It’s official: The Miami Seaquarium is up for sale

MIAMI — The Miami Seaquarium, one of the country’s oldest marine mammal parks, is officially up for sale.

Since opening on county-owned land on Virginia Key in 1955, the Seaquarium has been part of a shared collective memory for generations of families.

But in recent years, there has been a shift in how people view marine mammals in captivity.

The death of Lolita, the beloved orca and oldest in captivity, before plans to release her to the ocean could be realized, further fueled scrutiny.

A string of searing U.S. Department of Agriculture inspection reports documented animal welfare violations and repeated facility failures.

A February 2024 USDA report stated that the park had “a single veterinarian” employed to care for “the 46 marine mammals, 50 birds and hunrdreds of fish, sharks and rays housed at the facility.”

Those issues placed the current operator, The Dolphin Company, in financial distress.

“As you can see in this filing, they are losing money every month,” Andrew Dawson, a bankruptcy law professor at the University of Miami, told Local 10 News. “The losses are piling up and this is an important thing for the judge to keep in mind.”

Those losses have totaled $1.5 million over five months, according to court documents. The park lost nearly a quarter of a million dollars in August alone.

Miami-Dade County moved to terminate the lease and evict the operator.

But that high-profile landlord-tenant fight between the county and MS Leisure Company, a Dolphin Company subsidiary, stalled when the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy after inheriting the already-aging park.

“The Seaquarium has about $30 million in debts,” Dawson said. “The court is saying, like, ‘How can we put this in the hands of someone with a high enough value that those claims will actually get paid out?’”

Now, the Seaquarium’s lease is up for sale as the company searches for someone willing to buy the physical assets on the property and step into the lease.

“The company will have a chance to try to come up with some plan that will maximize the value of their assets, including the lease,” Dawson said, calling it similar to a class action settlement. “The judge has to approve it because there are so many people who have an interest in this — creditors, the county itself, and others impacted.”

Court filings say the Seaquarium has 103 employees who will be paid during bankruptcy proceedings.

“What exactly happens to those jobs after a sale would depend on the terms of the sale itself and what the buyer intends to do,” Dawson explained.

At the same time, two Miami developers — Terra Group and Integra Investments — are angling for the redevelopment opportunity.

“There are two aspects to this,” Dawson said. “One is that you have to keep taking care of the animals, which is a big expense. (These are) not like machines that you can just shutter, like unplug, and that is part of the cost of operating this business during the bankruptcy, is keeping it open.”

He added, “The court is also going to have to make sure that whatever the plan is, to take the next step to this location, there is going to have to be some plan that complies with other relevant laws that might deal with the animals themselves.”

Dawson said a Chapter 11 bankruptcy “can only help a business that has a viable model.”

“If you don’t have a business model that is actually going to make profits, there is nothing bankruptcy can do,” he said. “The best bankruptcy can do at that point is give it breathing space to figure out who can make more money with this particular group of assets.”

Dawson said if the proposal has been fully briefed and all stakeholders have had a chance to be heard, the court could rule quickly. If not, the process may take longer.

The Seaquarium is “an amazing location,” he said; the question is, “Who could actually put that to a higher and better value that would maximize the return to everybody who is owed a claim?”

Copyright 2025 by WPLG Local10.com - All rights reserved.