by David Kirby
Socializing among coworkers was the norm, much like students at a small college. People on staff often shared housing and living expenses. There were beach parties, pool parties, golf games, and nights out on the town. Weddings between SeaWorld employees were not unheard of.
Jeff made friends, even though many on staff were not his type. A large number seemed to be politically reserved, if not conservative, and more fervent in their Christian faith than he was used to. An oddly high ratio sold Amway products or participated in network marketing schemes on the side, to make ends meet.
In Jeff’s early years at SeaWorld (he worked there from late 1987 through 1995), his core group of friends included Mark Simmons and Carol Ray—who were hired at about the same time as he was—and Samantha Berg, the smart, wisecracking firebrand from New York.
Carol is five feet six with honey-colored hair and sea-blue eyes. She combines the classic loveliness of Grace Kelly with the next-door warmth and humor of Meg Ryan. Born in Pennsylvania and raised in Connecticut, Carol went south for her higher education to study at Rollins College, Florida’s oldest college and a respected liberal arts school in Winter Park, north of Orlando. Like Jeff and Sam, she was an excellent swimmer and loved the water.
Carol loved psychology as well and excelled in her courses. In her senior year, she took a specialized track on behavioral studies and did research on human behavior, and especially the concept of classical and operant conditioning and the work of B. F. Skinner. Carol knew all about the pigeon films. But she never considered working in the field of animal behavior or training. She had never seen a killer whale in her life.
After graduating in 1987, Carol decided to find a temporary job while weighing what to do for graduate studies. She thought she might like working with kids, perhaps those with developmental disabilities, though she wasn’t sure. Then one day a friend mentioned a job interview she had at SeaWorld, for a tour-guide position in their education department. “Wouldn’t it be fun if we could do it together?” her friend asked.
Carol wasn’t so sure. She had always been conflicted about animals in captivity. She grew up with an intense desire to see wild animals up close because they were so beautiful and remarkable. But even as a young girl, she would leave zoos and aquariums feeling depressed, even a bit guilty for having enjoyed herself so much. But it sounded like a nice summer job, and it didn’t involve contact with the animals. It wasn’t as if Carol would be exploiting any of the creatures herself. She got an interview and drove down to SeaWorld.
During the meeting, the HR people kept glancing down at Carol’s résumé as she answered questions. Something was up. “You know,” a woman said, “you have a psych degree, you specialized in behavioral studies, you’re scuba-certified, and you’ve been a competitive swimmer. You really have the background of an animal trainer. Would you be interested in any positions in that department?”
Carol was shocked. She assumed people required specialized instruction and hands-on experience working with animals to even think about applying for a trainer job at SeaWorld. She had none of those things. She declined the offer. Besides, Carol wanted to make some money, travel, and then go to grad school. This sounded like too much of a commitment.
Carol was hired as an educational tour guide and found that she liked the work. She enjoyed taking groups around the park to have a peek behind the scenes at areas not normally viewed by the public.
Carol was liked by guests and staff alike. She was careful to follow the cues for proper on-the-job terminology, and how to deflect difficult questions from tourists. A training manual given to guides contained a list of offending terms to avoid. “Certain words and phrases have negative connotations,” the manual said. “At SeaWorld, we call these ‘buzzwords.’ Avoid buzzwords and use more positive words—you’ll give guests a better overall impression.”
The booklet listed alternatives: the animals had not been “captured,” but “acquired.” They were not kept in “cages” or “tanks,” but “enclosures” and “aquariums.” Meanwhile, “captivity” was to be called “a controlled environment” (today the term seems to be “in human care”). And no matter what guests saw, animals never had “sex” at SeaWorld. They engaged in “courtship behavior.”1
Other loaded terms were to be avoided as well. Some of them required lying—or promulgating scientific ignorance—to get around:
Dead, die—If people ask you about a particular animal that you know has passed away, please say “I don’t know.”
Kill—This word sounds very negative. Say “eat” or “prey upon.”
