(It would be 1970 before Seaquarium head trainer Ric O’Barry, who’d come around to believing that making such intelligent and well-mannered animals “perform” was cruel, and inhumane, would leave the oceanarium business to become an outspoken opponent of keeping them in captivity.)įor nearly a decade, the Aquatarium, with trained dolphins leaping and tooting in two enormous tanks, was Pinellas County’s top tourist draw. The Seaquarium provided and trained the animals for Flipper, and Ball was rolling in dough.
TRAP STREET SADDI ROLLING SERIES
Ball, who owned the Miami Seaquarium, was inspired by the runaway success of the TV series Flipper, itself a spinoff of several family films. Hurlbut changed the name of his attraction to the John’s Pass Aquarium, but by 1964 he was outgunned by the Aquatarium, a $3.5 million marine park built on 17 acres, right on the sand, in St. PETE: Paddy the Porpoise and the Marine Arena
This animal lived inside Hurlbut’s sunless concrete tank for nine years, performing three shows daily. When he took delivery of “Patty,” Hurlbut discovered the dolphin was male, and its name was hastily amended to “Paddy.” Hurlbut had already lost his first four captive dolphins (one was shot to death, in the tank, by a Madeira Beach policeman) and he had a bounty on the John’s Pass docks for “porpoises,” $100 per animal. Every day, Hubbard would bring his boat to the island and toss fish over the fence to “Patty,” “Mike” and “Frank,” to the delight of his customers.Īfter a storm destroyed part of his chain-link creation, allowing Mike and Frank to escape, Hubbard sold Patty to John’s Pass resident Jack Hurlbut, who had built a small concrete tank across the gravel street from his bait shop. Petersburg, tour boat captain Wilson Hubbard captured three bottlenose dolphins in 1953 and penned them inside a crude underwater fence on the shore of remote Shell Key.
Marineland became the most popular tourist attraction in Florida during the 1950s, and spawned imitators not only in Florida, but across American and around the world. In 1949 came Spray, the first dolphin successfully born in captivity. In the 1940s, Marine Studios hired a former sea lion trainer from the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus to “teach” the animals to leap on command for fish, and to perform “tricks” for rewards. To keep tourists interested, a locally-caught bottlenose dolphin was kept in the circular tank, for scheduled feedings.
TRAP STREET SADDI ROLLING MOVIE
It opened in 1938 as Marine Studios, ostensibly as an underwater location for movie shoots (key scenes from Creature From the Black Lagoon were lensed there). The first “aquarium” attraction in the world was Marineland, near St. Winter was living proof that dolphins did not have to be made to do unnatural things to be appreciated and loved. She was fitted with a prosthetic tail, which she learned to use, and although she was nursed back to health – “rehabbed,” in the parlance of the veterinary universe – she would never be able to feed or fend for herself in the wild.Īnd so she remained at the facility, visited daily by throngs of adults and children inspired by her resilience, as depicted in a somewhat fictionized Hollywood movie and its sequel, both shot partially on location in Clearwater. In another time, Winter the dolphin would have been forced to toss beachballs, play a toy piano with her snout and leap over limbo poles suspended in the air, all for the gawking amusement of tourists.īut Winter, who died this week after 16 years in captivity at the Clearwater Marine Aquarium, arrived in a more enlightened age, when public indignation at the exploitation of Atlantic bottlenose dolphins was beginning to percolate.ĭiscovered stranded on a Cape Canaveral beach in 2005, Winter was near death, the circulation to her tail flukes all but cut off by the twisted nylon ropes of a crab trap.Īt the Clearwater Marine Aquarium, the remains of the young dolphin’s tail were amputated.