The Turtle Hospital: How a Marathon Motel Pool Became the World's First Sea Turtle Hospital

There is a green sea turtle in Marathon that cannot sink.

His name is Bubble Butt, and he has lived at The Turtle Hospital longer than almost anyone who works there. A boat hit him in 1989 — the propeller cracked his shell and left a pocket of air trapped underneath it that never went away. The air makes his back end float. He can paddle, he can eat, he can bask, but he can no longer dive, which for a wild sea turtle is a death sentence. So the staff glue small weights to the back of his shell to cancel out the buoyancy, and he lives out his days in a saltwater pool a few feet from the Overseas Highway.

Bubble Butt gave his name to a whole condition — "bubble butt syndrome," positive buoyancy from trauma — and he is the reason a lot of people cry a little on the tour. But the strangest thing about him isn't the turtle. It's the building he lives in. The world's first state-certified sea turtle hospital started life as a fishing motel with a swimming pool, and for a while, the building next door was a strip club.

A motel, a strip club, and a Volkswagen fortune

The improbable origin of this place runs through one man: Richie Moretti.

Moretti wasn't a marine biologist. He was a mechanic who got tired of cold winters, moved to central Florida, and built what became one of the largest Volkswagen repair operations in the country. In 1980 he came down to the Keys to fish, liked it enough to stay, and in 1981 bought the Hidden Harbor Motel — a modest 1951 property in a then-sleepy stretch of Marathon, the kind of place where anglers crashed for a night before heading back out on the water.

The motel had a saltwater pool. Moretti filled it with local fish and turned it into a small aquarium for guests. And that's where the whole thing pivoted on something almost too on-the-nose to be true: this was the height of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles craze, and the kids who wandered through kept asking the same question. Where are the turtles?

Moretti wanted to add some. But you can't just keep sea turtles — every species that swims off Florida is threatened or endangered, and the only way the state would let him hold them was as part of a licensed rehabilitation program. So he recruited a local veterinarian, built out the capability to actually treat sick and injured animals, and in 1986 earned certification as the first state-licensed veterinary hospital in the world dedicated solely to sea turtles.

The strip club came later. In 1991, Moretti bought the building next door — which had, in fact, been a nightclub — and gutted it into the main hospital: receiving room, X-ray, an operating theater. For the first two decades he bankrolled the whole operation with income from the motel, renting out rooms to pay for turtle surgery, until lodging finally ended in 2005. Somewhere in there, a guy who made his money fixing air-cooled engines became one of the most important sea turtle conservationists in the country.

What the tour actually shows you

Here's the part worth being clear about: you cannot just walk in and look at turtles. The only way in is a guided tour, and it's genuinely a tour of a working animal hospital, not a petting zoo with a gift shop attached.

Tours run on the hour and half-hour, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., every day, and last about 60 to 90 minutes. The education center and gift shop stay open until 6 p.m. The address is 2396 Overseas Highway, right in the middle of Marathon at roughly mile marker 48.5, and reservations are strongly recommended — call 305-743-2552 — because summer and holiday tours fill up and they cap the group sizes.

A guide walks you through the medical side first: the receiving area where new patients come in, the X-ray room, the operating room where the surgeries happen. You'll usually see turtles mid-rehab in the tanks — some in small holding tubs, some in bigger shared ones — at various stages of recovery. It's honest about the work. Not every animal makes it, and the staff don't pretend otherwise.

Then comes the payoff most people remember: the saltwater lagoon. This is the original 1951 motel pool, now a 100,000-gallon tide pool that houses the permanent residents — Bubble Butt and the other turtles too damaged to survive in the wild — plus animals nearly ready for release. Everyone lines the edge, gets a handful of food, and feeds them. Big, unbothered, ancient-looking animals gliding up to the wall. It's the moment the kids lose their minds and the adults go quiet.

What's actually wrong with the turtles

You come for the cuteness. You leave thinking about fishing line.

The Turtle Hospital treats loggerheads, greens, hawksbills, Kemp's ridleys, and the occasional giant leatherback — animals brought in from as far away as New England. And when you ask what put them here, the answers are uncomfortably human. Boat strikes, like the one that got Bubble Butt. Entanglement in fishing line and plastic. Flipper amputations. Hooks swallowed by turtles that mistook bait, or a plastic bag for a jellyfish.