Play, talk, enjoy—Anthropomorphic, they give human traits to animals.
Evolve—Because evolution is a controversial theory, use the word “adapt.”
In November, Carol was contacted by the HR department again. A few trainer positions were opening up, due to some Orlando staff heading to the new SeaWorld in Texas. Did Carol want to try out? She got the transfer, to Whale and Dolphin Stadium, remaining there for five months with the belugas, dolphins, and false killer whales. In spring of 1988, Carol was kicked “upstairs” to Shamu Stadium, where she joined Jeff and other rookie bucket scrubbers.
“I was really enjoying my time at Whale and Dolphin,” she told Jeff. “But the bigwigs showed up this morning and called us into the office one by one for a talk. I had no idea what was going on.” Several people were transferred into and out of Whale and Dolphin that day. Some were sent to Sea Lion and Otter, only one or two went to Shamu. “I have mixed feelings—it’s kind of exciting but I’m bummed it looks like it will be a while before I can do much up here,” she told Jeff. “What do you think?” Jeff said it was the transfer that most SeaWorld trainers dreamed of. “You’re supposed to be excited!”
Once at Shamu, Carol was handed another set of manuals and booklets to read, this time with information geared toward trainers rather than guides. One was a primer on training marine mammals. Another was a glossary of preferred and prohibited terms to be deployed while fielding questions during a show, titled “Difficult and Unusual Questions and Answers.”2
One of the first phrases every trainer learned to repeat was the animals ate only “restaurant-quality fish.” Jeff, Sam, and Carol could utter the mantra in their sleep. It never occurred to them that there is no actual definition of what constitutes “restaurant-quality fish.” One would presume it meant fresh fish that had been inspected and deemed fit for human consumption.
One would be wrong. On page 4 of the “Difficult and Unusual Questions and Answers” handout was the question “If the fish that we feed our animals is ‘restaurant quality,’ why are the boxes stamped ‘not for human consumption’?” The answer: “Fish going for consumption by the public must be federally inspected.” All the fish at SeaWorld came from the same source as seafood served in restaurants, the booklet said. “It is of the same quality, but inspection is not required. All uninspected fish sold must be labeled ‘not for human consumption.’”
Processing, moving, and feeding all that restaurant-quality fish to the killer whales was a major part of everyday life at Shamu. Tons of the stuff were everywhere. Adult killer whales at SeaWorld ate between 140 and 240 pounds of food each day, mostly thawed herring and capelin (a small smelt), but also some salmon, mackerel, and other species.
Fish was batch-tested for calories, fat, protein, moisture, and other values. The whales were weighed and carefully monitored for changes in eating habits and other signs of nutritional problems. On command, the orcas would slide up onto a special scale and stay calm while their weight was read. The animals were given random batches of food at random times throughout the day, whether during shows, training sessions, relationship sessions, or just periods of relaxation. “To provide a high level of mental and physical stimulation,” SeaWorld’s materials explained, “it is important to vary feeding times and amounts for mental stimulation.”
SeaWorld would not reveal how much it spent on animal food, nor would it say how muc
h cash it took in by selling tourists little pieces of thawed fish to feed to dolphins, stingrays, and other animals. It was a shrewd revenue stream: Have your visitors open their wallets to feed the animals they have already paid top dollar to see.
The corporation must have bought its fish at high-volume, wholesale prices (who else would consume tons of smelt in central Florida?), but implied it paid retail like everybody else. “The price of fish fluctuates too widely to give you a consistent figure,” the “Ask Shamu” educational bulletin explained. “We feed our adult bottlenose dolphins between 25 to 35 pounds of fish every day (fish such as mackerel, smelt, capelin, and herring). You can go to your local supermarket and investigate how much 25 to 35 pounds of these types of fish would cost in your area to get an idea of the daily cost to feed just one dolphin.”3
Other “difficult questions” that trainers had to prepare for included:
Q) Are any of our animals treated for ulcers or other stress-related illnesses?
