May/June 1999 Issue

Saving the Sea at Mote Marine

In the subdued light of Mote Marine Aquarium, a 7-year-old boy hunkers down, looking intently at a vicious-looking moray eel. Both seem hypnotized. A girl scrambles her fingers to imitate an indifferent crab, while three other youngsters bug out their eyes to stare down a grouper. Young mothers relax for quiet moments and older faces become serene. Nobody fidgets. No beepers go off. No cell phones chirp. Moving effortlessly and silently through their environment, sea creatures seem to calm those of us who expend energy chugging along through life. It’s a long way from a theme park.
   This is the public face of Sarasota’s Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium, under the direction of Kumar Mahadevan, executive director in charge of a dizzying number of projects and programs. While most of the work goes on behind the scenes—in crowded little offices or big hospital tanks, on vast waterways and reefs of the ocean, or in choking inland rivers—what is visible to the public is an aquarium stocked with more than 200 varieties of marine animals from the waters of Florida’s west coast.
   Mote has become a major tourist attraction. In 1997, 260,000 visitors toured the aquarium. In January (a record-setting month in attendance), a newly expanded $3.5 million facility opened, with several new exhibits, labs, and a research library open to the public.
Mote is also a hospital haven for marine animals that survive traumatic injury or illness—the ponderous sea turtle, bewildered dolphin, endangered manatee, or the rare pygmy whale. In huge hospital tanks, staff and volunteers administer great doses of medicines (how much aspirin is enough for a 1,500-pound headache?) and lots of tender care, sometimes staying in the water around the clock to support invalids.
   “It’s very draining for the volunteers,” explains senior scientist Jay Gorzelany. “They become attached to their charges.” After recovery in the hospital tanks, rescued mammals, such as manatees Hugh and Buffett, transfer to a 70,000-gallon lagoon with viewing window. The goal is to get them healthy and able to return to the wild. It does happen, but not often enough, according to Gorzelany. “Dolphin and manatees don’t beach themselves because they are sick; they beach themselves to die. In spite of rapid-response mammal stranding rescue teams, too many do die.”
   On the brighter side, a dolphin named Gulliver has been released and set a record for travel while wearing a monitor. Alvin and Blitzen, two rare rough-tooth dolphins, were also returned to the wild with satellite tags. Buster, a released dolphin, is out there somewhere, along with Echo and Misha, who are sometimes sighted.
   Meanwhile, back at the lab, aquaculture experts are involved in a breeding program for sturgeon that, having survived for 120 years, are facing extinction in the Caspian. There is a breeding program for locally prized snook, as well. Red tide is also the focus of intensive research.
   Mote has a mind-boggling list of research projects. It provides a beehive laboratory world devoted to marine and medical research, aquaculture, and coral reef studies. New avenues of research open almost daily. It’s all a far cry from the two-room trailer in Placida, where Eugenie Clark started Cape Haze Marine Laboratory in 1955. As Clark’s international recognition grew, the lab was moved to Sarasota in the early 1960s. There, it found a benefactor in William R. Mote. He brought in Perry Gilbert, an expert in shark behavior, as director during an era when facilities, the staff, and reputation grew at a headlong rate. In 1969, Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium moved to its ideal site on City Island—neither a city nor an island, but a spit in Sarasota Bay.
   All three Mote pioneers remain interested in lab activities and the well being of the enterprise they launched and guided to international success. Each owns an inscribed brick in the courtyard of the new Connector building, part of the new 37,000-square-foot expansion.
According to Mahadevan, the expansion provides labs and offices for scientists who have been sitting on one another’s desks with no place to hang a briefcase. Now with a new site, the public can look in on scientists as they go about their work.

Studying Sharks
Some of the business includes shark research, which is Mote’s trademark. Shark study generates a lot of public and private interest, because it hints strongly that it may lead to a breakthrough in cancer research. Sharks do not get cancer. Indeed, the shark’s entire immune system is more efficient than that of humans, although ours is more evolved.
   Because you just don’t go out and catch a shark every day, the lack of sharks and knowledge of prior diet and exposure have hampered research. In 1981 Mote scientists found that they could breed and maintain a controlled population of clearnose skates, which are closely related to sharks and rays. Like sharks, their skeletons are entirely cartilage; and like sharks, they don’t get cancer. Scientists now have access to skates from embryo through every stage of maturity.

Research has zoomed ahead.
Designated by Congress as a Center for Shark Research (CSR), Mote’s mission includes basic and applied studies of all aspects of shark biology from anatomy to ecology and fisheries science, often in cooperation with organizations such as the National Marine Fisheries Service. CSR director Robert Hueter and his team collect and tag sharks on Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula and continue mapping all shark pupping areas on all sides of the Gulf of Mexico and parts of the Caribbean.
Mote holds an annual college-level course in shark biology at Atlantis, a $100-million resort in the Bahamas. Scientists from Mote, the University of South Florida, and the National Marine Fisheries Service teach the weeklong course. Twenty students—some from as far away as Norway—spend a week in laboratory sessions, aquarium studies, snorkeling along the reefs, and scuba diving with sharks.

Growing Prestige
As Mote has grown, so have the prestige and influence of its staff of 50-plus. In the past year, Mote scientists, all with impressive credentials, have published 42 manuscripts, with 15 more submitted for review. They have published 14 abstracts and book reviews, and have racked up 83 unpublished abstracts and technical reports.
   As exploration and research delve deeper, Mote develops additional ways to share knowledge. There is outreach through videos and participation in the Jason research voyages, as well as through international conferences and interchanges of scientists around the globe. An offshoot of the laboratory, Mote Environmental Services Inc., shares its expertise in marine resource management with countries all over the world. It was awarded a contract, for example, to develop regulations for offshore oil drilling in the Caspian and Aral seas.
   Other outreach programs include Monday Night at Mote, with films and lecture; a speakers’ bureau, science fair assistance, Elderhostel programs, student field trips, Mote Explorers, marine science summer studies, and Mote’s Science VideoLink. Mote also hosts popular sleepovers—Moonlight with the Manatees and Sleep with the Sharks—during the winter season. After learning plenty about the animals, the young visitors bed down beside the tanks listening to a storyteller while quiet bubbles and burbles lull them to sleep.
   Volunteer indoctrination alone reaches more than 1,000 people. A 10-week course—required of docents and available to all volunteers—prepares them to work as aquarium guides, cashiers, lab technicians, boat mechanics, groundskeepers, communication specialists, gift-shop clerks, and office personnel. “With expansion, we need more and more volunteers,” says volunteer coordinator Andrea Davis. “Volunteers are an integral part of Mote.”
In addition to home base on City Island, Mote maintains the Mote-Tropicana Aquarium at Sarasota-Bradenton Airport; coordinates exhibits at the Imagination Hands-on Museum and Aquarium in Fort Myers; operates the Pigeon Key Marine Research Center where it studies coral reefs; and is splashing through uncharted waters in the unstudied wildlife of Chassahowitzka and Weeki Wachee rivers.
   While a committed board of trustees headed by chairman Alfred Goldstein, a dynamic advisory council, foundation grants, and government funding help keep Mote afloat, much of its support comes from the 4,000 members. Small-scale gifts are sought and welcome at Mote. You can underwrite a gallon of water for $1, for example, or an inscribed brick for the courtyard for $100. Above all, Mote welcomes members at levels from $20 and up.
   Even if all you want to do is unwind for an hour, visit the aquarium. It’s habit-forming.

Ann Travelstead is a freelance writer based in Sarasota, Florida.