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

by David Kirby

  Hydros are tricky. If not performed properly, they can be disastrous. Jeff had to steer the whale just so, keeping her far away from the hazardous edges of the pool. He also had to ride Katina at a perfectly calibrated angle—about sixty degrees. If he shot from the water at a lesser degree, the whale might fling him entirely from A Pool and into the audience in a blood-splattered disaster. If they came up too vertically, Jeff might land on top of Katina on the way back down, seriously injuring both of them.

  Katina knew what to do. She raced up through the water at the optimum angle, surfacing from A Pool at precisely the right spot. After several moments in the cold and quiet blue, it was something of a jolt to reemerge into the warm, muggy sunshine and the thunder of several thousand roaring fans. The cacophony was mixed with the blaring and rather bad jazzy sound track that sounded like theme music from a canceled eighties cop show, jarringly mixed with African-village spirituals.

  But Jeff was focused on how he and Katina were going to finish the feat, not the racket and flashing cameras of Shamu Stadium. He wanted to execute a beautiful swan dive: It was extremely important to look good upon entering the water, much like an Olympic high dive.

  Just as they reached their apex, about fifteen feet above the surface, Katina flicked her huge head skyward, lending Jeff an extra punch of energy that flung him even farther into the air. It was all projected on the huge JumboTron screens behind the stage, like two magnifying mirrors. The crowd bellowed its approval. A whistle blew above the din—recognition of a proper execution. It was coming from the “control trainer” onstage—another bridge to let Katina know she’d done the jump perfectly, and that her positive reinforcement (a reward) would soon follow.

  Katina continued her forward trajectory, almost like an exaggerated bow, but instead of reentering the water on her rostrum, she landed with a big frontal belly flop. As she was descending, Jeff completed his swan dive and soared in a great arc before gliding back down into the frothing pool with a minimal splash: a perfect 10. He emerged from the water and pumped a fist wildly in the air, a gesture of pure jubilance projected onto the JumboTrons for all to see.

  Hydros can be exhausting, and Jeff fought to catch his breath. But the hotdogging portion of “Shamu: World Focus” was just getting started. Jeff swam over to the stage and hauled himself out. He grabbed a metal pail full of herring and carried it over to Katina, then shoveled handfuls of thawed silvery fish into her bright pink mouth and directly down her gullet. Jeff knelt beside Katina and rubbed her head and eye patch. He smiled, cooed gently, and kissed the whale on her rostrum. The crowd let out a collective “Ahhhh.” Something was inherently endearing about an athletic young guy showing true affection for a fifty-five-hundred-pound sea creature—especially one with the power to shred him if she wanted to.

  But Katina bobbed softly in the water, her shiny black head resting amicably on the rounded concrete ledge. She did not break her gaze with Jeff. He was in full control of the animal; or at least it seemed that way.

  Now that Tina had been positively reinforced, it was time for the next stunt. Jeff got up and took three long strides back from the water to get a running start. Katina watched his every move, waiting to see which side of the pool he would dive into this time—it was always a mystery. Jeff took a step toward stage right and sprinted. Long before his feet left the concrete, Katina had already done a barrel roll and headed out.

  Jeff swam out to one side. Katina saw him and banked a turn to come around from behind. Jeff parted his legs in a split. Katina knew that was the signal for a “water pickup.” She swam up under him so that Jeff was straddling her back, about a foot in front of her dorsal fin. Katina surfaced, lifting Jeff’s body out of the water, with just his feet and ankles dangling in the pool. It felt like riding a horse in the water back in Lake Mills.

  They moved slowly, about walking speed. Jeff sprang to his feet. The fans were wowed. Jeff hunkered into a crouching position for balance and bent one knee to reach down and give Tina a quick tap-tap-tap of the hand.

  That meant “Go!” Katina stepped on it, pumping her flukes with a steady, forceful rhythm. You need to gain a certain speed to stay up on a surfboard, just like riding a bicycle. Balancing on an orca involves the same principle, so Jeff surfed around on the whale’s back at a fast clip, about 10 mph. He smiled and waved as they circled the perimeter. Jeff loved this behavior, as long as he didn’t get washed off by Katina’s own wake. It took a lot of practice for that not to happen.

