giving coral reefs a future

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1. What is your motivation to support and partner with SECORE?
Dutch: Here at Curacao Sea Aquarium, we have ongoing education and research programs. SECORE is a central part of both programs. After exchanging with people from around the world, I was surprised and impressed by the international impact SECORE already has.

2. Can you tell us more about the Sea Aquarium education program?
Dutch: In the education program, we want to trigger nature awareness and concern about the future by our visitors. This can be achieved via zoological and aquaria exhibitions with the related information that we provide, but also via special programs such as SECORE.

3. What is the goal of the Sea Aquarium concerning its research program?
Dutch: We also aim to become a major research center. SECORE is the coral reef partner, but we also collaborate with other partners such as the Smithsonian Institution and Wageningen University in the Netherlands on taxonomic deep sea projects using our manned submarine and our research vessel. Such research partnerships received lots of media appearance in the past, and that is important for the Curacao Sea Aquarium, because this confirm a happy marriage between nature research and business.
Research looks often boring, but needs to look sexy and understandable in order to attract general public and patron attention. SECORE activities could look very sexy if we highlight that more. In a few decades time from now, we may have thriving elkhorn coral fields at the wave breaking structures we had to introduce in the course of building and developing the Curacao Sea Aquarium.

4. You play a prominent role in leading those efforts―generating public awareness and promoting research―to success. How?
Dutch: I am the person that supports research and makes facilities available. SECORE for example needs a healthy reef and a laboratory next to the sea. That is why SECORE is here, and you have to bring the laboratory to the sea and not the sea to the laboratory. We have just built water quality monitoring laboratories and will build new laboratories that allow maintaining organisms collected from the deep sea under the temperature and light conditions at the collection site. The decompression chambers that I purchased from the NASA Space Shuttle program may play a role in this context.
In addition, the many new deep sea species that we recently have discovered with the help of our submarine include the potential to develop new drugs and medicines. Learning about nature helps to use nature.