We tried to open up the park to the surrounding sea and distant keys. It's a Japanese technique to borrow surrounding landscape, to help create a sense of immensity on an intimate site. To achieve that end, native grasses, shrubs, bromeliads, agave plants, and palm trees were used to build a new terraced landscape from the park's highest, driest point, where cacti thrive, down to the shoreline pools, garden clusters, and a dramatic palm-tree court that was created by Vaccarino. A special permit allowed the team to transplant 20 mangrove trees from a nearby swamp to a new lagoon on site. Today, mangroves propagated at Coral World are being replanted around the island.
Many exhibits make marine life accessible.
Sometimes architects and aquarists together ended a long, hard day with a magical, night-time hunt for baby sharks in Magen's Bay. Sea horses, whose numbers have declined due to hurricanes, were brought from Florida to create a popular exhibit and sea-horse breeding program. To date, curator Donna Nemeth has returned about 5,000 sea horses to the ocean. A turtle rehabilitation program exists, along with a new bird-breeding program. We're a small organization, but if we can put out 25 mangrove trees, they're going to grow so quickly and make such a visible difference in a small amount of time that we can help bring St. Thomas back to more of what it used to be.