by David Kirby
Two of the males, Ramu and Kilroy, were sold to the new SeaWorld theme park in San Diego. The smallest female, Katy, who was about a year old at capture, lived for just two months in Seattle. Her cause of death was not revealed. The largest female from Yukon Harbor, a young female named Kandu, stayed in Seattle as a popular tourist attraction for three years before Griffin sold her to SeaWorld.
“That left Walter, the fifth calf from Yukon Harbor,” Paul explained. “Griffin sold him to a regional boat show, which brought him to Vancouver for display as a publicity stunt.” But the fourteen-foot-long, three-thousand-pound animal refused to eat. His new owners knew nothing about cetaceans and tried to force-feed Walter seventy-five pounds of dead fish and hamburger meat a day. He lost weight and developed a terrible skin rash. When Vancouver Aquarium director Murray Newman saw the ailing orca, he offered the boat show $25,000 and took Walter off their hands.
Only then did officials realize that Walter was a female. They renamed her Skana. She was given live fish and finally began eating again: seventy-five pounds of cod, salmon, herring, and flounder every day. Skana regained her health and her skin cleared up.
In the spring of 1968, about six months after Paul started work, another large orca roundup took place, this time in Garden Bay, one of the many picturesque inlets of Pender Harbour, a deeply crenellated anchorage fifty miles northwest of Vancouver. One evening, some local fishermen were attending a bowling league banquet in Secret Cove, about ten miles from Garden Bay, when they heard that orcas had been spotted. They were acutely aware of the swift profits that Griffin and others were amassing by snatching whales from local waters. They raced back to the marina at Garden Bay, loaded their boats with nets, and went out to trap the killer whales.
The men spotted the pod at nine that night, catching seven orcas in their nets. They immediately called SeaWorld, Marineland, and Marine World Africa in California, in addition to the Seattle Marine Aquarium and the Vancouver Aquarium.
Paul’s boss, Murray Newman, flew up to inspect the catch. Paul made a trip as well, armed with recording devices to capture the animals’ vocalizations. The roundup had begun when a large male, later named Hyak (Chinook for “swift” or “hurry”), was caught and held in a netted pen in the harbor. Before long, members of his extended family, believed to be the Northern Resident A5 pod, entered the harbor and swam up to the net. The captive whale and his free-swimming relatives vocalized wildly and relentlessly. The pod seemed unafraid of the men, machines, and nets that surrounded them. They wanted to be near Hyak, regardless of the consequences. It didn’t take long before they were captured, too.
Over the next several months, Paul shuttled back and forth from Vancouver to record the whales’ sounds. In May, two males named Corky I and Orky II were flown to Marineland of the Pacific in Palos Verdes. Paul watched as they were separated from the rest of the pod. “The vocalizations were the most frequent and excited when these two whales were being prepared for transportation to Marineland,” he said. “Their pen was moved across Pender Harbour so that they were separated from the others by more than a mile. I recorded the continual exchange between the groups of whales. During the final stages of removing them from the water, the vocalizations became increasingly frantic. They seemed to be associated with emotion and trauma.”
That trauma hardly deterred Marineland officials. “Do we want to buy one? You bet we do!” Marineland curator John Prescott gushed to the Vancouver Sun, which noted that the quote was offered “gleefully.”
Marineland already had one killer whale—a female named Orky I, a Northern Resident from I pod—when the males Corky I and Orky II arrived from British Columbia. Orky I only lasted about two years longer at Marineland—she died of pneumonia in July 1969 at the approximate young age of seven. The following year, Corky I died from a severe abscess in his body cavity, also at age seven. Corky I was replaced by Corky II, a female A-pod Northern Resident captured in Pender Harbour, in 1969 (Paul had returned to witness that chaotic scene as well). Corky II was the orca that Naomi saw perform with Orky II at Marineland when she was a teenager in Los Angeles. Corky II and Orky II would produce seven calves, none of whom would survive infancy.
