Miami Seaquarium has been served an eviction notice in the form of a letter titled “Notice of Advisement – Termination of Lease of Review” by Miami-Dade County. Seaquarium’s owners MS Leisure Company, have been told they must vacate the premises by April 21, 2024.
Founded in 1955, the 38-acre oceanarium is one of the oldest aquariums in the United States and is home to over 500 animals including marine mammals, reptiles, and birds as well as fish and sharks. But from 2022 to 2024, MS Leisure Company received 27 citations from the USDA, for not maintaining the facilities well, not providing suitable veterinary care, not maintaining outdoor facilities, not maintaining indoor facilities, not having adequate staff, not having satisfactory water quality and for not handling the animals properly, when a visitor was bitten by a dolphin. Once home to Lolita the Killer Whale, the 69-year-old marine park has just six weeks to vacate the premises, and take all its animals with it.
The County wrote, “[MS Leisure Company’s] long and troubling history of violations constitute repeated, continuous and longstanding violations of [its] contractual obligations to keep the Property in a good state of repair, maintain animals in accordance with applicable law, and comply with all laws as set forth in…the Amended and Restated Lease Agreement.”
News website NPR also reported that “Between the county and the USDA, MS Leisure Company received notices that several areas in the park were unsafe and not structurally sound, including enclosures for the whales, penguins, parrots, dolphins, and sea lions. The issues have led to animals being injured and accidentally eating pieces of the structure that are deteriorating.”
Open letter to the Mayor
Miami Seaquarium’s Chief Animal Care Officer Andrew Scullion has written an open letter to Miami-Dade Mayor Danielle Levine Cava, expressing his deep disappointment with the decision, defending the park’s animal welfare practices and inviting her to visit for herself (with independent animal care specialists,) to witness operations as she has not visited in over two years.
“I have never encountered such a coordinated onslaught of prejudiced and purposefully distorted judgment towards an individual facility,” Scullion wrote in the letter. “The lack of due diligence and fairness exhibited in both accusation and judgment is both surprising and deeply disappointing.”
Levine Cava responded in a recent news conference by saying that representatives of the county’s parks department have made regular visits to the park. The Miami Seaquarium is located on the island of Virginia Key in Biscayne Bay, Miami-Dade County, Florida. Over 500,000 people visit the facility annually and it employs 225 people.
Image credits: Pietro, CC BY-SA 3.0, Leonardo Dasilva, CC BY 2.0 and Pietro, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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