Where do you put seven stingrays when the hurricane that wrecks their tank is the same hurricane that tears the roof off a Major League Baseball stadium forty minutes north? For a stretch of the past two years, the answer ran straight through Apollo Beach, and it says something about this stretch of South Shore that most people driving past the Manatee Viewing Center on Dickman Road never think to ask.
The manatees never missed a beat. During the 2024-25 season, the same winter that Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton tore through the region, the warm-water canal at Tampa Electric's Big Bend Power Station set a new attendance record: 1,100 manatees gathered at once, breaking the previous mark of 850 set the winter before. The animals that draw people to this free attraction every year kept showing up on schedule, cold front after cold front, regardless of what the storms had done to everything around them.
The rays did not get off so easy.
Same Storms, Two Landmarks
Cownose Cove, the touch tank where visitors have handled cownose rays since 2016, took a direct hit in September 2024 when Hurricane Helene flooded the habitat and compromised its filtration system. Thirteen days later, Milton arrived and scattered fiberglass insulation from a nearby destroyed building into the tank, contaminating both the water and the equipment that kept it clean. The Florida Aquarium, which supplies and cares for the rays under a partnership with Tampa Electric, pulled the animals out and moved them to its downtown Tampa campus for what turned into more than a year of repairs.
Here is the part that most visitors to the boardwalk never connect: those same rays had actually been living at Tropicana Field before the storm, part of the ballpark's own touch-tank exhibit behind the outfield wall. When Milton tore the dome's roof apart in October 2024, the rays rode out the storm inside the tank at the Trop before being relocated to the Aquarium days later. Two of the region's most recognizable free attractions, a wildlife center on the edge of Apollo Beach and a Major League ballpark on the other side of the bay, ended up sharing a recovery timeline because the same storm hit both of them within weeks of each other.
The Season the Touch Tank Sat Empty
Anyone who visited the Manatee Viewing Center during the 2025-26 season opening knew something was missing. As of early November 2025, Tampa Electric was still describing the repairs as nearly complete rather than finished, which meant the touch tank had now sat empty through an entire manatee season and into the start of a second one. Regular visitors who'd made a habit of the Cove found a staff member instead, explaining the delay and hoping, out loud, that it might reopen within a month.
It took a little longer than that. But by January 2026, the rebuild was done: a full restoration of the 8,300-gallon habitat, including a new gel coat on the tank itself, cleared the way for the Aquarium's animal care team to bring seven male cownose rays back home.
Stan Kroh, who manages Land and Stewardship Programs for Tampa Electric, put it simply when the rays returned:
"We are happy to welcome the rays back home to the Manatee Viewing Center. Along with the manatees, they are beloved ambassadors of Tampa Electric's environmental stewardship."
The animal care team spent time monitoring the rays' behavior in their restored environment before opening touch interactions back up to the public. Once they had, Cownose Cove was, for the first time in more than a year, a working exhibit again.
A Detour to the Ballpark
It did not last long. The same seven rays that came home to Apollo Beach in January 2026 moved again just three months later, this time to a newly renovated enclosure at Tropicana Field called the Cownose Clubhouse, positioned behind the right-center field wall. The timing was not a coincidence. The Rays played their entire 2025 season at Steinbrenner Field across the bay while the roof at Tropicana Field underwent a nearly $60 million repair, and the ballpark's own comeback story reached its finish line on April 6, 2026, when the team hosted the Chicago Cubs in its first home game there in 561 days. The rays were there for it, back in the tank they'd been pulled from a year and a half earlier.
The Rays remain the only Major League Baseball team with live animals in their ballpark, and for a few months this year, Apollo Beach was effectively where those animals waited out the rest of the region's biggest reconstruction project. It is a strange bit of trivia, but it is also a fairly good measure of how connected this corner of the bay is to the rest of it. A storm that damages a touch tank on Dickman Road and a storm that damages a stadium roof on the other side of Tampa Bay turn out to be the same storm, and the animals that moved between them lived through both recoveries at once.
What Reopens Here on November 1
The manatee season itself follows the same pattern it always has. The center at 6990 Dickman Road opens November 1 and runs through mid-April, ten to five daily, with the nature trail closing an hour earlier at four. It closes for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter, and shuts down early at three on Christmas Eve. Admission and parking are free, as they have been since the center opened in 1986, a run that has now brought in more than 7.4 million visitors total, including nearly 500,000 in 2023 alone.
The 900-foot boardwalk through the mangroves is still there, along with the 50-foot observation tower that gives you a clear view across the bay on a good day. Tampa Electric added two new webcams this past season, giving people who can't make the drive a live look at the canal from home. And somewhere out in that warm water is a manatee that has now returned to this same canal for 42 consecutive years, longer than most of the houses in Apollo Beach have been standing.
The touch tank itself is repaired and running again, restocked by the Aquarium's program. Whether the current rays are the same seven that did the trip to Tropicana Field and back is not something either organization has spelled out, and for a visitor walking the boardwalk this fall, it hardly changes what you're there to see. What changes is knowing that the tank you're looking at spent the better part of two years being fixed twice, once for a ballpark and once for itself, because the same storm found both places at the same time.
That is the kind of detail that does not show up on a map or a listing description, but it is the kind of thing that makes a neighborhood feel like somewhere specific rather than just a dot between Tampa and Sarasota. If you already call this stretch of South Shore home, you already knew the manatees would be back this November. Now you know the rest of the story too.
The Brenda Wade Team has spent decades getting to know this part of Tampa Bay one season at a time, from the boardwalks to the neighborhoods around them. When the day comes that you're ready to talk about what a home here is actually worth, we'll be exactly where we've always been.