The male calf from Pender Harbour was purchased by the Vancouver Aquarium for $5,000. He would soon become the aquarium’s second orca, after Skana. Paul’s boss, Murray Newman, was already thinking of the dual roles—touristic display and scientific subject—the new whales could play. “We think this is a unique opportunity to have a look at these huge creatures at close proximity,” he told the Vancouver Star. “We will study the sounds the animals make at the same time.”
The young male was hoisted onto a boat and ferried down to his new home at the Vancouver Public Aquarium, which named him Hyak II. It was a highly painful leave-taking from his mother. “When they were separated, she would occasionally turn in his direction and emit a series of about twelve distinct loud clicks,” Paul said. “The calf responded with one or two separate vocalizations, and the mother would turn away.” During his separation, transfer to Vancouver, and the first two weeks at the aquarium, Paul said, the baby whale “emitted nothing but a single plaintive cry again and again.”
Paul had the new arrival placed in a small tank about fifty feet long, thirty feet wide, and eight feet deep—isolated from the other orca, Skana. The two whales could not see one another, but they could clearly sense each other. Before long, Skana and the youngster Hyak were breathing together in perfect synchronicity.
Paul focused much of his early work on Skana, when she wasn’t performing in the main pool. He wanted to test her visual acuity. He designed a system of two levers and two cards that could be lowered into the water: One card had a single vertical line and the other had two lines. Each time Skana pressed the lever next to the card with two lines, she received a reward: half a dead herring dropped from a slot on an automated carousel.
Paul and Skana did the experiment seventy-two times a day. When he started, he used a card with a four-inch gap between the two lines. Then he narrowed the gap, to one inch, a half inch, quarter inch, and so on until he reached one thirty-second of an inch. At one-sixteenth of an inch, Skana selected the correct lever 90 percent of the time. At one thirty-second of an inch, she could no longer tell the difference. So Paul went back to one-sixteenth inch, expecting Skana to achieve 90 percent accuracy once again.
“On the first try, Skana pushed the incorrect lever and got no herring,” Paul explained. “I was surprised but not alarmed, especially since Skana got it right on her second try and received her positive reinforcement.” But then came the third try, and the fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh. Each time, Skana pressed the wrong lever, even though it meant no reward. “Even more strangely, she began vocalizing forcefully before and after each wrong selection, like she knew it was wrong but chose to do it anyway.” Skana kept selecting the single line, no matter what.
He tried repeating the experiment with the other cards, but Skana consistently picked the lever with just a single line, vocalizing loudly each time. Overnight, Skana had gone from scoring 90 percent to zero. Paul was despondent; his project appeared to be an utter failure. Or was it? “I began to suspect that Skana was pushing the wrong lever on purpose,” he said. “She was, in effect, telling me, ‘Hey, I’ve got ideas and opinions too, buddy. Don’t think you can make me do whatever you want to do just because it means I’ll get a dead fish.”
Paul came to realize that Skana was probably bored. “I started to think about the issue of motivation. I wondered, why are we giving this whale half a dead herring?” he recalled. “That may not be great motivation. And I said, ‘Well, this is kind of a boring environment for the whale, she doesn’t have much to do.’ So I started thinking, okay, instead of fish, I’ll let you do some other things. I said to her, ‘You can swim around the pool. And if you get it right, I’ll toss a bowl into the pool and let you retrieve it.’ Stuff like that.”
Under those circumstances her
performance came up to about 50 percent, but it never returned to her previous level, Paul said. “So I still was thinking about the question of motivation. And I thought, ‘Okay, orcas are acoustic animals. Their primary sense is sound; it’s their main way to get information about the world, and their society.’”
Paul started producing a variety of sounds for Skana to hear: bells, flutes, whistles, even spoons on wineglasses. She seemed intrigued by them, perhaps even pleased. She often showed this by swimming in the center of the pool and rolling over onto her back, then approaching the source of the sound. When Paul lowered an underwater sound box into the tank, Skana swam to it and rested her lower jaw (essentially, her outer ear) directly on top of it.
