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Otto Rutten I grew up on the coast of North Carolina in the Wilmington/Wrightsville Beach area. Family outings to the beach occurred every day during the summer and instilled in me a love of the ocean. I spent my youth surfing and sailing. Between classes in Marine Biology and Oceanography during high school and watching Cousteau on TV, I realized I wanted to become a marine biologist. If you asked me then what I wanted to be, I always said I wanted to be a marine biologist and work in the Florida Keys! While attending college I took a SCUBA diving certification course and I was hooked. I graduated from Cape Fear Community College with a degree in Marine Technology in 1984 and went to work for the North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries. While working there for seven years I worked on a variety of projects including many fish tagging programs, regulating the inshore shrimp fishery, the juvenile fish sampling program, and the artificial reef program. I also found time to further my education at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. I attended UNCW part time and completed my BS in Marine Biology in 1989.
Weekends were spent diving the diverse hard bottom ledges of offshore
North Carolina. In 1990 I started graduate school part time at UNCW. While
in graduate school I began helping several of the professors at UNCW with
research through the National Undersea Research Center (NURC). For me
it was fun to help out diving in North Carolina and the Florida Keys.
This association grew into a job in 1994 when I started working for NURC
in the Key Largo office as the assistant Science Director. Gradually I
came to be in charge of the Dayboat program here in Key Largo. NURC provides
logistical support to scientists from all over the country for a variety
of marine research projects here in the Keys. Along the way I completed
my Masters in Marine Biology in 1998. Having conducted fish censuses in
North Carolina, Bonaire, and the Keys made me a good candidate to be a
rebreather diver doing fish censuses on this mission.
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