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

by David Kirby

  To properly study animal behavior, scientists simply had to observe a species both in the field and in a controlled lab environment, she believed. That necessarily involved captivity, even if temporarily. Naomi was training to become an academic researcher, not a Save the Whales activist wielding leaflets on street corners. Fighting captivity was all about policy and politics; Naomi was interested in science and data. Besides, she wasn’t going to work at SeaWorld. Captivity was not her issue.

  But within the last year or so, things had begun to change. It had started to dawn on her that captivity might be hard on the marine mammals under study. A slight rumble of disquiet, a tiny pang of guilt over her prior enjoyment of seeing orcas on display had started tugging at her conscience. Naomi was beginning to think of captivity from the whales’ point of view.

  After all, she used to watch Corky and Orky at Marineland when she was young and she still visited the Vancouver Aquarium when she came here. She had recently seen Hyak with Bjossa and Finna. They were terrific. But Naomi had to admit she hadn’t thought about where the whales had come from. She had no idea that Corky was taken from Pender Harbour, or that Hyak had been stolen from his pod at such a young age in the local waters near Vancouver.

  Many years later after hearing Paul’s entire history, Naomi wondered how he reconciled his emotional feelings with his scientific work.

  He didn’t. “It’s not possible. I had no option but to reach the conclusion that what we were doing to the whales in those tanks was unfair. I had a little bit of experience seeing what they were like in their natural setting, the ocean, because I’d been present at two captures, in 1968 and 1969, both in Pender Harbour. That was enough to understand just a tiny bit about what they were possibly like in the wild. And it wasn’t a very large step to say that it was wrong what we were doing, that taking them from their natural setting was unfair to them.”

  This was the reason why whale watching in the area was becoming so popular, he reckoned. “By experiencing these animals in the wild, people really feel as if they’re in tune with something that is meaningful. It’s a lovely way of life these whales have organized. And we come along and take a whale out of that environment and put her or him into a concrete tank. It’s such an unnatural thing to be doing that you have to conclude that it’s just not fair play.”

  Paul had started to think about the idea of releasing the captive orcas back into nature and reuniting them with their families. The idea did not go over so well with Murray Newman and the conservative management at the aquarium.

  That’s when Paul gave a lecture at UBC that changed his life forever.

  The lecture hall was packed. Paul gave a talk about the biology of orcas, about echolocation, and about the experiments he had conducted with Skana at the aquarium. “This was the first time in the history of behavioral science that a lab animal so obviously refused to do something it knew how to do,” he said.

  “My respect for this animal has sometimes verged on awe. Orcinus orca is an incredibly powerful and capable creature, exquisitely self-controlled and aware of the world around it, a being possessed of zest for life and a healthy sense of humor.” Paul could see a number of professors rolling their eyes at this point. Assigning human attributes like a sense of humor to animals was beyond frowned upon, it was taboo. Paul continued anyway. “Moreover, they have a remarkable fondness for and interest in humans.” Then he dropped his bomb:

  It has been my feeling, since observing the semicaptive whales at Pender Harbour, that Orcinus orca in the wild, in the company of family, is a decidedly different creature than the Orcinus orca that we observe in the aquarium.… I am not convinced we get a full or accurate picture of Orcinus orca in an aquarium setting. Perhaps an alternative would be to work in semicaptive environments like the one at Pender Harbour, where it might be possible to train the whales for release and recall. The feasibility of releasing trained cetaceans into the ocean and having them return upon command has been well established in studies with dolphins by the US Navy.3

  Most of the audience burst into applause, though Paul realized that some faculty members and aquarium staff were sitting on their hands, looking glum. What Paul didn’t realize, not yet anyway, was that a reporter from the local newspaper had been in the room all along, taking notes.

  “And the next day there was a headline in the paper saying that this guy wanted to set the aquarium’s whales free,” Paul said. “I hadn’t intended to make that a campaign or public event or anything like that. But I got caught in the fallout and ended up in a fight with the aquarium.” His two-year contract was about to expire and management politely let him know it would not be renewed. He still had his job at the university, but things were rather tense there as well. Eventually, Paul accepted a $4,000 research grant as severance and left academia for good.