As much as Skana liked new sounds, she also grew bored with them quickly, and she always let Paul know when she’d had enough. After tiring of a certain sound she would swim over to the gateway to the holding pool and stick her head in it, refusing to come out until Paul stopped the noise. “It was another imaginative way for her to speak to me, to tell me no,” he explained. “Just like she did with the cards.”
It was a whale’s way of putting her hands over her ears and going, Nyah, nyah, nyah.
During this time, Paul had spent little time with the male calf held alone in the other pool. He did this deliberately and ordered aquarium staff not to spend time with the infant. (Years later, he discovered that some staff would sneak down after he was gone for the day and keep the orca company. A baby whale was just too cute to resist.)
Paul was trying to be scientific, not cruel, in keeping Hyak II isolated. He wanted to work with a “naïve” whale, one that had minimal interaction with humans. Skana was fully trained and performed in the aquarium’s show, but not Hyak. “I was working with the thought that, okay, maybe I won’t use food for a reward with him. Maybe I’ll use sound instead,” Paul said. Hyak had been left alone for several months. He had grown sullen and seemingly depressed. He was sedentary and barely moved around, preferring to simply lie still and stare into one corner of his small, rectangular tank. It was exceedingly unnatural behavior.
“I thought, okay, what I’ll do is see whether I can train the whale to swim around the pool for an acoustic reward,” Paul said. He fashioned a crude underwater loudspeaker out of an empty paint can with a small stereo speaker in it and hooked it up to an amplifier. He then obtained a sound-wave oscillator that could synthesize a huge variety of tones. He also got a record player and a stack of albums—everything from Beethoven to the Beatles.
“What I did was say to the whale, ‘Okay, you’re sitting in that corner of the pool. If you move out of the corner, I’ll provide some acoustic stimulation for you,’” Paul explained. “‘And if you keep going, I’ll continue to provide this acoustic stimulation. But if you stop and go back to the corner of the pool, I’ll stop.’ It was a pretty simple situation.”
But how did he get Hyak to start moving in the first place? “I just waited,” Paul said. “He had to move at some point. And when he finally did, I played the music. You know, normal behavioral stuff: You wait until you get a component of the behavior that you want, then you reward it.”
Paul was not with Hyak by the pool, but rather hidden inside a building behind glass, where he could observe the whale anonymously. “He would move just a little bit out of the corner of the pool, and I’d turn on the sound,” Paul recalled. “And he would stop or go back to his corner. So I’d turn it off. I did this a few times, and within just two sessions, he is swimming around and around and around the pool. That was such a contrast to what had happened with Skana, where she took over six hundred trials to learn what I thought was a fairly easy task. He had solved the problem in less than two.” Paul had been amazed.
“I said to him, ‘Okay, I’ll remove the requirement that you have to swim around the pool, and I’ll reward you for anything you do that isn’t just sitting in that corner. And under those circumstances his behavior underwent this incredible transformation. This little whale, he’d just been sitting there so quietly, all alone, and then I played my records and he became this unbelievably energetic little guy.”
Paul always began a musical experiment by playing an underwater tone for Hyak, letting him know they were about to begin. From the corner Hyak would turn his head around and wait. When he heard music, he began to back out of his corner, tail first. Paul played everything for the little whale: Mozart, Miles Davis, the Moody Blues. Hyak seemed to like it all. But what he liked more than anything was music that was new.
One day Paul put an album on by the famous Indian sitar player Ravi Shankar. “He was so interested in that, he responded to it so enthusiastically,” Paul said. “So the next day, I went down and played it to him again. And we didn’t get more than just a few seconds into it when he stopped and went straight back to his corner. He sat there and waited for me to put on something else. He’d remembered enough of what I’d played him the previous day, and he didn’t want to hear what he’d already heard, again.” Hyak wanted something new.
This little whale had an extraordinary acoustic memory, Paul realized. And as with Skana, he believed that Hyak was trying to use operant conditioning to elicit a desired response from the human, not the other way around.
