That said, almost two years after the orca's death, the Seaquarium still stands (albeit with a reduced collection). Nor did the facility begin with an orca. Nor did it have a cloud over its name for much of its history. For the fascinating story of how this place came to be, I recommend The Captive Sea.
In the 1950's, marine biologist Craig Phillips was tasked with transforming mud and mangroves on the edge of Biscayne Bay into a world-class aquarium. The book is the saga of building the campus, devising methods of caring for the animals, collecting them, and managing them. As the title would suggest, this is a book of its times (many zoo and aquariums folks shy away from use of the C word these days), and some of the chapters may be upsetting for readers these days, such as the collection of dolphins from the wild (though it's interesting to see how in Phillips' era, it seemed completely uncontroversial; the only pushback he seems to have received was from a town in South Carolina that was worried that the capture of a local white dolphin would deprive them of a tourist draw). A casual mention made of planned inbreeding also startled me a little, before I remembered that this was written before the effects of inbreeding were really established.
Phillips describes experiences working with a wide variety of marine life, from jellies to octopi to sharks to manatees. I find it a fascinating read because it goes back to an era of animal-keeping when so much less was known, especially aquatic animals, and there was so much to learn, a more curious, scientific era of experimentation. Of course, the flipside of that is that not all experiments are successful, and in cases like these, you're dealing with living things, so failure has consequences of life and death. Even I, who know fairly little about marine animal management, saw a few passages and thought to myself, "Well that's not going to work out very well..." only for the author to discover the same thing on the next page. I was particularly thinking of that when I was reading Phillip's descriptions of working with leatherbacks, the largest of the sea turtles and the one species generally not kept in aquariums. Phillips actual had better success with this species than I thought he would, but it still seems like a species that, at least until there's some major breakthrough, is not meant to be.
One species conspicuously absent from Phillips' memoir is the orca. Well, not entirely absent - he mentions the species and describes it, doing so in a manner that suggests that most readers of his era would have been very unfamiliar with the species. He then simply says that it's never been kept in captivity, but that it would doubtlessly be a big sensation if it ever were. Well, he wasn't wrong about that, I suppose.
If you're reading The Captive Sea hoping for insights in how modern facilities care for marine life, you're probably going to walk away disappointed - much has changed in the field since the 1950s (as one would hope). It does, however, make a fascinating read (ok, some of the parts about salinity and filtration I skimmed a bit, but the rest was great!) about the history of one of the most ambitious zoological projects ever attempted- recreating ocean ecosystems on dry land.
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