Love Your Aquarium 2026
Love Your Aquarium – BIAZA Campaign
The theme for 2026 is ‘In our Nature’ – the staff, volunteers and communities who support zoos and aquariums to thrive, and inspire the next generation of conservationists.
Galway Atlantaquaria is incredibly proud to showcase what is ‘In Our Nature’
Since the Aquarium opened its doors in 1999, we have worked incredibly hard on the presentation of marine life, education ethos and Aquarium ‘Sense of Place’ our story. As a private business the Aquarium really wanted to celebrate our unique marine life, and be part of the community.
We believe that for over twenty five years we have remained true to our principles and passion for marine life and how we inspire change in our community and conservation principles. We are immensely proud to be part of the community in Salthill, Galway City, we love that we can support conservation, and we believe that we do inspire positive change in our community too, its in our nature.
What is Conservation?
Aha the eternal question…..there is no doubt that there are many aspects to what it is and in general the most commonly accepted definition is The protection, preservation, management, or restoration of natural environments and the ecological communities that inhabit them. Conservation is generally held to include the management of human use of natural resources for current public benefit and sustainable social and economic utilisation.
This means that everyone can be inspired to become a conservation agent of change, and Galway Atlantaquaria does play a pretty significant role here too.
Small Conservation Grants and Community Work
Do you know we were the first Aquarium in Ireland to run the Community Beach Cleans? In 2009 we hosted our first Beach Clean and joined Clean Coasts in 2011 we have been very proud to take care of Grattan Beach with a whole community of volunteers.
We are so grateful to the many volunteers, Galway City Council and Sandlarks who have taken on the role as Clean Coasts Volunteers on Grattan Beach, Salthill.
Small Conservation Grants
In the last three years Galway Atlantaquaria has been really proud to launch our Small Conservation Grants Scheme designed to help local projects and conservation groups with their own Conservation Projects. In the last few years we have met some wonderful groups that do some amazing conservation work, and we are so proud to support these important conservation works.
Citizen Science and Community
In managing Conservation we are very aware that our conservation work is small scale, however we do have to work with what we have, and we do believe that small scale projects do add up. For example in 2025, we had the largest amount of free monthly experiences and reached over 3000 people engaged with some sort of beach clean, rockpool, egg case hunt, or other marine themed experience on the shore. In 2025 we have started the birdwatching, flora and sand fence recording. This means that we are able to showcase the beauty of nature through video and images.
LOVE YOUR AQUARIUM
As we celebrate Love Your Zoo & Aquarium, we hope that our visitors learn more about the role we can play in inspiring, educating, and talking more about the role we can all play in protecting our biodiversity, it’s in our nature.
Professional Zoo’s & Aquariums are important and we do make a difference.
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