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Acuario de Austin bajo escrutinio después de reportes de ataques de animales a visitantes y personal

Editor’s note: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated the Austin Animal Advisory Commission was considering recommending an ordinance to ban for-profit, unaccredited zoos and aquariums to the Austin City Council. The error has been amended. 

A petition to shut down the Austin Aquarium started by a UT graduate garnered over 55,000 signatures, one of several calls to take action following reports of animals harming visitors and staff.

Last October, the U.S. Department of Agriculture officially warned the Austin Aquarium for not facilitating adequate animal and visitor safety after multiple incidents where visitors were bitten or scratched by animals such as lemurs or kinkajous. Just last month, a visitor reported being attacked and bitten on the face by a lemur. 

Petition creator Madhavi Subramaniam said that in an undercover PETA investigation of the Austin Aquarium conducted last year, PETA discovered many bites, scratches and attacks go unreported. 

According to the investigation, several of the staff bitten “reportedly lied to hospital staff about the type of animal that bit them when seeking treatment” to avoid formally reporting the attacks. The undercover investigator was told “never to document an attack in the site’s animal care records,” following up to 12 attacks that occurred while they were investigating. 

The investigation also found the aquarium is legally owned by a woman named Crysty Covino but operated mainly by her husband, Ammon Covino. In 2013, Ammon Covino was convicted and sentenced in federal court for illegally trafficking wildlife, terms he later violated. The investigation states Ammon Covino’s unofficial operation of the aquarium may be an “attempt to circumvent the law” as he cannot legally hold a USDA license. 

Subramaniam said she started the petition after witnessing the aquarium’s conditions firsthand. She said it was unusual for an animal care facility to be in a strip mall, and she had a “bad feeling” after seeing the mammals forced to sit on concrete 24/7.

“To me, it was clear that people do want this aquarium to shut down, not just for the fact that kids who go there are regularly harmed, but for the fact that animals who are forced to stay there are being regularly abused,” Subramaniam said. “When I started the petition, I certainly didn’t expect to get this many signatures. I started it just to get a gauge of what people thought, but when you start it and get 50,000 plus signatures, you realize this is a hated aquarium.” 

After considering whether to recommend an ordinance to the Austin City Council that would ban for-profit facilities unaccredited by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums from allowing the public to interact with its animals on display, the Austin Animal Advisory Commission voted to form a working group that would further define the ordinance’s language to increase its likelihood of passing. 

The Austin Aquarium declined to comment.