In 1902, The United States Bureau of Fisheries (USBF) opened a permanent marine laboratory on Pivers Island in Beaufort, North Carolina. The two-story structure, situated on a nearly inaccessible island, contained a public aquarium in addition to laboratory and research space. The new Beaufort station was not the only marine laboratory with a public aquarium attached; The Naples Zoological Station, USBF laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts and the Scripps Oceanographic Institution in La Jolla, California all housed private laboratories and public aquariums in tandem. These spaces were ostensibly dedicated to separate endeavors- scientific investigation and public entertainment respectively. Historians have highlighted the initial inclusion of an aquarium at Naples as economical: the admission to the aquarium space could help fund the marine laboratory (Groeben, 1985). This understanding of the motives and advantages for maintaining a public aquarium at American stations has not been questioned. This paper will challenge the vision of the attachment of public aquariums to marine laboratories as a separate, entirely economically driven endeavor. Utilizing records from the USBF Beaufort and Woods Hole laboratories and the Scripps Oceanographic Institution, and drawing on the work of Mary Sunderland, Karen Rader and Victoria Cain, I will show that these seemingly separate spaces were co-producers of knowledge about marine organisms and their native environments. Closer inspection reveals a complex network of interactions between the public aquarium and marine laboratory spaces. Laboratory and aquarium spaces shared similar technologies, organisms, and workers. The requirement of maintaining captive organisms, for experimentation or display, linked these two spaces and facilitated conversation between private and public science spaces. Analyzing these spaces together sheds light on the interaction between public science and laboratory spaces and prompts new questions about the role of public institutions in the scientific process.