WILDLIFE & CONSERVATION
Mote Science Education Aquarium (Mote SEA)
Sarasota County · Gulf Coast
Mote Marine Laboratory's new aquarium at Nathan Benderson Park, opened in October 2025, with the research labs in view through the glass.
ABOUT THIS PLACE
Mote SEA opened on October 8, 2025, at Nathan Benderson Park, serving Sarasota and Manatee counties, and it replaces the aquarium Mote ran for decades on City Island. The building runs to 146,000 square feet on a twelve-acre campus. What it is built around is the idea that the public should watch science being done rather than only see the results: wall-to-wall glass lets visitors look straight into working laboratories. Three teaching labs cover biomedical science, marine ecology, and ocean engineering with artificial intelligence and robotics, and five workforce training labs give students real research experience. The plan is for more than 70,000 schoolchildren a year, with free programming for over 26,000 students from Title One schools. Mote itself runs 22 research programs and thirteen centers of excellence, working on several continents, and the aquarium is the public face of that rather than a separate operation. The old City Island site closed when this one opened
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