  He was devastated to leave his friends Skana and Hyak behind in Vancouver, and he made an effort to wish a special farewell to each. (Skana would live eleven more years at the aquarium before succumbing in 1980, at about age nineteen, to a systemic fungal infection. Hyak would pass away from pneumonia, at approximately age twenty-four, on February 16, 1991—just four days before Keltie Byrne died in the orca pool at SeaLand.)

  Paul used his grant money to start the Killer Whale (Orcinus Orca) Foundation, or KWOOF, whose whole mission was to halt all whale captures in the waters of British Columbia. But he also wanted to keep studying orcas, preferably in the wild. The best place to do that, a friend of his said, was Johnstone Strait and Alert Bay, the “Home of the Killer Whale.”

  The Spongs arrived in Alert Bay just before Christmas in 1969. Paul set about speaking with locals, fishermen, and First Nations people in other locations. Everyone told him how large numbers of orcas came through the area every summer, staying through the end of the salmon runs and then disappearing again. Eventually, Paul and Linda came across a peaceful cove on Hanson Island, tossed a hydrophone in the water, and established a camp there.

  The marriage with Linda did not last, but Paul’s fascination with killer whales did. He was hooked. Paul remained on Hanson Island, continuing to build OrcaLab from the ground up. The lab is dedicated to the belief that one can closely study the wild without interfering with it.

  “We don’t go out in boats to observe the whales,” Paul explained to Naomi. “We do land-based work as a matter of philosophy. It’s research without interference.” In addition to recording the whales via hydrophones and analyzing the vocalizations for individual and family patterns, staff and volunteers also take visual sightings of orcas as they pass OrcaLab, and reports from land observation sites staffed by OrcaLab volunteers.

  Paul met his second wife, Helena, at an end-of-summer party and salmon roast on a nearby island in 1979. She was a schoolteacher from Vancouver, beautiful with blue eyes and long strands of blond hair running down her back. In 1978 she took a teaching job at the Little School in Alert Bay, whose student body was about 80 percent First Nations. After marrying Paul, she quit the school to work with him full-time at OrcaLab. “It was impossible not to get involved,” she told friends. Helena developed a deep interest in orca acoustics, society, and behavior, as well as the impact of human activity on orca habitat.

  The idea for a network of hydrophones was born from one of the summer gatherings that Paul and Helena hosted each year at OrcaLab. The informal powwows attracted fifty to seventy-five people from the local area and as far south as Puget Sound. It was a who’s who of orcaphiles (sometimes affectionately teased as “orcateers”). They slept on the living-room floor, camped in tents in the garden, or crashed in one of the outer buildings in sleeping bags. Helena would ply the hungry mob with gourmet meals that she somehow coaxed from a wood-burning stove, much to the astonishment of just about everybody.

  The summer gatherings brought everyone together to brainstorm and discuss ideas on advancing orca science. Naomi always looked forward to the rendezvous, and to taking in the musings of the cast of characters who
showed up every year. Jim Borrowman and Bill MacKay would ferry people out to Hanson Island from Telegraph Cove and join the orca talks themselves. They knew the Northern Residents as well as anybody. Paul and Helena were the celebrated hosts, but one guest was the center of attention: veteran orca researcher Michael Bigg.

  To Naomi and many others, Mike’s surname was appropriate. He was a big, sandy-blond guy with, everyone agreed, an outsize heart and generous spirit. He is still revered as the father of contemporary killer whale field research, credited with developing the photo-ID system that revolutionized it. Naomi adored Mike and considered him to be a friend and mentor.

  Mike was born in London in 1939, but his family moved to the Pacific coast of Canada when he was young. He soon grew to love nature, especially marine mammals. He received a PhD in biology from the University of British Columbia with a dissertation on the reproductive ecology of harbor seals. In 1970, Mike accepted the directorship of marine mammal research at the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans station in Nanaimo.