  They usually went around the entire pool once. Jeff blew his own whistle, which was hanging around his neck on a string, to indicate that the surf ride was ending. He reached down and tapped Katina again: a “tactile bridge” until he could reward her with fish. As they approached the stage, Jeff adroitly leapt from the orca surfboard and onto solid concrete. The crowd roared its approval.

  The music kept up its loud, frenetic pace. Jeff took a running dive back into the water, and Katina rolled over once again to follow. She was such a great animal, Jeff thought, a true performer, the ultimate show woman. Katina the Cadillac was so much better to work with than some of the other Shamus—the stage name given to all performing orcas at SeaWorld. Katina’s daughter Kalina, better known as Baby Shamu, had much of her mother’s talents, but wasn’t quite on par. Gudrun, the Icelandic whale, was generally sweet and had her good days, but she never became consistent with hotdog behaviors such as hydros and rocket hops. She spent much of her time in the back, in E and G Pools, with the males. Gudrun’s daughter Taima, the half-Transient offspring of the late, great Kanduke, was exceedingly intelligent and, as a result, much less predictable than the other females. Eventually, she had to be banned from water work because of concerns for trainer safety.

  Katina waited to see what trick they would execute next. She knew hundreds of behaviors, and she was ready to perform any of them. Jeff opted for the ever-popular “stand-on.”

  A stand-on was done very much like a hydro: You waited in the water on your back with legs outstretched; Katina pushed your feet and you flipped over and steered down toward the bottom; you both swooped back up toward the surface. The difference was that this time, instead of launching from the water at one end of the pool at an angle, you started in the middle, and the whale pumped her way perpendicularly to the surface. She sprang straight up from the water, like some massive black-and-white jack-in-the-box. And instead of facing stage left or right, you faced directly into the wide-eyed audience, seated right in front of you.

  Jeff never moved his feet from Katina’s rostrum. Standing straight and tall, he popped out of the water first, waving at the astonished crowd as he rose like a statue of Neptune balanced on the tip of a giant blackfish pedestal. The control trainer whistled a bridge. Jeff flashed a bright grin at the very zenith of the stand-on, his mirror image projected on the screen just behind him. Then the two of them dropped vertically together back into the pool and disappeared.

  Jeff swam over to a small platform where he’d stashed some salmon, which Katina adored, behind a rock wall. He pulled himself from the water and grabbed some fish for the waiting orca.

  The last behavior, the showstopping finale, was known as the rocket hop. Jeff climbed onto the stage and pointed to a far corner of the pool. Dolphins, unlike most animals, understand the abstract thinking behind a finger point. If you have a cat and you point your finger at its food, it will look at your finger, not the food. But a dolphin will quickly learn to look where you are pointing and can be trained to go there. Jeff made an exaggerated point to the corner of A Pool. This was a hand signal to Katina, telling her to execute a “sighting bow” when she got to her appointed spot. She complied. Jeff dove down beneath her about twenty feet and laced his fingers together, bringing his arms into a bread-basket shape.

  Tina deftly slipped her rostrum into the interlaced fingers of Jeff’s hands. She coasted briefly as Jeff caught his balance by firmly placing one foot onto each pectoral fin. It was critical to maintain phy
sical contact at all three points (the head and the two flippers) or the rocket wouldn’t hop.

  They took off for the surface. This time, instead of doing the forward dive of a hydro, Katina knew she had to execute a high and precise back dive. At the apex, Jeff let go of Tina’s head, pushed off from her pectoral fins, and, as she fell back to earth on her back like a booster rocket, decoupled from her and continued to soar through the air, finally diving into the water several yards ahead of the great whale.

  Jeff caught his breath once more as he swam to the stage and got more fish for Katina. He had saved the best for last and lavished her with two plump salmon. He could rest up before the next show in a couple of hours. This round of “Shamu: World Focus” was almost over; only one segment was left, the big “splash” routine, when a large male came out and slapped his flukes on the surface, soaking the first few rows of squealing tourists, most of them children.

