Death at SeaWorld: Shamu and the Dark Side of Killer Whales in Captivity

by David Kirby

  The leading perpetrator, the big male orca with the collapsed fin, was named Tilikum, a word from the Chinook language meaning “friend” or “friendly people.”

  It was the first time that anyone had been killed by a killer whale in captivity (or anywhere else), but it would certainly not be the last. Three more people would die over the next two decades; Tilikum would be responsible for two of them, twenty-six hundred miles away in SeaWorld Orlando.

  Nineteen years later, almost to the date, he would savagely attack and dismember beloved orca trainer Dawn Brancheau. The killing would throw coals on the increasingly heated argument over whether it is appropriate, ethical, and safe to confine the ocean’s top predators—highly intelligent, mobile, and family-bound animals—to what is, essentially, an Olympic-size swimming pool dug far away from their native waters and free-swimming kin.

  * * *

  The pleasant city of Victoria, British Columbia, clings like a cockle to the bottom of expansive Vancouver Island, North America’s largest west-coast land mass stretching 290 miles over large tracts of alpine wilderness, despoiled by intermittent rectangles of deforested earth.

  Back in 1991, the northern half of the island was relatively undeveloped, with an eerie end-of-the-earth feel deepened by the wisps of gray mist that swirl around the lonely granite peaks and filter through the thick stands of cedar and western fir that rise along the lower slopes.

  At the time, the north island was a destination almost exclusively for those who wished to flee the world, fish for salmon, log timber, commune with Native people, or observe wildlife up close—especially killer whales. There was, quite literally, little else to do.

  In February of 1991, marine biology graduate student Naomi Rose, twenty-eight, was holed up in a deserted north-island fishing lodge perched on low, wooded bluffs overlooking an isolated inlet 240 miles from Victoria’s SeaLand. The appropriately named Hidden Cove Lodge is tucked into the island’s northeastern coast, where the broad Queen Charlotte Strait funnels south into the river-like Johnstone Strait, which separates Vancouver Island from the Broughton Archipelago—a dense warren of forested islets—and the mainland coast.

  Naomi was lodge-sitting. She had agreed to guard the place—a contemporary wooden-beam-and-glass inn with a cathedral-ceilinged great room that peers out over the chilly cove—against vandals and teenagers throughout the lonely winter. In exchange, she received weekly provisions, fuel to run the generator five hours per day, and an unperturbed place to analyze the whale data she’d collected. Naomi had isolated herself in this remote corner of Canada to complete the number crunching required for her dissertation, “The Social Dynamics of Male Killer Whales, Orcinus orca, in Johnstone Strait,” which she was preparing for her PhD in biology from the University of California at Santa Cruz.

  Naomi was utterly alone. At this time of year, two dozen people, maximum, might be staying within a twenty-minute boat ride of the lodge. A car ride was out of the question: There were no roads to Hidden Cove, no way in or out, except by vessel over the often-turbulent inland waterway.

  Naomi didn’t mind being alone. Every year since 1986 she had ventured to Johnstone Strait to observe killer whales up close in their native habitat—in particular the sixteen distinct pods that travel through these northern waters every summer in search of their favorite meal, chinook salmon. Each year, Naomi had camped in close quarters with a half dozen or so other students on the rocky shoreline of West Cracroft Island, about eleven miles south of Hidden Cove. Under those conditions, six easily became a crowd, and Naomi would wander off down the cliffs for some peaceful isolation, alone with her thoughts and perhaps a flying squirrel or two.

  But those visits came in the summer months, when Johnstone Strait bustles with pleasure craft, fishing boats, and whale-watching tours. Now, however, Naomi was by herself on a silent cove in the bowels of winter. The low-hanging fog and freezing drizzle only magnified her isolation.

