Clearwater Aquarium

Friends with young children all know the movie Dolphin's Tale, filmed at Clearwater Aquarium. We headed there this morning, expecting a venue similar to the Florida Aquarium we visited in March 2011. I realized right away that the Aquarium has limited capacity for visitors when I saw the trailers installed as restrooms in the parking lot. We waited in a long line to buy our tickets and entered the facility through what looked like a makeshift cafeteria in an army encampment.

The aquarium is populated by rescued aquatic animals, including Winter of movie fame. Winter has a prosthetic tail, constructed using a technology that is now used for human prostheses as well. Other rescued animals include sea turtles, river otters, sea lions and other dolphins. The animals live in conditions that seem inadequte to my critical and uneducated eye. I simply felt sorry for the residents and wondered if rescue efforts that bring animals to the aquarium are are simply a futile use of resources that could be deployed more productively elsewhere.

Staff soldier on in their education efforts, proselytizing cheerily over a cheap and irriting sound system.The animals themselves ranged from the pathetic to those simply unable to fend for themselves in the wild. I felt sad, though the hundreds (thousands) of children and their parents seemed to be enjoying themselves immensely.

In this economy, a new aquarium seems unlikely anytime soon. Some of those hard-working staff and volunteers must dream wistfully of an venud like the beautiful Monterey Bay Aquarium, integrated with Monterey Bay itself. The Clearwater Aquarium doesn't even seem to make this list of aquariums in the United States.