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To help save and restore the overfished marine snail, queen conch, Megan Davis, Ph.D., research professor ¹ú²ú×ÔÅÄ Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute and her team, partner with local communities in Florida, The Bahamas, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, Curacao and other regions of the Caribbean. She is internationally recognized for her more than four decades of work in the field of warm-water aquaculture, specifically with the queen conch.

Davis’ passion for the ocean began as a young girl collecting shells along the beaches of her native country of Australia and sailing summers in The Bahamas with her family. Before coming to ¹ú²ú×ÔÅÄ 27 years ago, she spent 10 years in the Turks and Caicos Islands as co-founder and chief scientist for the world’s largest queen conch farm, among other projects, too.

As an important food source, conch is one of the most commercially valuable fisheries in the Caribbean, but threatened from overfishing and climate change, said Davis, who helps raise conch in community-based farms for release into the wild and for sustainable seafood production. Most recently, she and her team received a $2.8 million grant to establish a queen conch hatchery in Grand Bahama.