  One of Mike’s first assignments was to conduct an official census of the killer whale population in British Columbia. At the time, it was widely believed that thousands of orcas populated local waters because so many had been spotted in the region. There was no way to identify individuals. It didn’t occur to anyone they were seeing the same whales over and over.

  Mike ingeniously enlisted the public’s assistance. He printed up fifteen thousand surveys and had them distributed to fishermen, ferrymen, tour-boat pilots, lighthouse operators, and private boaters, asking them to record every killer whale they saw—all on the same day: July 27, 1971. This would help to eliminate the problem of counting the same whales more than once.

  The results shocked just about everybody. According to the survey, there were not thousands of orcas in British Columbia. The estimated population was, at most, 350 whales.4

  Mike loved to share his knowledge, and he worked closely with colleagues such as marine mammalogists John Ford and Graeme Ellis (who witnessed the Resident whale rampage against the Transients in Descanso Bay). The team knew they needed to devise a foolproof system to identify each member of the orca population. They also needed to delineate the varied family patterns that make up killer whale society. No one even realized the difference between Resident, Transient, and Offshore whales, let alone the subdivision between Northern and Southern Residents.

  Early in the survey, Mike noticed that one whale had a distinctively mutilated dorsal fin, probably after meeting a propeller blade. When he got back to the lab, he wondered to his team if he could find and identify her again. They did. Mike named the female “whale A1,” though he also called her “fifty-year granny.”

  By taking photos of all the whales and comparing them, the researchers noticed that scratches and scars on the body and the unique gray saddle patches on the back could also be used for positive identification, in addition to fin nicks and notches. Saddle patches are typically divided between “open” saddles—with streams and fingers of gray in their patterns—and “closed” saddles, which are more solid in appearance.

  The small team of photographers and orca spotters soon grew into a small army of whale-watching volunteers. Bigg, Ellis, Ford, and their team sorted through the thousands of black-and-white images that had been sent in. (Each whale was photographed from the left side, an arbitrary choice that standardized the system.) Mike and his team compiled an exhaustive catalog of photos of each whale. It numbered and lettered each animal according to pod and listed known or estimated gender and birth year. The constantly updated catalog remains the most comprehensive orca family history in the world, documenting the matrilineal relationships of every killer whale that frequents the shores of British Columbia and Washington.

  The official census was a scientific and policy triumph. Now for the first time, the killer whale population could be better managed. Scientists could actually count the animals rather than guessing their numbers and whereabouts.

  The study of live killer whales in their natural world was founded.

  Armed with individual orca IDs, researchers set out to collect and catalog data on longevity, reproduction, social relationships, travel patterns, births, deaths, and even diet—crucial knowledge for the full understanding of any species. The census found that the 120 or so members of the Northern Resident community were divided into sixteen pods and three distinct “clans” (clans are closely related pods with similar vocal dialects). The more tightly knit and much smaller Southern Resident community, with 71 individuals, was composed of just three pods within a single clan.

  Pods were further divided into subpods, closely related and composed of two to eleven matrilines, followed by the most basic orca social unit of all: the matrilineal group. Matrilines consisted of a mother and her offspring, who almost always traveled together and usually rested side by side. When mature females had offspring of their own, their children became part of the matriline. These groups typically had three and sometimes four generations of whales, usually numbering about three to nine animals in size.

  Mike and his colleagues also discovered that the orcas of Washington and British Columbia had a big problem: captures at Pender Harbour, Yukon Harbor, Penn Cove, and elsewhere—by industry giants—had left a significant reproductive dent in certain pods, especially among the Southern community.

  In 1976, Mike submitted his official report to the Canadian government. It included data on the rate of captures, and how the unbridled “culling” of such a small population was unsustainable and endangering to the whales. He urged Ottawa to enact binding restrictions on the taking of orcas from any waters under the jurisdiction of Canada.

