island has had.

Many people think shells are like rocks, but in fact a shell is created by an animal called a mollusk. As the mollusk grows, so does the shell. Mollusks can be herbivores, carnivores or omnivores, but all need clean water habitats to survive. Shells mean many different things to many different people. Some people collect shells for crafts, some search for very specific shells for a collection, while others simply walk the beaches to observe and hear the sound of the shells amid their feet. 

Adult manatees are typically 9- to 10-feet long from snout to tail and weigh around 1,000 pounds. Manatees have two forelimb flippers that they use for steering movements and to hold vegetation while eating. A large, round, flattened paddle-shaped tail is used for swimming. They are quite agile, and able to swim upside down, roll or move vertically in the water. They frequent back bay estuaries and shallow coastal zones and spend up to eight hours a day grazing on seagrasses. This includes the back bay waters of Cayo Costa and Gasparilla Islands as well as our beaches, where in the summertime, mating herds have been observed.