Adam F.
Yelp
This place looked fun, but I wasn't sure if it'd really be worth $25 to visit, since they really hype up their more expensive offerings over just the base ticket. I can confirm: it is totally worth $25. It looks small on Google maps, but that's just because they don't have any bells and whistles, it's just nonstop marine mammals, all the time, everywhere you look. They have one sort of show or another going basically all the time (except for a couple times a day when they take breaks and just show videos). I could honestly have stayed all day (we had to get back to Miami, so I only stayed for a couple hours, which was not quite enough time).
I learned a lot about dolphins and sea lions, but more importantly, holy *carp* the animals were super cute, and you get to be right up close, much closer than a traditional sea life place like Seaworld.
As they show, their shows are actually just as much for the animals' benefit (training, etc.) as for the humans - I especially liked the show that was basically just free play, where they let the sea lions (some of whom were basically toddlers!) play with whatever toys they wanted, and talked about how each of them has their own personality... the cutest thing was how apparently one of them thinks the absolute most fun game on the planet is to bonk a volleyball over the fence and then make their trainer run and fetch it from the ocean - and then right when they were describing that, she came up with a new game, bonk the volleyball right under the pedestrian bridge where it's even harder to retrieve. Improv comedy at its finest right there.
So yeah. Totally worth it. (Make sure to use the promo on their website if you can buy tickets at least a day in advance.)