  That same year, funding for his work dried up.” He was ordered to work on other projects, mostly pinnipeds, the seals, sea lions, and walruses. The move did nothing to deter his killer whale work. He continued the research in his free time, usually at his own expense, often with contributions from private citizens infected by his excitement and love for Orcinus orca. In the late 1980s, Mike summarized his work in two papers on the photo-identification of orcas, to be published by the International Whaling Commission. But in 1990, he was diagnosed with leukemia. Naomi was crushed.

  “It sounds as though Mike Bigg will die soon, a matter of weeks rather than months,” she wrote in her journal on October 13, 1990. “How sad. And of course how unfair … the heart will go out of the project when Mike dies. He is the center, the lodestone—when he is gone, we will all mill aimlessly, no one to send data to, no one to send pictures to, no one to stop in to see along the road to Telegraph Cove.”

  A few days later, the final proofs for Mike’s two papers were couriered to him from the publisher in England.5 Mike Bigg, a true scientist until the end, reviewed the opus on the afternoon of October 18, 1990, then passed away a few hours later. He was fifty-one.

  The news devastated the northern island community, including Naomi, who was working on her dissertation at Dan Kirby’s fishing lodge when she heard the news. “Mike Bigg died last night,” she wrote in her journal. “And the whales went by, perhaps even as he was dying—I’d like to think their slow passage past Hidden Cove was connected with Mike’s passing from this world.” She added, “You’ll never get to see my thesis now! How will I know it’s right?”

  When her dissertation was completed, Naomi would dedicate it to Dr. Bigg. A few years after that, the whale sanctuary and rubbing beaches across from West Cracroft Island would be renamed the Robson Bight (Michael Bigg) Ecological Reserve, after intensive efforts by colleagues and friends up and down the coast.

  Mike’s death was not the only bad news to rock the tight-knit community. In 1986, Robin Morton, a Canadian naturalist and filmmaker, along with his American-born wife, Alexandra, were in the midst of a long-term field study on the islands of the area, including the daily acoustic recording of cetacean activity. Robin was also working on an orca documentary.

  Alex had studied dolphin communica
tion at Marineland in LA, then worked with the park’s killer whales, Corky II and Orky II. One day she dropped a hydrophone into their tank—and pioneered the study of killer whale vocalizations. Alexandra recorded the sounds of mating, childbirth, and grieving after a calf was stillborn. She wanted to study how infant whales learned language from their elders, but none of the calves at Marineland survived for more than a month and a half. Alexandra would later go on to fight Norwegian salmon farms in the region, which she said were killing wild salmon populations and threatening the survival of the Northern Residents.

  One morning Robin, Alexandra, and their four-year-old son boated into Robson Bight so Robin could do some underwater filming at the rubbing beaches. His gear included a high-tech “rebreathing” apparatus that captures exhalations (which contain oxygen), scrubs them of carbon dioxide, and recycles them back into the air supply. It prevented the release of bubbles that might distract marine life. But on this morning, the mechanism failed. Carbon dioxide filled Robin’s lungs and he gently passed out. Alexandra dove into the freezing sea to find her husband lying on the stony bottom, faceup and arms outstretched, as if reaching toward her through the dark green water. She dragged him back to the boat. It was too late.6

  In the late 1980s, SeaWorld included the tragedy in its educational material on orcas, “Killer Whale Fact Sheet,” saying that “killer whales have attacked boats and bitten scuba divers. A diver in Canada was killed while photographing killer whales in 1986.” The implication was that orcas were no more dangerous in captivity than in nature.

  But the whales had nothing to do with Robin’s drowning.

  9

  Happy Talk

  Soon after settling into his new job at SeaWorld, Jeff Ventre realized just how much of his social life centered on the park. Many careers offer opportunities for friendship and romance, but something comfortable and insular about SeaWorld seemed to encourage it. Company executives tried hard to infuse the workplace with an infectious sense of camaraderie, fealty, and mutually supportive teamwork. Smiling was an on-the-job requirement.