Hyak was now constantly demanding new music. Fortunately, in 1968, there was no shortage of it. The Rolling Stone’s album Beggars Banquet had just been released, in addition to a number one single, “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.” Hyak seemed to love rock and roll. The aquarium’s conservative management frowned upon the racket of English longhairs blasting their electric guitars, but Paul figured, what the hell? He’d give the Stones a go. He got the LP out of its sleeve and put it on the record player.
“All of a sudden, Hyak swam at me and charged around the pool making great waves that washed over the edges,” Paul recounted. “He went down one side, leapt, and then turned the corner and r-r-r-aced down the other side. Then he shot his body out of the water once again, did a barrel roll, and dove back in. After that he slapped his pectoral fin on the water. He’d sit there and spray great plumes out of the side of his mouth. It was such an amazing transformation of behavior. And I said to myself, wow, he really digs the Stones!”
Hyak had other tastes in music. One day Paul played Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D Major, sending Hyak into a beautiful and bizarre ballet. “His whole body sort of vibrated to the tone of the music, and he slapped his pectoral fins in time with the melody of the concerto,” Paul recounted. “His flukes as well, they were totally in time with the music. And there were fountains of water spouting from his mouth, all of it timed together. I was so amazed by this.”
Paul ran to find other aquarium officials to observe the surreal waltz for themselves. By the time he returned with witnesses, however, the music had stopped and Hyak had gone back to sulking in his lonely little corner.
Clearly, sound was stimulating to Hyak, but Paul thought there might be another positive reinforcement at play: human companionship. “I believed that I was becoming the positive reinforcement,” he recalled. “The company that I was giving him was his reward. And in fact, I did an experiment one time to test that idea out.”
Paul would go down to the aquarium at night, where he had designed a test to see if he could get Hyak to vocalize in exchange for Paul’s company. “I had a light on in the little office I was in, next door to the pool,” he explained. “And I said okay, if you vocalize, I’ll stick around. And if I heard him on the hydrophone vocalizing, and if he kept vocalizing, I would stay there and leave the light on. But if he stopped for more than the limit I had established—three minutes in a row—I’d turn the light off and go home. And under those circumstances he would just continually vocalize, hour after hour.” Hyak quickly learned that he could take occasional breaks and stop vocalizing, but never more than the three-minute limit, lest the light go out.
“The light was a symbol that he had some company,” Paul said. “It was a sign that the poor, lonely g
uy had somebody paying attention to him, that he had company during the night.”
Paul had been in Vancouver for about a year and was starting to have a surprising and uncomfortable emotion: The dispassionate and highly trained neuroscientist was beginning to have doubts about his own research. Not the methodology, not the scientific rigor, but rather the ethics of the entire enterprise. Was captivity in the best interest of these large and intelligent creatures, no matter how far it was advancing knowledge?
Paul needed a good deal of soul-searching to answer this tough question. But once he did, the answer was simple and resounding.
“I began doing this work with orcas in captivity as a very traditionally trained experimental psychologist. I was interested in behavior and behavior alone. And I was deliberately not paying attention to that brain that I had seen in the glass jar,” he said. “I had the thought that captivity might be stressful, but I pushed it way to the back. I was aware of all the speculation at the time about what dolphins do with their brains, but I deliberately pushed all that aside. I wanted to focus on finding out some really basic things about these whales.”
Years later, as Naomi looked back on Paul’s extraordinary experiences, she realized she had not given nearly enough thought to orcas in captivity during those early days of research. The orcas she saw at SeaWorld and other parks looked healthy and relatively content to her. And they seemed to enjoy performing, which they did with unwavering precision and drive.
And as Paul had illustrated, much of what we know about orcas came from studying them in a tank, not the open ocean. His work with Skana and Hyak would have been impossible in Johnstone Strait. The language acquisition studies that Naomi had worked on with Phoenix and Ake, back in Honolulu, could likewise only have been done in captivity.
