The Marine Laboratory is a satellite campus of Duke University. Nicholas School of the Environment, located on the coast of North Carolina near Cape Lookout and 180 miles from the main campus. Its mission is research and education in coastal oceanography, ecology and policy. Its serves researchers, educators and students from Duke University and from many North American overseas institutions. Many of these user institutions have formed formal consortia with Duke University to advance common goals, e.g., the Marine Science Education Consortium (MESU), the Duke/University of North Carolina Oceanographic Consortium (D/UNCOC) and the NOAA Cooperative Institute of Fisheries Oceanography (CIFO). As a coastal field station serving a diverse clientele, the DUML has the expectation and obligation to provide its users with animal care facilities for observational and experimental studies. These facilities must: 1) comply with the ever more rigorous USDA Animal Welfare Act and DHHS policies related to the care and use of laboratory animals. 2) provide the highest quality sea water for the maintenance of marine biota, and provide sea water variously processed for research, e.g., ambient, filtered, mixed salinity, heated and chilled. To meet its obligation, the Marine Laboratory will repair, renovate and modernize its existing running sea water and animal care infrastructure to the functional status of a living resources care system. Repair, renovation and modernization will include the following five elements: 1) four new 25m3 headboxes to gravity feed particle and gas equilibrated sea water to eight receiving stations in two separate systems, 2) a covering structure for a 1902 outdoor tank farm, 3) provision of fast sand filtered and cartridge filtered sea water to two receiving stations, 4) provision of chilled and heated sea water on a limited basis to one receiving station, and 5) renovation of all animal care laboratories to comply with American Association for Accreditation of Laboratory Animal Care (AAALAC) guidelines, both for vertebrate animals.