Ulcers are found in both wild, as well as captive, cetaceans. In cetaceans that are ill, it is common to use medications similar to those used in the human field to prevent formation of ulcers. It appears that ulcers may be caused by many factors and are not related solely to stress.
Q) What is the difference between sedatives and tranquilizers?
A tranquilizer is often given to an animal who is acting normal but is about to undergo some type of procedure. In this case the veterinarian may be using a drug which allows the animal to be handled safely. A sedative might be considered a drug used to allay further excitement in an animal which is reacting to a change in circumstances.
Q) How long do killer whales live? Not 100 years like in the wild?
The most current scientific documentation (Heyning and Dahlheim, 1988) indicates Killer Whales have a maximum life span on the order of 35–40 years. The average is less and may be about 25 years.
Q) Are they happy here?
While it is difficult to qualify any human emotion in animals, we believe our animals are happy. We base this on behavior and social interactions with other animals, reproduction, health, and longevity.
Carol got some tips on the proper use of SeaWorld jargon from various trainers. “You always want to turn a difficult question—no matter what the topic is, or what the crux of the question is—into some type of approved sound bite,” one of them explained. “So, if someone came up to me and said, ‘The whales seem unhappy,’ I would say, ‘Well, what we’ve found is that whales in captivity live as long as they do in the wild, they’re fed restaurant-quality fish every day, and they’re given the best care possible.’”
Carol understood. It was like politicians who deflected treacherous inquiries by giving another answer. It was 1989 and the Iran-contra scandal was winding down. No shortage of verbal jujitsu had been emanating live from hearings on Capitol Hill, land of the misleading sound bite.
10
Mama’s Boys
Naomi Rose knew she wanted to study the male killer whales of Johnstone Strait. Now she needed to figure out how. Over her first two summers on West Cracroft Island, she began honing her thesis topic to focus on the evolutionary biology of Northern Resident males and the possible selective advantages of their uncommon, if not singular, stable family bonds.
The pioneering work of Naomi’s supervisor, Robert Trivers, was her constant guide and scientific muse. Dog-eared and heavily annotated copies of his book Social Evolution and his original papers went with her each summer to Canada. (Trivers was ending his time at UCSC—he eventually ended up at Rutgers University.) Naomi moved to the lab of Burney Le Boeuf, the pinniped expert and leading authority on the social behavior and migratory patterns of elephant seals. From 1986 onward, Naomi would spend her winters studying these seals.
Social Evolution had nothing about orcas, or even other cetaceans, but the general theory of evolutionary biology was universal and eminently applicable to Orcinus orca. As far as Naomi knew, no one had yet applied it to study social behavior in male killer whales.
She realized from reading Trivers’s book that the different thing about killer whales versus the rest of the animal kingdom was this social structure where the males don’t disperse from their mothers. “Male dispersal is the norm in most mammals, though I do know some human males who never leave home,” she would often joke to others.
Naomi had been playing with the idea of trying to answer why. Why did this dispersal pattern evolve? What were the forces acting on the evolution of this social structure? Others thought it was a superb line of inquiry. If Naomi could reach some conclusions, her work would be groundbreaking. But her plan had a blemish. Naomi was at a loss when it came to the type of data she could collect to answer the question why. “It’s too big a question,” she lamented to colleagues later.
The problem was insurmountable. Naomi altered her question from why Resident males don’t disperse to what are the consequences of their staying with their mothers? After all, having a posse of outsize, testosterone-charged males stay close by their moms and siblings can create stress and social disruption. How were those consequences mitigated? And how might a female-dominated society of apex predators, focused on raising calves, benefit from the permanent presence of rambunctious and libidinous bulls?
