The general public got to see the official opening of the state-of-the-art Manatee River at the Jacksonville Zoo and Botanical Gardens.<\/p>\n
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. \u2014 Friday marked the big day for Jacksonville Zoo and Botanical Gardens. The state-of-the-art manatee habitat has officially opened to the public.<\/p>\n
The place was buzzing for the opening of the new \u201crezoovenation\u201d project, the public is getting their first look of the manatees that\u2019s been added here.<\/p>\n
People from all over have been pouring in to come visit the Jacksonville Zoo and see the $70 million project that\u2019s finally been completed.<\/p>\n
The new manatee habitat holds over 300-thousand gallons of water\u2014designed to rescue, rehabilitate, and release manatees. The habitat can also hold up to 20 manatees at a time; however, only three are in the water right now.<\/p>\n
Members of the public and local leaders were in attendance to see the new state-of-the-art manatee river and zoo entrance, such as Jakcosnville Mayor Donna Deegan.<\/p>\n
\u201cI just think they\u2019re so adorable, but I was especially attracted to Cullen, he\u2019s the one that constantly has lettuce in his mouth and the fact that this shines a light on the importance of conservation and education\u2014It\u2019s just really important,\u201d Mayor Donna Deegan said.<\/p>\n
The Jacksonville zoo opened at nine on Friday morning, the first ten people in line got a free behind-the-scenes look at the manatee facility, and the first 100 guests got free zoo merchandise.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The general public got to see the official opening of the state-of-the-art Manatee River at the Jacksonville Zoo…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":181541,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[116,118,117],"class_list":["post-181540","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-jacksonville","tag-jacksonville","tag-jacksonville-headlines","tag-jacksonville-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181540","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=181540"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181540\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/181541"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=181540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=181540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=181540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}