  She had been warned. The two-story lodge had been built by Dan Kirby, a local entrepreneur and architect of no-nonsense Canadian-Irish stock who based his blueprints on what he calls a “two-beer” design. (“I sat down, drank two beers, and designed it.”) Dan was skeptical about hiring this single young female to take care of his property over the winter. When Naomi met with him, he sized her up with an odd mix of curiosity and skepticism. Who was this short (five-feet-two-inch) Asian-American (Japanese-Korean mother, Jewish-American father) woman, from California? Was she really cut out, physically and mentally, for a protracted winter solo in Hidden Cove?

  “Do you even know how to chop wood?” Dan politely queried. “We have a wood-burning stove. It’s the only source of heat.”

  Naomi was unfazed. “I chopped plenty of wood on West Cracroft, Dan,” she said flatly.

  “So you think you know how to live in the woods?”

  “I have lived in the woods.”

  “Yes,” he said, “but that was in the summertime, when the strait is full of people and you don’t freeze to death. You do realize there will be very few boats out on the water, right? You’re on your own now. And when you go out on the water, take a radio with you. You need a life jacket and a bailing can, too. If you break down or hit a shoal, nobody’s going to come by and rescue you.” And, he added, not everyone could live in the big lodge all alone. Some had fled in a cold sweat, complaining of odd creaks, groans, and other ghostlike occurrences.

  Naomi laughed. But just two months into her gig, she began showing signs of an unsettling syndrome that can afflict lone caretakers at secluded outposts: a restless cabin fever, aggravated by the deeply disturbing sensation that one is, perhaps, not quite as alone as one had imagined.

  The tough young graduate student was secretly haunted by the feeling that someone might be out there, lurking in the black Canadian night. Some evenings, she preferred to turn off the generator and sit in the pitch dark, rather than run the risk of attracting an observer, staring at her every move through the picture windows.

  One night in December, Dan Kirby and his wife, Sandra, found Naomi alone in the lodge without a single light on. Dan knew deep-woods heebie-jeebies when he saw them, and he staged an intervention of sorts, diagnosing his caretaker with “being bushed” (British Columbian for forest jitters) and boating her back to his well-lit house in Port McNeill for dinner and a mug of warm cider, followed by a few days of Christmastime relaxing with friends in town.

  In late February, Naomi was getting ready to finish up her data analysis on whale behavior and head back down to Santa Cruz, which seemed like midtown Manhattan compared to this place. Her studies were finished, the five summers of observing orcas in Johnstone Strait were over, and—like most people who spend a decent amount of time close to killer whales—her life would never be the same.

  Naomi was about to become a full-fledged scientist, but she was also a human being, with the entire range of emotions and reactions that goes with our complex species. We can’t help but have a physical, even jolting reaction when encountering certain phenomena, and not just food, danger, or sex. We humans—even scientists—respond to beauty, majesty, power, size, and intelligence, and no animal possesses all those things more than Orcinus orca.

  Naomi had seen killer whales before, at SeaWorld, Marineland, Vancouver Aquarium, and other venues, and she had taken in the orca shows with a mixture of scientific detachment and entertainment-park amusement. She was interested in, but hardly moved by, captive orcas. But SeaWorld was nothing like seeing killer whales in their natural habitat, surrounded by the unspeakable beauty of Johnstone Strait, with its countless rocky islands, dense forests, and snow-covered peaks that rise from the distant mist.

  The mist: For a while it seemed to be permanent. When Naomi first arrived on West Cracroft Island, in June of 1986, the strait was socked in for several days. She couldn’t even see the water, let alone any whales.

  But she could certainly hear them, maybe fifty feet offshore, breaking the foggy silence with power
ful bellows of air and vapor bursting from their blowholes. Listening to one of these colossal mammals come up to breathe is almost as electrifying as seeing it. The sense of size and power one gets simply from the pah-WOOSH of exhalation is exhilarating.

  But Naomi had come to Canada to see wild whales, not just listen to them. She waited for the skies to clear.

