Zoo Review: Clearwater Marine Aquarium

I felt like I was confessing a dirty, shameful secret, but the truth had to come out.  Three or four times during my visit to the Clearwater Marine Aquarium, I had to look a docent (of which there seemed to be dozens, more than animals it seemed at times) square in the eyes and tell them the truth.  "Sorry, I never actually saw the movie."

To a man (or, more often, to a teenage girl), they looked back at me shocked.  It was if they were thinking, "Then what are you even doing here?"

Truth be told, Clearwater Marine Aquarium predates Dolphin Tale, the cinematic saga of its most famous resident, Winter the dolphin, by nearly forty years.  Still, there is no denying that Winter is what put the Aquarium on the map and in the collective imagination of the world.  She and her companion, another Atlantic bottlenose dolphin named "Hope," are the stars of the (admittedly tiny) facility, visible from above the water or in an underwater viewing gallery.  Don't be surprised if you don't see Winter wearing her famous prosthesis - unlike in the movie version, she only dons it occasionally (when it's not in use, you can see it hanging over the pool).  An entire wall is covered with the dolphin's fan mail.  There are frequent keeper talks and training demos with the dolphins to keep them stimulated and the public informed.

Besides the dolphins, the aquarium is home to a river otter, a pair of nurse sharks, a flock of great white pelicans (the only nonnatives in the collection), and more sea turtles than you could imagine.  Oh, and a very few other fish - this tops Dallas World Aquarium as the least fishy aquarium I've ever been to.  That's because this is not a typical aquarium - it is not a member of AZA, it does not participate in Species Survival Plans and breeding programs.  They don't have big tanks with lots of different fish and invertebrate species from around the world, meant to highlight aquatic diversity.  It is solely focused on rehabilitation or, when that does not prove possible, permanent housing of local marine animals in need of a home.  This mission has been going on since 1972.  It just did so a lot more quietly until Winter came along.

At times, the presence of the movie seemed overbearing.  Half the signage seemed focused on the film rather than the animals ("Morgan Freeman was here!").  Exhibits are named after animal characters from the film.  That one exhibit of nonnatives, the pelicans?  That came to be because one of the pelicans was a former animal actor that was used for the film as a stand in for a native pelican (Hollywood often uses exotic species as substitutes for natives in TV and movies due to protections in place for native wildlife).  After the movie, he came to live at the Aquarium, and the rest of the flock was acquired for companionship.

I found the Aquarium the most enjoyable when it put aside its newfound celebrity and focused on what it is at heart - a rescue center.  The first exhibit I saw when I walked in was a long gallery of windows looking into the sea turtle hospital, where you could watch caretakers exam turtles in the hospital room or watch turtles potter around in their holding pools.  Informative graphics on the wall detailed the stories of past rescues and releases.  Upstairs was a display of a shrimp trap, describing how these traps were once responsible for the deaths of countless sea turtles and how the development of the Turtle Exclusion Device revolutionized sea turtle conservation.

Clearwater is a simple facility - the tanks are plain concrete, nothing fancy, as you would expect from an institution which has spent most of its existence on a shoestring budget.  Bigger and better things may be on the horizon, however, as the facility looks to move to a new building which, among other improvements, would give the dolphins three times the swimming space.

I love it when a zoo or an aquarium has a compelling story to share, and Winter's is hard to beat (at least until Cincinnati gets around to making a Fiona movie).  Clearwater Marine Aquarium should be immensely proud of the work they've done to give that dolphin the quality of life she has now -  I suspect many organizations or rehabbers might not have given her that chance.  It just feels a little like they focus so much on that one story - and the Hollywood telling of that story - that they risk losing track of the other stories that abound there.  I would hate to see the success of this plucky little Aquarium solely tied to the fate of one dolphin, when there are so many other animals to be saved out there.

Clearwater Marine Aquarium