  Everyone always waited until the last person was safely out of A Pool before opening the gates and ushering in the massive male for the big splash finale. Nobody was allowed to be in the water when Tilikum was swimming around out there.

  7

  Residents vs. Transients

  Summers on West Cracroft Island were never easy, but Naomi still kept returning to the isolated field camp. She was hooked on the place, in love with the whales, and eager to get on with her dissertation. She knew her topic would be the Northern Residents. She wanted to apply the sociobiology theories she’d learned from Bob Trivers, her adviser, to her investigations and analysis.

  At the start of her second summer, in 1987, Naomi, Janice, and a crew of field assistants left Santa Cruz in two cars packed full of camping gear, field equipment, granola, and dried beans, overnighting at the home of Janice’s parents in Seattle. From there, it was a three-hour drive across the border to Vancouver, where Janice always stopped to spend a few hours at Vancouver Aquarium, set amid the firs and Sitka spruces of the city’s waterfront jewel, Stanley Park.

  That year, Janice had prearranged a VIP tour of the aquarium. The students watched the show starring three killer whales: Hyak II, Finna, and Bjossa (bee-YO-sah).

  Hyak II was a huge male captured in 1968 off Pender Harbour, British Columbia, along with six members of his Southern Resident pod. Finna and Bjossa were caught in Iceland and brought to Canada. Hyak quickly befriended them, and in 1987 he impregnated Bjossa. Finna, originally thought to be a female, turned out on closer inspection to have male genitalia.

  Naomi enjoyed the orca show—she harbored no qualms at that point about keeping killer whales in captivity and thought the performances were entertaining. After the show, the students went backstage where only trainers had access. They got to spend time getting close to the orcas, close enough to touch. Naomi admired the two charismatic adolescents and was overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of the giant male, Hyak II.

  They continued the journey over to Nanaimo, sleeping again at the home of Mike Bigg. By the end of the next day, Naomi was back in Telegraph Cove. Dave Bain and the Tessie had left Johnstone Strait, but Janice was still there, as was a used inflatable boat for their use, a fifteen-foot Avon borrowed from Ken Norris’s lab, which they named the Sparrowhawk. “It is so good to be back here. Everything familiar. Everything feeling right,” Naomi wrote in her journal at the opening of her second summer on the island, in 1987. “I already feel like this is home again. Rereading last year’s entries for these days, I realize I have already made a lot of spiritual progress by now, and seen a lot of sunshine, slept out in the rain.”

  Naomi shared the responsibility with Janice of hiring the field assistants in 1987 and was solely in charge after that. Finding quality people was not easy. Some of the students she took on were terrific, but not all. Naomi found that managing complex relationships in tight quarters was taxing. She wasn’t always at her most magnanimous when people messed up, which was often. But she was hardly running for Miss Congeniality. She had a PhD to earn. If people took umbrage that she occasionally bristled at their incompetence, so be it.

  “Some people think I’m a bitch,” she announced to her underlings one day. “I don’t have a problem with that as long as it helps me to get done what I need to get done.”

  Mostly, however, Naomi confined the bitching to her journal. By her third summer, now fully in charge of the field camp, she felt the burden of leadership. On July 25, 1988, she wrote:

  I am not happy. The stove isn’t working. People didn’t bring enough cooking gear. How did that happen? Nobody brought pots or pans or plates or utensils or pails.… Cooking is going to be a fairly dull and unpleasant business like this, and all the food buying got screwed up, and … AUGH.… I will end up spending so much more money than I needed to have, because of fuck-ups and malfunctions and just plain bad luck. I am so aggravated.… I don’t know. If I can get the lantern to work and the stove to work (I can’t believe all these brand-new things that don’t work!) and the struts come on Wednesday and I buy a big pot … I don’t know. Where’s the granola?

  One night an ember from the campfire smoldered all night and, in the early-morning hours, set fire to part of the campsite while everyone was still sleeping. Naomi’s tent was closest to the blaze—its crackling and popping woke her up. She scrambled to douse it before it spread. Other times bears foraged through the settlement in noisy nocturnal raids. The students kept their food locked up tight in a bear box. When that ran out of space, they hung groceries from tree branches. One day a woman camping on the island was jumped by a cougar. She got away, but was badly bitten and scratched. Jim and Bill raced over from Telegraph Cove to ferry her to a hospital.

