Dr Judy St Leger is the MACNA 2022 Keynote Speaker

Aquaculture and Sustainability: No More Clowning Around

For over ten years, Rising Tide Conservation has been supporting research to increase options for marine ornamental aquaculture. Program successes have included tough pelagic species and species that just didn’t do well as collected specimens. Some of these fish are now commercially available. Some.

Now it’s time for the next chapter. It’s time  to go from “we can do it” to “we are doing it”. We’ll talk about what the future of marine aquaculture can look like and how folks from the home aquarist to entrepreneurs can make it happen.

Bio:
Dr. Judy St. Leger is the founder and President of Rising Tide Conservation. She’s an aquatic animal veterinarian committed to ocean conservation. Back in 2009, her boss wanted a new way to approach reef conservation that would provide alternatives to fish collections. From this idea, Rising Tide was born.

Rising Tide is an organization that brings together the worlds of conservation, research, and marine aquarists to support aquaculture. In this role, Judy has written articles and given lots of presentations about aquaculture to almost anyone who will listen. She’s fascinated by eggs and adores larvae!

When she isn’t thinking about algae and rotifers, Judy lives with her husband Marc and their border collie, “Zip”  on a farm in upstate NY. There, she raises sheep that graze on solar farms to help with sustainable energy production. Oh yeah, she’s raising a threatened breed  (Black Welsh Mountain Sheep) of sheep to improve their numbers as well. Looks like this girl will grow anything!