Aquarium Encounters - Marathon, Florida Keys

Assortment of vids featuring the various exhibits at Aquarium Encounters in Marathon, compiled from two separate trips. At Aquarium Encounters you're able to get up close to the critters and feed nurse sharks, sting rays, Rex the African Spurred tortoise, and even swim in the coral reef tank with all the tropical fish. It's not a huge and flashy place, but if you're in Marathon, and you love ocean life (and tortoises....and turtles....and alligators as well, as they have baby and juvenile alligator displays...) then it's worth checking out. The two times I've been there were during the summer/off season, so it was pretty peaceful actually, though during Season it's much different from what I was told. The back end of the property runs alongside the water, so you can watch the boats go by as well. www.floridakey...
(Update: I am just so glad I made the effort to go down to the Keys when I did for Memorial Day and July 4th and got the footage that I did [of which contributed to this particular video compilation], overriding the intellectual resistance to not go due to holiday traffic. Because little did I know at the time that the Keys were going to be devastated by the end of the summer by hurricane Irma. :/ It's a travesty watching vids here on UA-cam of the devastation, including places that I'd visited and favorite scenery that I enjoyed driving by, and seeing all the homes destroyed and people's lives in ruins. :/ )
Just another note that UA-cam flagged my video with "Includes Copyrighted Content"......because a song that Aquarium Encounters was playing overhead while I was recording at 38:29 - 39:53 called "Things That You Love" by "Pepper" through The Orchard Music on behalf of LAW Records is now in this - non monetized - video. I disputed the claim, citing that it was in the public domain, I didn't have control over the song being played at Aquarium Encounters, and again, I'm not out to make money off this vid, or anything on my channel. Didn't matter. They want to be like that, and uphold the copyright dispute for no logical reason. Meanwhile InGrooves was cool enough to release the copyright claim on the other song that appears in the background of this vid. So, that was nice.

[@CarissaConti]

NOTE: YT has an issue, site-wide, with comments. That's the only way to put it. It's all sorts of issues, including comments looking like they're posting, but when you refresh the page/wait 10 seconds they're gone. In other instances comments will look like they're posting if you're logged in, but if you pay attention you'll see that the comment count doesn't actually go up, and if you log out you won't see your comment. So it's not actually there, even though YT is tricking people into believing it's there. Comments that do go through will trigger an updated comment count for the channel owner in the back door section of their channel, but it doesn't change on the main comment page. So you'll see that one EVERYWHERE on YT.......Comment counts that show for example 150 comments, but when you scroll down you'll only see half that, and that includes the replies. Comments that show there are 10 replies, but when you click to expand the replies only 6 are showing up. *Where are the rest of the comments? Where are the missing replies?* YT notifications will tell people - sometimes - that they have a reply to a comment they made, but when you click to go to the reply on the video.....it's being hidden. :/ Meanwhile some comments will trigger notification alerts for the channel owner, but others don't. It seems to be a 50/50 thing, if you're lucky. There's no rhyme or reason to it, it's completely arbitrary. It just goes and goes, the list of issues that I and many others have experienced all around YT, and including on my very own channel. I supposedly haven't had a single comment on a single one of my almost 30 videos in many many months, even on the dash cam vid with over 150K views. That's not right.
YT has been screwing with my channel basically. Just like I went for a period of 4-5 months without a single new subscriber, when again I have vids getting thousands of hits per month. I hate YT, but, there's also not a better platform out there in terms of vid quality, audience reachability and other assorted features. But the broken comments sections of so many people's channels, along with the censorship that YT takes it upon itself to impose on comments site-wide, regardless of the channel owner's settings, makes it akin to China. And it's no surprise, since YT CEO Susan Wojcicki had visisted China several years ago, and when she returned.....YT comments have never been the same since. China knows how to censor like nobody's business and how to keep 1 billion+ people in the dark, and YT took a little visit to China to learn how to do the same over here. So hopefully if anybody posts a comment going forward (7/2/23) it will go through.

[@mariomitchell7065]

Thank you very much Carissa, this is a beautiful video.