Tampa’s Lowry Park Zoo Petitions for a Manatee Emoji!
Tampa, Florida’s Lowry Park Zoo is petitioning the Unicode Consortium for creation and registration of a manatee emoji. November is Manatee Awareness Month! Photo Courtesy – Lowry Park Zoo/Change.org
Greetings! Here’s some great news for you … Tampa’s Lowry Park Zoo is petitioning the Unicode Consortium for the creation of a new manatee emoji! Now – of course I prefer the manatee emoji be created with a purple cap and a yellow jersey that yours truly always wears! However, let’s just get this awesome new manatee emoji project completed!
Recently, Lowry Park Zoo began a petition on Change.org. They want to organize a list focusing on a manatee emoji celebrating Florida’s official state marine mammal. And this would be in honor of Manatee Awareness Month, which is November. The zoo’s petition states, “Elephants, tigers and penguins all have emojis, so why not manatees? By creating an emoji, we are making it easier for people to think about and share their love for these gentle giants.” The goal of Lowry Park Zoo is to obtain 25,000 signatures with its online petition before it would present it to Unicode, which is the nonprofit organization that regulates all universal coding for emojis.
Discover Tampa’s Lowry Park Zoo
This Zoo is a five-time winner of the TripAdvisor Certificate of Excellence (2010-2015). And it happens to be of the most popular zoos in the southwestern United States with more than 1 million visitors annually! It’s history dates back to the 1930’s when the Zoo actually began as a municipal department housing a small sampling of Florida’s native species.
Today the Lowry Park Zoo is an award-winning modern facility, which opened to the public in 1988. The zoo’s accreditation by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA) came in the early 1990’s. Lowry Park explains its mission “is to connect people with the living earth.” It also said, “ We strive to do so by operating the Zoo in accordance with the highest professional standards of conservation, education, research and recreation, and by serving as a resource for the community regarding conservation and environmental matters affecting animals and habitats, both locally and throughout the world. Growing to what now encompasses 56 acres of naturalistic animal exhibits in a lush, tropical garden setting, the Zoo offers popular educational programming and fun recreational amenities, for which it has won accolades as one of the country’s most family-friendly zoos.”
Lowry Park Zoo – A Top Notch Center for Conservation!
The award-winning Lowry Park Zoo was formally recognized as a center for conservation and biodiversity in 2004. Lowry Park houses and exhibits “the most comprehensive collection of endangered Florida wildlife anywhere.” Especially, the conservation programs at the Zoo’s David A. Straz, Jr. Manatee Hospital, which is the only “permitted nonprofit critical care facility of its kind in Florida.” It is a top-notch emergency room treating sick, injured and orphaned manatees. Zoo visitors can watch conservation efforts at work as its veterinarians and animal care staff attends to the manatee patients via underwater viewing windows in the Manatee & Aquatics Center.
For more information on Tampa, Florida’s Lowry Park Zoo, here is their address and phone number:
1101 W. Sligh Avenue
Tampa, FL 33604
Phone: (813) 935-8552
So let’s continue celebrating Manatee Awareness Month together and help spread the word about us manatees – after all we’re Florida’s official state marine mammal!
If you see any sick or injured manatees, please call the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission at: 1-888-404-FWCC. They are the folks who are responsible for rescuing us in Florida.
Here’s the Save the Manatee Club link to learn more about us manatees …
Here’s a cool link for you to learn more about how we’re rescued and brought into rehabilitation …
~ Kobee Manatee
