What ' s ahead for Sea Life Park

Cancun-based DolphinQuest, which owned Sea Life Park for four years, has decided to sell it and concentrate on its marine parks closer to home in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean. The buyer is a Madrid company that is Europe's biggest operator of animal theme parks. It announced the purchase Thursday and specified it will keep the staff and management and invest in the park, which got 300,000 visitors last year. Sea Life Park had grown long in the tooth under the owner before DolphinQuest, a New York investor who grew tired of his Hawaii investments when he had trouble unloading his Waimea Valley park. Even the animals were old. DolphinQuest was both sensible and creative once it acquired the park. It made a virtue of the animals' age, allowing penguins to roam freely -- when younger they bit too much for that -- and charging extra to let people swim with the dolphins. It crunched the numbers and discovered that tourists alone would not make the park profitable, so they developed programs to encourage a couple trips a year by local families, adding a luau program at a spectacular location on the east end of the property. These directions should prove fruitful in time, but in a slowing economy it was probably wise to retrench, while the larger company that bought the park is more able to invest in some new infrastructure and advertising.