Most conservation funding traces in Africa end somewhere vague. This one ends at a gift shop in Abu Dhabi.
The National Aquarium Abu Dhabi committed US$25,000 a year to African manatee research in Senegal and Guinea, and it named where the money comes from: proceeds from the aquarium’s Manatee Retail Shop. The commitment was announced on June 11, 2024, when groundwork began in West Africa on what the aquarium and the Mohamed bin Zayed Species Conservation Fund call the African Manatee Conservation Project.
The chain is short and it is published, which is rarer than it should be. The aquarium raises the money at the till. The Mohamed bin Zayed Species Conservation Fund manages it. The African Aquatic Conservation Fund, a non-governmental organization working across 19 West African countries, spends it in the field.
What the money buys
The stated program is population genetics, acoustics, feeding ecology and physiology: the basic descriptive science that has never been done for this animal. It also funds people. The project underwrites at least ten researchers and African graduate students, covering fieldwork, laboratory analysis and travel to present results at international conferences, which is the line item that usually gets cut first.
The first fieldwork was set for the summer of 2024 on the Koulountou River in southern Senegal, on manatee populations that had only recently been found there, with further work planned for the winter of 2025 along the Senegal and Niger Rivers to look at inland animals, their diet and their ecological role. The longer ambition is an African Manatee Alliance, a regional network to connect researchers across the species’ range.
“By combining our resources and expertise, we can make significant strides in protecting the African manatee and preserving the biodiversity of West Africa,” said Paul Hamilton, General Manager at the National Aquarium Abu Dhabi.
The two animals the program is built around
The aquarium holds two African manatees, Nyokoti and Sengou, both between 15 and 20 years old. They were relocated from South Korea and introduced to their habitat at Al Qana on April 3, 2024, the same event at which the conservation project was announced. Neither could have been returned to the wild.
The aquarium is one of very few places outside the species’ range where the animal can be seen at all, and that is the argument the partners make for the arrangement. “They are quite a magical animal,” Hamilton told The National in March 2025. “They are not something that you get to lay eyes on very often.”
Nicolas Heard, then acting director general of the Mohamed bin Zayed Species Conservation Fund, put the connection more directly: “That is the crucial connection between the work that the National Aquarium here is doing and the work that conservationists are doing in Africa.”
One of the graduate researchers the project supports, Clinton Factheu, a doctoral student from Cameroon, traveled to Abu Dhabi to study the two animals. He had previously seen a complete manatee in the wild only once. “We know little about them and they are very threatened,” he said. “I decided to dedicate my career to them.”
That is the mechanism worth naming. A researcher from the species’ range state gets to observe an animal that is effectively unobservable in the water he works in, because two individuals who could not go home are in a tank in the Gulf.
What the Red List says
The African manatee, Trichechus senegalensis, is Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List, with a population trend recorded as unknown. The aquarium’s release calls it vulnerable, which matches the assessment. The animal occupies shallow coastal water, wetlands and rivers from Senegal to Angola, and the threats named in the reporting are poaching, bycatch, entrapment in dams and habitat loss.
The unknown trend is the point of the research program. You cannot report a direction of travel for a population nobody has counted, and a species that surfaces only far enough to breathe is not one that gives up numbers easily.
What we could not verify
We check what happened after a release before we write from it, and here the check came back empty rather than bad. The African Aquatic Conservation Fund’s own news page carries nothing later than 2020. The National Aquarium’s newsroom is a migrated archive in which every article carries one of three bulk publication stamps, so it publishes no updates either. Neither organization has put out a public result from the Koulountou fieldwork, the winter 2025 river surveys or the African Manatee Alliance.
What we can confirm is the state of the animals. Both manatees were alive and in good condition when The National visited the aquarium in March 2025, nearly a year into the arrangement, eating up to 50 kilograms of greens a day between them. We found no later published account of either animal.
An unreported program is not a failed one. Field seasons in West Africa do not produce press releases on a schedule, and graduate research takes years to reach publication. But a funder trace that names a figure deserves a follow-up that names a result, and that half is still owed.
Why this one is worth writing down
Most of the conservation stories in this region are run by non-governmental organizations, and the question of which accredited zoo or aquarium pays for them usually takes an afternoon to answer and often has no answer at all. Here the aquarium published the number, the source of the number and the organizations that receive it, without being asked.
The comparison worth making is with ZooTampa’s manatee critical care center, which has spent 35 years on the Florida species and whose funding is likewise a matter of public record. Those are the two ends of the same business: a facility that rehabilitates animals from the water outside its door, and a facility 12,000 kilometers from the nearest wild manatee that turned two unreleasable animals into a research station and a grant.
The aquarium’s announcement is published on its own site.
Quick answers
- What is the African Manatee Conservation Project?
A research and community program in Senegal and Guinea announced by the National Aquarium Abu Dhabi and the Mohamed bin Zayed Species Conservation Fund on June 11, 2024. It covers population genetics, acoustics, feeding ecology and physiology, and supports at least ten researchers and African graduate students.
- Where does the money come from?
The National Aquarium Abu Dhabi committed US$25,000 a year from the proceeds of its Manatee Retail Shop. The Mohamed bin Zayed Species Conservation Fund manages the funds, and the African Aquatic Conservation Fund, which works across 19 West African countries, carries out the work.
- Which manatees live at the aquarium?
Two African manatees, Nyokoti and Sengou, both between 15 and 20 years old. They were relocated from South Korea and introduced to their habitat at Al Qana on April 3, 2024, at the event where the conservation project was announced. Neither could have been returned to the wild.
- How threatened is the African manatee?
Trichechus senegalensis is Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List, with a population trend recorded as unknown. It occupies shallow coastal water, wetlands and rivers from Senegal to Angola, and the threats named in the reporting are poaching, bycatch, entrapment in dams and habitat loss.
- Has the project published results?
Not that we could find. The African Aquatic Conservation Fund's news page carries nothing later than 2020, and the National Aquarium's own newsroom is a migrated archive in which every article carries one of three bulk publication stamps. Both manatees were alive and in good condition when The National visited the aquarium in March 2025, and we found no later published account of either animal.
