Conservation at Home

• Recycle everything you can: newspapers, cans, glass, aluminum foil and pans, motor oil, scrap metal and plastics. Call 1-800-I-RECYCLE or visit www.earth911.org to find out how and where to recycle your trash.
• Install water-saving showerheads and/or limit your shower time. You can save anywhere from 10 to 50 gallons of water for every 10 minutes spent in the shower.
• Save electricity by turning off lights when you leave a room and radios, televisions, and computers when not in use. Replace light bulbs with energy-efficient compact fluorescent bulbs; the initial cost is higher, but the long-term investment will save you money and protect the environment.
• Plug all electronics that have “vampire” transformers into a switched strip outlet and turn of the entire strip when not using the electronic device. These transformers consume electricity even if the device it powers is turned off.

On Your Front Lawn

• After mowing, leave lawn clippings on the lawn. They add nutrients to the soil.
• Control insects using natural controls instead of pesticides.
• If you must water your lawn, water early or late in the day to prevent evaporation. Use timers to control the amount that your lawn is watered or water by hand.

In the Car

If every family in the United States uses one less gallon of gasoline per week, greenhouse gases will be reduced by one million tons. With this in mind:

• Buy a fuel efficient car. The average American driver will expend 5600 less pounds of carbon monoxide gases per year by driving a car that gets at least 32 miles to the gallon.
• Check tire pressure for proper inflation, and keep the car tuned and well-maintained.
• Dispose of motor oil and anti-freeze through a local service station or recycling center. A one-quart container of oil disposed of at the local landfill can contaminate up to two million gallons of drinking water.
• Drive less! Walk, carpool, bike or use public transportation. Sharing a ride just once or twice a month can have a tremendous impact.

Out and About

• Dispose of trash properly. Even in cities, most trash eventually finds its way to the open oceans. A cigarette butt thrown away on the street may eventually be mistaken for food by sea birds that see it floating on the water. Cigarette butts, like most human trash, is not biodegradable.
• Pick up trash when you see it, whether in the city, in the woods, on the beach, near a river or anywhere else.

Beach sweeps, river rummages and adopted scenic highway clean-ups of litter and other trash are regularly scheduled events with uniformed staff that help also to create public awareness.

Aquarium staff is also involved in conservation education within our communities by organizing local public events for national campaigns such as Party for the Planet / Earth Day, Shark Week, and Year of the Frog.

Our animal husbandry staff (marine biologists or aquarists) also cultures our own live foods for some of our smaller animals. These live foods include single-cell algae, brine shrimp, rotifers and mysis shrimp.

Our aquarists have learned to breed jellies from attached polyps, (pictured above) to free-swimming adults.

Occasionally we must obtain animals from the ocean and when we do, our husbandry staff does this directly in order to ensure that the animals are handled with the best care possible from their habitat to ours. Our aquarists use SCUBA gear to dive underwater to collect select species of Caribbean reef fishes, and they collect all of the large sand tiger and sandbar sharks and many of the rays in our exhibits using a specialized hook-and-line technique. The other group of reef fishes we display originate from the Indo-Pacific region, and these fishes are obtained from commercial suppliers who are certified to collect these in a sustainable manner without the use of chemicals, or they are obtained as captively bred.

We also participate in the conservation and science programs of the Association of Zoos & Aquariums, a non-profit organization dedicated to the advancement of zoos and aquariums in the areas of conservation, education, science and recreation.