The Florida Aquarium has opened its new state-of-the-art Coral Conservation and Research Center in Apollo Beach.
Dedicated to preserving, breeding and rearing corals at risk of extinction in the wild, the expanded facility is nearly double the size of the aquarium‘s former centre.
“Florida’s coral reefs are essential to our health, our economy and marine wildlife and over the past several decades, they have been in decline,” said Roger Germann, president and CEO of the Florida Aquarium.
“With this state-of-the-art facility, we are significantly increasing our restoration impact and providing hope for recreating a thriving reef.”
The Florida Aquarium is “bolstering our efforts to address the urgent threats facing our oceans’ ecosystems and rapidly declining coral populations”, Germann added.
The facility first opened on the aquarium’s Apollo Beach campus in 2016. It is home to the world’s largest living collection of Atlantic pillar corals, a species rapidly declining in the wild.
“Here, we will be able to expand our work to protect and reproduce a greater diversity of corals and produce thousands more coral offspring each year,” said Keri O’Neil, the aquarium’s senior scientist and director of the coral conservation programme.
She added, “Our ability to not only protect the corals in our care, but also to spawn them and rear thousands of babies with new and unique genetic combinations, is more important than ever given the threats these animals are facing in the wild.”
Coral conservation programme
The aquarium’s coral conservation programme made history by spawning Atlantic pillar coral in a lab setting for the first time. It was also the world’s first initiative to reproduce ridged cactus coral in human care.
It is estimated that Florida’s coral reefs have an $8 billion value and support more than 70,000 jobs.
In more news, the Florida Aquarium has launched an innovative initiative with Tampa General Hospital to give paediatric patients a tour of the aquarium using a rolling robot.
Images courtesy of the Florida Aquarium
