MIAMI — Some students at the University of Miami want the school to stop sending them on research field trips to the Miami Seaquarium after a damning federal report revealed that park managers fed spoiled food to marine animals and allowed bacteria to multiply in tanks, making manatees and dolphins sick, among other violations.
A group of undergraduate students stated a campaign last month asking the school to cut ties with the marine park. The campaign, built around a petition on Change.org, is part of a political science class assignment on activism. It hasn’t generated much traction, however, attracting only 209 signatures since it was posted a month ago.
Organizers said the campaign reflects frustration by some undergraduate students at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science who are required to study animal behavior at the Seaquarium. Rosenstiel School students said they felt uncomfortable going on field trips to the Seaquarium, a facility that has been the target of numerous animal rights campaigns alleging mistreatment of dolphins and of Lolita the orca, for decades the park’s main attraction.
The political science students said their intention is to help the Rosenstiel students raise awareness about what they consider academic field work that doesn’t add to their education, while working on a real-life campaign for their activism class, said Catherine McGrath, a third-year political science student.
“We realized that many students at RSMAS were quite upset with this requirement to do work at the Seaquarium, so we joined forces with them to help with a campaign,” she said. “We believe this is a credibility issue for UM. We don’t want our university to be associated with an abusive marine park.”
Some Rosenstiel students said they must submit reports on dolphin and manatee behavior after spending a few hours observing the animals at the Seaquarium as part of required lab work in their freshman year.
The relationship between the university and the Seaquarium goes back many years, with marine science and veterinary students doing internships at the facility. The Rosenstiel School and the Seaquarium have a joint “Rescue a Reef” exhibit at the marine park showcasing coral conservation and restoration efforts in a 500-gallon tank.
For more than 30 years the Seaquarium was run by Arthur Hertz, a longtime UM Board of Trustees member who graduated in 1955 with a Bachelor of Business Administration. Hertz, who died in 2017 at 83, built a career at Wometco Enterprises, which owned the Seaquarium from 1960 until 2014. When the company was broken up and sold in the early 1980s, Hertz, who had risen through the ranks to become CEO, decided to keep the Seaquarium.
He tried for years to expand the facility. In 1991, Hertz told The Miami Herald the Seaquarium was “tired” and needed to be modernized. “If we’re going to retain it, we’ve got to rebuild,” he said at the time. But his attempts were thwarted by Key Biscayne residents, who battled the expansion. He ultimately sold the marine park in 2014 to Palace Entertainment, a unit of Madrid-based Parques Reunidos.
Palace found itself in the spotlight two months ago when public records showed an atypical string of deaths between March 2019 and April 2020. Five bottlenose dolphins and a baby California sea lion died — a high number for a park with just 25 dolphins before the deaths occurred.
A few weeks later, the Seaquarium was cited by the U.S. Department of Agriculture for multiple critical infractions, including water quality problems that made animals sick and feeding the animals rotting food.
Lillian Engelhard, a junior in the Marine Science program at the Rosenstiel School, said the 17-page USDA report was the last straw for her.
“I already had a problem with the Seaquarium because I’m against animals in captivity and it’s just wrong to keep Lolita in that tiny tank. I felt uncomfortable being required to do this lab work there; and when the report came out, I was really angry,” said Engelhard, who went to the Seaquarium on a 2019 field trip. She said groups of about 10-15 students go at least once to the Seaquarium during the Intro to Marine Science Lab course.
“It would be more beneficial for students to go on a boat and see dolphins in the ocean or manatees in the canals,” she said.
Another student who didn’t want to be named for fear of retribution said a tank where rescued manatees were kept appeared cracked and filled with water that looked dirty. “There were three manatees in this glorified bathtub, without enough space for them to move; it was a very sad sight,” she said.
McGrath and Alex Terr, another undergraduate political science student, said the idea is for campaign organizers to gather more support for the petition and meet with Rosenstiel School faculty in mid-December to talk about their grievances.
“The University of Miami has been affiliated with the Miami Seaquarium on Virginia Key for years now. Students enrolled in the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science are forced to perform research on the animals at this aquarium,” the petition said. “Unfortunately, students are threatened with failure if they refuse to work with the animals and administration has not addressed student’s concerns,” according to the petition, which had 209 signatures after about four weeks.
The Rosenstiel School didn’t make anyone available for an interview. In a statement, the University of Miami’s communications department said: “The petition contains incorrect information. Undergraduate students at the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science are able to participate in a voluntary field trip to the Seaquarium to observe mammal behavior of dolphins and manatees. If a student chooses not to participate, they are not penalized and it does not impact their grade.”
For McGrath and Jarrod Houseknecht, a friend who is also studying political science at UM, the USDA report was the spark they needed to pressure the university to dissociate from the Seaquarium.
“A lot of us knew there were problems and our friends from RSMAS have seen how the animals were kept in really bad conditions, but this report opened our eyes to just how horrible the situation really is,” Houseknecht said. He’s been distributing fliers to students around campus in the past few weeks to drum up support for the petition. “The connection with the Seaquarium is an embarrassment for the university.”