Tension often exists between males in many species—they are hormonally wired to compete for access to females. The disruption this causes is a key reason why most mammalian males disperse and live in bachelor groups or alone. “But with killer whales, you’ve got all these males living with their moms, so how do you keep that tension from boiling over?” Naomi asked her adviser, Burney Le Boeuf. “How do they manage it? Why don’t we see male orcas going at it the way that male elephant seals or bighorn rams or wolves go at it, inflicting real damage to each other? How do they avoid that?”
Naomi was excited when she finally settled on her dissertation topic. “I’m going to investigate how this community works out ways of living together that minimize the disruption that males and their hormones normally cause,” she told her buddy Janice. “And I want to study how they adjust for the added pressure of competing for food.” Competition for all kinds of resources occurs in a group environment, she said. “That’s why men often play violent sports. It’s a way to ritualize natural aggression that group living can cause. It’s a testosterone reliever.”
Orcas don’t play sports, but the males did display all sorts of male-only behaviors that seemed to mimic some of the ritualism, drive, and energy of football or basketball. Was that how males minimized the inevitable pressure and tension of remaining in such large and tight-knit family groups?
In the seasons that followed, Naomi set out to observe as many male Northern Residents as she feasibly could. She wanted to discern patterns of male behavior and write about what those patterns might say about the species. With whom did these males hang out? What did they do all day? How much time did they spend traveling? How much time did they spend foraging, socializing, or resting? When their mothers were resting, were they also resting nearby? And who was initiating all these behaviors?
Naomi began refining her research ideas, running them by her adviser, Burney Le Boeuf, colleagues Graeme Ellis and John Ford, and friends such as Jim Borrowman and Bill MacKay, Paul Spong and Helena Symonds, Janice Waite and Dave Bain, among others.
“What is the payoff for the male? Why does he stick around?” she wondered. “That’s what I’m trying to get at. If you’re a grown man and you’re living with mother, there are definite disadvantages to that, like being subject to the house rules, right?”
Naomi thought she might have an answer. “For resident males, there’s an advantage to staying with mom. And that’s the fact that females are very gregarious. When multiple pods get together, the females gravitate toward each other and have their own sewing circles, or whatever.” That intensive socializing gave their sons instant entrée to all those unrelated girls.
The son might hook up wi
th the daughters of his mother’s friends, or even with his mothers’ friends themselves, she continued. Naomi had seen several adolescent males who were not socially mature yet—they were sexually mature, but not socially mature—hanging out with post-reproductive grandmas unrelated to them. “I think it’s literally a Mrs. Robinson situation,” she said, referring to the 1967 hit film The Graduate.
“That female may be past menopause, but it doesn’t mean she doesn’t like to have sex. And this young guy, who’s got lots of get-up-and-go but no reproductive female that’s going to give him the time of day, she’ll hang out with him.”
If the sons get dates, then what do the mothers get out of this unusual arrangement? The trade-off couldn’t be so one-sided, Naomi knew, or it wouldn’t be stable. Naomi suspected the benefit mothers enjoyed from letting their grown sons stick around was free babysitting.
Alloparenting occurs in both sexes in several cetacean species, but with orcas, males tend to look after their own siblings. Being able to count on older sons to babysit allows a Resident mother to be more reproductively successful. “It lets her concentrate on her newest born and not worry about the five-year-old calf that’s still full of beans and is potentially going to run off and do something stupid, because the older brother’s looking out for them,” Naomi said. “It even allows her to get some ‘me’ time, which no doubt recharges her batteries and improves her health, making her a better mom.”
Over the ensuing seasons, Naomi observed that adult males often traveled in the middle of the strait, where the water ran deep and fewer salmon swam, while females and younger calves hugged the shoreline, where shoals and kelp beds were more likely to shelter prey. “The males are sort of getting the dregs, but I think they’re forced into it by their mothers,” Naomi explained to the other students at the West Cracroft Island camp. “I think she’s basically saying, ‘Get out of my face. Go off in the middle there. I’m going to take the best pickin’s here along the coast.” Not only did the mother ensure more fish for herself and her calf, she was also protecting the youngster from any threats, keeping her back against the wall, basically.
