Celebrating 50 Years of The Marine Mammal Center
The Marine Mammal Center is celebrating 50 years of creating a healthy ocean for marine mammals and humans alike. With ocean conditions rapidly changing, this work is more important than ever.
From its very beginnings in 1975, the Center has held marine mammal welfare at its core. This remains true today, while our organization has grown and evolved significantly over the years – especially in the last decade. We continue to respond to marine mammals in distress and provide them with life-saving care, but our mission extends beyond that now. While much of this work is about giving individual patients the care they need for the best possible second chance, it is also about populations as a whole, the health of our ocean and human health.
As we celebrate our 50th anniversary, we celebrate the growth of the Center and our successes throughout the decades – including gaining insights from the more than 24,000 patients we’ve rescued, scientific discoveries that increase the understanding of our ocean’s health, achievements in student education and public outreach, contributions to endangered species conservation, efforts to advocate for a healthy ocean and more. Through our first 50 years of research, which has been cited in scientific literature more than 2,000 times, we have learned that the fate of marine mammals is closely linked to our own. By better understanding these connections and finding solutions for the threats marine mammals face, we take action to protect our future and inspire the next generation of ocean advocates.
One of the landmark successes we’re celebrating in conjunction with the Center’s 50th anniversary is the 10th anniversary of Ke Kai Ola, our conservation program and hospital dedicated to protecting the endangered Hawaiian monk seal. For more than a decade before opening Ke Kai Ola, the Center worked closely with partners in Hawai‘i to provide medical care to this species. In 2014, we took that work to the next level by opening the doors of Ke Kai Ola. Now, as we celebrate Ke Kai Ola’s 10th anniversary, we are also celebrating the growth of not only our Hawaiian monk seal conservation program but also the growth of the population. In 2022, the Hawaiian monk seal population surpassed 1,500 for the first time in 20 years, and nearly 30 percent of those animals are alive today directly due to conservation efforts led by NOAA and its partners like us. Today, we are a lead responder for this species on Hawai‘i Island and Maui, providing outreach to beachgoers as well as inspiring students through our education programs.
We are deeply grateful for the supporters, volunteers and staff who have championed our work, including programs like Ke Kai Ola, over the last five decades. As we celebrate the success of our past, we know our work must continue.
Our ocean is in trouble, and it is more important than ever to protect the marine ecosystems that are vital to the health of all life on Earth. We must educate and inspire people to act in support of ocean, marine mammal and human health—our collective future depends on it.
Will you join us for the next 50 years and beyond?