Ammon and Crystal Covino

Ammon and Crystal Covino are entrepreneurs, business partners, and parents of eight, three of whom joined the family through foster care and adoption. They have been together since they were teenagers, married more than thirty years, and have spent their adult lives in Texas building businesses and raising a large family.

Ammon generates the ideas and makes the ideas happen. Crystal is his partner and an owner in the businesses. From construction and real estate through interactive aquariums, animal experiences, and family entertainment, and now Ammon's books, building has been the constant.

Their story includes real successes and serious legal challenges, some of it covered extensively by others.

Ammon Covino

Ammon Covino is an entrepreneur, builder, and author.

He spent about thirty years in construction and real estate development before turning to interactive attractions. They own and operate Austin Aquarium, Houston Interactive Aquarium and Animal Preserve, The Reef in San Antonio, and Studio Giraffe, a venue in Houston, and is currently developing a sixteen-acre resort property in Leander, Texas. His side of the work is building.

He writes under the name A.M. Covino. His books are THE ALPHA-OMEGA WORKS, a set on why human systems behave the way they do: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Homo Sapiens, The Mitochondrial Self, The Lens, and Ants, Butterflies, and Roaches, which is free. Those four are also collected in The Alpha-Omega Works omnibus. A fifth, LIFE, is in progress. The argument running through all of them is that most of the harm human systems produce requires no villain, only incentives, scale, and time.

I am not a biologist and I am not an academic. I build things. I have spent my life around animals and around the people who care for them, and that is where the questions in these books started. Nothing in them asks you to take my word for it. Where a claim is established, it is sourced. Where it is my own reasoning, it says so. Where the evidence does not settle it, it is marked as a position rather than a finding.

That is a reason to check me rather than trust me.

Crystal Covino

Crystal Covino, who goes by Crysty, is an owner of Austin Aquarium, San Antonio Aquarium, and Houston Interactive Aquarium and Animal Preserve.

She is building how those places run, from animal care and staffing to the way a guest moves through the room. The animals are not props.

She has also run a doTERRA business, Essentially jOIful, since 2015, which sits under Covino Enterprises, LLC.