  “Whales today!” the first-year grad student wrote in her journal the night of June 28, 1986. “And very close up, too.” She had been out with her fellow field assistants from UCSC, at the tiller. The mist had finally lifted, revealing a pale blue sky hovering over water as smooth, green, and glassy as a 7UP bottle. Naomi’s heart raced as the little boat pulled tight alongside members of the A pod, one of the largest clans of killer whales in the Pacific Northwest.

  There were several adult females with their calves, a few of them recently born infants. There were frisky adolescents and a number of full-grown males whose straight, tall dorsal fins towered like black sails high over the boat, which was dwarfed by the whopping multi-ton males.

  On this morning, A pod was busy socializing as its members swam around in a small area, rubbing against each other, vocalizing wildly, and seeming to have the time of their lives. If killer whales throw summertime parties, this was surely one of them.

  When orcas are in a frolicking mood, anything can happen. Every so often and without warning, a whale would career from the sea just yards from the boat—a massive explosion of black and white dripping in salty froth—before crashing back down from its breach, creating a thunderous clap that could be heard for miles around on such a calm day. Naomi’s jaw was agape at so many whales amusing themselves around the boat when two of the infants, known as A49 and A45, leapt from the water not ten feet from her, dousing the boat’s occupants with the icy splash of their combined downward thrust of a thousand pounds. The young calves, with two kicks of their flukes, playfully swam away, leaving behind a wake that rocked the boat like a leaf in a rapid.

  “Quite a shocker!” Naomi marveled in her journal. “It was so amazing knowing who they were and following them so closely. It was quite startling to suddenly have A45 right next to us. I started moving away, but it turns out that running the engine, even a little, is the worst move. So I turned it to idle after the others shouted at me to stop. It was really something.”

  What struck Naomi that first day was the velocity of these animals. It was snail-paced compared to bottlenose dolphins, which dash about like frenetic teenagers on speed in a flash of quicksilver. Instead, these giant creatures seemed to move around deliberately, calm and unhurried. “It’s all very majestic,” she told her colleagues over a late-evening campfire under the stars. “It’s like watching them in slow motion, comparatively speaking with dolphins. It’s totally emotional. Very visceral.”

  One summer, when Naomi and some of her field assistants were following whales along the coast of West Cracroft, they came across a lone female whose rostrum was crammed up against a crevice in the wall of the shoreline. She was fishing. The whale had chased a large salmon into the crevice, which she had completely blocked with her head, depriving the fish of circulating seawater to replace the dwindling oxygen supply in what had become its rocky death chamber. Naomi had heard of this cunning practice before, which is apparently unique to Johnstone Strait orcas, but she had never dreamed she would actually see the inventive use of a craggy cliff as a tool. How on earth did this female learn to deprive fish of oxygen? Her mother must have taught her, Naomi surmised.

  “Drop me off over by those rocks,” she said. “I want to take a closer look.”

  Naomi climbed from the boat and tiptoed over to a ledge above where the whale was patiently awaiting her meal. Naomi had never been so close to a wild orca before, maybe five feet away, almost close enough to reach out and touch the animal—an understandable urge that she subdued.

  Two things overwhelmed the grad student that day. One was the sheer mass of the creature—from this close, she seemed as big as an airplane, her enormous ebony back rising up over her bulbous head like the front of a 747. Naomi was in awe.

  The other amazing thing was the whale’s utter awareness. She had watched Naomi approach, but did not move: The whale was far too intent on wearing down her oxygen-deprived prey, waiting for the dazed fish to come bumbling from its crevice and into her mouth. Naomi figured that this ingenious form of foraging was not only a low-energy enterprise for the whale, it was probably entertaining as well.

  Naomi crouched down, but the orca did not flinch. Instead, her big black eye, the size of a cow’s, met Naomi’s in an instant flash of interspecies recognition, perhaps even communion. The eye stared back at Naomi, who took the look to mean something like, “Don’t think I don’t notice you there. I do. But I have to concentrate on catching my lunch, so don’t interrupt.”

  To the marine biologist, it was an extraordinary moment. This animal had more than mere intelligence. She had a consciousness. She had opinions. And, Naomi thought, the killer whale had no interest in harming her.

