Research and conservation at georgia aquarium



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Coastal Georgia Manatee

Florida manatees have been documented in Cumberland Sound, GA for decades and Georgia Aquarium has teamed up with Sea to Shore Alliance and Georgia Department of Natural Resources (GDNR) to conduct the first ever health and population assessment of Georgia’s manatees. Listed as “Endangered” (IUCN) since 1967, recent estimates suggest less than 5,000 individuals remain in North America. In recent years, record levels of mortalities have been reported due to cold weather, red tide and other factors such as human activities. Georgia Aquarium and its partners are collaborating to conduct aerial surveys that document location and numbers of manatees, to place satellite telemetry tags on animals that record movement and to perform health assessments on a small subset of individuals collected for satellite tagging.



Sting Ray

Sting Ray City is a series of shallow sandbars found in the North Sound of Grand Cayman, Cayman Islands and is a well-known tourist attraction where southern stingrays are known to congregate and visitors can feed and interact with the animals. There is concern that the human interaction activity may be directly and indirectly facilitating the decline in the population of rays. This research project is funded and organized by The Guy Harvey Research Institute. The goal of this project is to measure indices of health, stress, and nutritional status from southern stingrays at Sting Ray City. The focus in 2014 was monitoring the reproductive capacity of female rays. This goal was accomplished by performing ultrasounds on all females to detect pregnancy or ovarian activity, which was in turn, correlated with blood hormone levels.


Coral

Since 2010, Georgia Aquarium has been working in partnership with the Coral Restoration Foundation (CRF) in the Upper Florida Keys to help to restore Staghorn and Elkhorn corals using ocean-based aquaculture nurseries and transplantation methodologies. CRF is a non-profit conservation organization created to develop off-shore coral nurseries and reef restoration programs for critically endangered coral reefs at local, national, and international levels.
The mission of CRF is to develop affordable, effective strategies for protecting and restoring coral reefs and to train and empower others to implement those strategies in their coastal communities. CRF has developed the largest offshore coral nursery in the United States, with more than 15,000 coral “frags” or “nubbins,” (14,000 Staghorn, 1,200 Elkhorn) and transplanted more than 3,000 corals from nursery to reef at 22 different reef areas in the Upper Florida Keys, with concentrated effort in Molasses Reef, located in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary off of Key Largo, Florida. The goal of each restoration project is to re-establish genetically diverse thickets of coral and nurture them to maturity so they can spawn and repopulate downstream reef areas. Georgia Aquarium team members make several site visits each year to work side-by-side with CRF to complete maintenance at the coral nurseries and plantings on Molasses Reef in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. The trips are made possible by a research grant Georgia Aquarium received from The UPS Foundation.
The work includes propagation and maintenance at a Staghorn and Elkhorn coral nursery located just offshore of Tavanier, Florida. Georgia Aquarium’s team has had the pleasure of planting 60 new Staghorn corals back onto a section of Molasses Reef that Georgia Aquarium is sponsoring. Three separate genotypes were planted, 20 of each, and data will be gathered through the upcoming months and years to see if one or more of the genotypes do well out on the existing reef. The team will continue photo documentation of the individual corals to help record the success and failures along the way.

Georgia Aquarium has also partnered with SECORE, one of the leading coral conservation initiatives of scientists and aquarium professionals from around the world, to restore reefs off the coast of Curaçao and educate biologists. The restoration project and the workshop both aim to better understand sexual reproduction of corals and develop new restoration strategies to help save endangered corals.


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