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 a big day for Jacksonville Zoo and Botanical Gardens, as the state-of-the-art manatee habitat officially opened to the public.<\/p>\n
The place was buzzing for the grand opening of the new \u201crezoovenation\u201d project, with the public getting their first look of the manatees.<\/p>\n
People from all over poured in to see the $70 million project finally complete.<\/p>\n
The new manatee river habitat holds over 300,000 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 manatee river and zoo entrance, such as Jacksonville 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 Deegan said.<\/p>\n
The Jacksonville Zoo opened at 9 a.m. on Friday morning; the first 10 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-182222","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\/182222","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=182222"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182222\/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=182222"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=182222"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=182222"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}