  There’s a mind down there in the water, Naomi marveled to herself later that day at camp. The way she felt when she saw these killer whales up close in the wild, well, it was hard to explain. She later described the emotion, but she couldn’t express why she felt it.

  “Why don’t you feel that way when you see this really cool salmon leap from the water? Why don’t you feel that way when you see a giant Steller’s sea lion hanging out on a rock, or even a gray whale or a humpback breaching in the ocean? It’s not the same. There’s just not the same awe. With orcas, there’s a lot of awe.”

  Naomi knew that, after humans, killer whales are the most socially and ecologically complex animals on earth, and certain types of orcas are the most socially stable animals of all. No other species but Homo sapiens is so diverse in its rules and traditions governing such things as diet, mating, family relations, group size, foraging, or communications. It’s why renowned whale scientists Hal Whitehead and Luke Rendell concluded in their research, “The complex and stable vocal and behavioral cultures of … killer whales appear to have no parallel outside humans and represent an independent evolution of cultural faculties.”2 That’s right: Orcas have their own cultures.

  This was certainly true for the fish-eating and highly social Northern Resident orca community that Naomi chose to study. The Northern Residents inhabit the inland waters of northern Vancouver Island in the summer months. At the time, they numbered 185 animals.

  Resident orca communities, dominated by females, are populated by intensely social whales that travel in large, stable groups centered on a matriarch, typically the oldest living female. Each pod has its own signature collection of clicks, whistles, creaks, and groans, though some vocalizations overlap among pods. They mainly eat fish and are particularly fond of chinook salmon, which are large and rich in energy: more bang for the whale’s caloric buck. Thanks to their highly sophisticated echolocation (a form of sonar), orcas can distinguish a species of salmon by its size, or by echolocating inside the fish’s body to determine the dimensions of its air bladder.

  “Residents travel in matrifocal [centered on the mother] units called matrilineal groups,” Naomi wrote in her dissertation. “A matrilineal group usually consists of a reproductive female (the matriarch), her dependent calves, her juvenile and adolescent offspring and her known or presumed adult son(s),” she said. “A matrilineal group can also consist of a post-reproductive matriarch and her presumed adult son(s).”

  “The outstanding feature” of Resident orca society is that neither sex wanders from the natal family and its home range, something “rarely seen in birds or mammals,” Naomi continued. “However, the degree to which both sexes associate with their mothers may be unique.” As young Resident females begin to produce their own calves, they spend more time away from their mother, eventually establishing their own matrilines within their particular pod, from which they never disperse.

  But male Resid
ents are another story entirely. They spend most of their time by their mother’s side, from infancy through old age. They may swim off for a few hours or days to mate with females from other matrilines or pods, but in the end they always come back to their mother.

  Male Resident orcas, in other words, are the planet’s ultimate mama’s boys.

  “A son stabilizes his association with his mother at about ten years of age at a relatively high level (40–75% of his time is spent within a body length of his mother) and appears to maintain this association throughout the rest of his life,” Naomi wrote. “My study focuses on the social dynamics of male killer whales of the Northern Resident community.”

  On the evening of February 20, 1991, after the Pacific weather had offered up a fairly uncommon snowfall, Naomi was working on the computer at her favorite table in the dining area. She was engulfed in her data on the social behavior of Resident males, and how orca society could permit these testosterone-charged and disruptive males to stay with their mother for life.

  Suddenly, there was a bang! at the picture window.

  The loud noise startled Naomi and pierced her heart with terror. Was her imagined backwoods killer finally at her doorstep? She looked up. A large man was plastered against the window, his face contorted into an evil snarl, a string of drool descending from one corner of his mouth. Naomi gasped and jumped in her chair.

  But it was only Dan Kirby, playing a practical joke on his young caretaker while delivering some supplies. She knew he would be coming, she just didn’t expect him quite then. Recovered from her shock, she welcomed him inside and they began to chat.