  Then there was the “swim with the killer whales” moment. It happened with one of Naomi’s field assistants, a young New Yorker who’d quit his banking career and decided to spend a summer in British Columbia studying whales. He wanted to be a field biologist, and Naomi decided to take a chance on him. He was easygoing, had a great sense of humor, and knew how to cook—all valuable assets in a remote and sometimes tense campground.

  The killer whales had been swimming past camp nearly daily, stopping to graze on salmon in the bull kelp anchored near the cliff. One day they heard a group of whales on the hydrophone. Radio calls started coming in from the Gikumi and other vessels: “Hey, you guys, they’re gonna come right under your cliff!” It was Jim Borrowman, announcing the arrival of A5 pod.

  The former banker smiled. “Cool!” he shouted, then scrambled down the bluff to see the whales up close. Naomi watched from above as he ran to the beach and plunged into the fifty-degree water, without a wet suit. She grimaced. If the approaching whales didn’t finish him off, the icy water just might.

  Six whales were steadily traveling down the island’s edge, their backs and fins slowly rising above the surface then slipping beneath the water once again, like black submarines. Now the killer whales were thirty feet from the field assistant and extremely close to shore. He treaded water. Other students held their breath.

  The orcas disappeared. The powerful whoosh from their blowholes ceased. Everyone waited in the silence. Things grew tense. A minute went by, then two minutes, then three. Finally, the A5s resurfaced, maybe a hundred yards away, farther down the strait. They had either swum under, or around, the human in the water.

  Naomi breathed easier. She hadn’t thought the animals would bother him, and besides, it was not her job to be his mom. He knew he was taking a stupid risk, Naomi thought. Everyone has the right to act stupidly. On the other hand, these were top predators, aggressive hunters without enemies, wild and unpredictable. Swimming with them was not advisable, in Naomi’s view. Getting in the water with Resident orcas was risky. Swimming with Transients could be suicidal.

  Naomi figured that the A5s had heard the loud splash when the man jumped in and then processed the weird echolocation pinging off his unfamiliar mammalian form. The whales may have mistaken him for an outsize seal. Perhaps they couldn’t figure out what he was. Whateve
r their reasoning, they made the instant, collective decision to avoid the object altogether. They were too cautious and conservative to investigate the strange being.

  It was one of the many fascinating lessons of life on Johnstone Strait. Another intriguing trait about killer whales in this part of the world was the clear distinction between the Transient and Resident communities. The ecotypes are distinct populations even though they overlap in territory. When Mike Bigg and his colleagues first began identifying killer whales, they believed the Transients were outcasts from the larger and stable Resident pods. Only later did they discover the two groups began dividing along evolutionary lines about 2 million years ago. Their DNA indicated they had not interbred for more than ten thousand years. (Some scientists now believe that the two ecotypes should officially be designated distinct species, but the idea remains controversial in marine mammal circles. More genetic research is needed.)

  Naomi quickly learned to tell the two types apart, just by the pointed tips on the dorsal fins of the Transients, and by the way the mammal eaters moved in the water. Residents tended to travel in deliberate, forward-moving patterns. When they traveled together and surfaced to breathe and disappeared again, Naomi could predict their dive pattern. It was typically two or three short dives, ten to twelve seconds apart, followed by a “sounding,” a dive that lasts two or three minutes. They would usually resurface traveling in the same trajectory. Transients didn’t follow such predictable patterns. They were far more prone to roam about in erratic motions that made it hard to know where they would surface next, the better to sneak up on their intelligent prey.

  Prey was the other main distinction between the two groups. Residents wanted fish and Transients craved mammal flesh. Residents also vocalized intensively as they foraged, Naomi observed, possibly to tell each other where the salmon were hiding, or perhaps simply to express glee at the challenge of the chase. But Transients stalked silently—otherwise their prey would hear them coming. After a good stealthy kill, though, they often vocalized up a triumphant storm, accompanied by exuberant breaches into the air.