But the single most common diagnosis is one you've probably never heard of: fibropapillomatosis. It's a disease that causes cauliflower-like tumors to grow on a turtle's eyes, neck, flippers, and internal organs — sometimes so badly the animal goes blind or can't eat. The tumors are driven by a herpesvirus, chelonid herpesvirus 5, and while the exact triggers are still being studied, outbreaks tend to cluster in warm, nutrient-polluted coastal water. In other words, the disease that fills these tanks is tangled up with the health of the water just outside them. That's the quiet argument the whole hospital makes without ever lecturing you: these animals are a mirror.

The turtles that never leave

Not everyone graduates. The permanent residents — Bubble Butt chief among them — are the animals whose injuries or disabilities mean the ocean would kill them. A turtle that can't dive, a turtle blinded by tumors, a turtle missing too many flippers. They stay in the lagoon for life, which for a sea turtle can mean decades.

There's something to sit with there. A permanent resident is, in one sense, a failure — an animal that couldn't be sent home. But they're also the ones that let 40,000-plus visitors a year stand three feet from a wild sea turtle and actually care about it. Bubble Butt has probably done more for turtle conservation floating in a converted motel pool than he ever could have out on the reef. The weights on his shell are a small, ongoing kindness, re-glued as they wear off, for an animal who will never know the arrangement he's part of.

The best part is free — and it's down the road

If the tour is the setup, the release is the punchline, and it doesn't happen at the hospital at all.

When a rehabbed turtle is medically cleared, The Turtle Hospital carries it a few minutes down the road to Sombrero Beach — Marathon's main public beach — and lets it go in front of a crowd. These public releases are free and open to anyone. Over the past year the hospital has sent off a string of named greens rescued from fishing line and fibropapilloma tumors: Wow, Haven — a 35-pounder who joined the Sea Turtle Conservancy's Tour de Turtles tracking race — and Pride, all cleared and returned to the Atlantic. There's a release on the calendar for Friday, July 10, 2026, at Sombrero Beach at 9:30 a.m.

Because releases depend on when an individual animal is ready, there's no fixed schedule — the dates get announced days ahead on the hospital's website and social channels. If you're going to be in the Keys, it's worth checking. Watching a turtle that arrived half-dead crawl down the sand and disappear into the surf is the kind of thing that reorganizes a kid's priorities for a week. It's also, not incidentally, the same beach where loggerheads come ashore to nest from spring through fall, so Sombrero pulls double duty as the place turtles both begin and begin again.

Is it worth it? An honest take

Yes — with one caveat. If you're expecting a big polished aquarium with dolphin shows and a food court, this isn't that, and you'll be underwhelmed. If you understand you're touring a small, scrappy, genuinely working hospital run by people who clearly love these animals, it's one of the most worthwhile hours in the Middle Keys, and it punches far above its ticket price.

What	2026 price*
Adult admission (guided tour)	$27
Child, ages 4–12	$13
Child under 4	Free
Tour length	60–90 min
Hours	Tours on the hour/half-hour, 9 a.m.–4 p.m.
Public releases at Sombrero Beach	Free

*A few older listings still show $38 adult / $19 child — prices drift, so confirm at turtlehospital.org or 305-743-2552 before you go.

Where it fits: the hospital sits almost exactly halfway down the Keys, so it slots naturally into a Marathon day. Pair it with the walk across the Old Seven Mile Bridge to Pigeon Key and lunch at the foot of the bridge, and you've got a full, un-touristy day that has nothing to do with a bar. It's also a smart, low-key stop if you're breaking up the drive on a Key West day trip — Marathon is the logical halfway pause, and this beats another gas-station Cuban coffee.

Book the first or last tour of the day to dodge both the heat and the crowds, bring sun protection (a lot of the tour is outdoors around the tanks), and go in knowing the emotional register can turn on a dime — one minute you're feeding turtles, the next your guide is explaining how one of them lost a flipper. If you like the idea of a Florida animal encounter that's built around conservation rather than spectacle, it pairs beautifully with swimming with the manatees up in Crystal River — both put you close to a threatened animal in a way that leaves it better off, not worse.

For a place that started as a motel pool and a mechanic's soft spot for turtles, that's a remarkable thing to be able to say. And if it hooks you, it's part of a whole Florida category of get-your-hands-a-little-dirty nature outings — the same instinct that sends people combing the shell line on Sanibel at low tide three hours up the Gulf. An hour with Bubble Butt is the reset you didn't know your beach trip needed.