by David Kirby
Still, Naomi felt that she had already made a difference, no matter how modest, in the scientific knowledge of orcas. “This study was the first attempt to examine systematically the behavior of male killer whales, in an effort to describe the behavioral consequences of their unusual social structure,” she wrote in the dissertation.
Her study period had extended over three summers from 1988 to 1990, comprising a total of 131 attempted observation days, of which she observed whales on 118 days, or 90 percent of the time. Observation days began at 7:30 a.m. and did not end until 6:30 that evening.
At the time, the Northern Resident community had seventy-eight males, though only forty-five of them visited Johnstone Strait regularly enough to study. Of those, Naomi gathered enough data on thirty-two to include in her sample. Those whales represented nine pods and sixteen matrilineal groups.
Male orcas are unusual among mammals in that they are the philopatric sex of the species (from the Greek philo, for “love,” and patra, for “fatherland”). That is, they never emigrate away from their home territory—in this case, their mother and her matriline. In many mammal species, having grown males hang around the females and offspring would be disruptive—the mother does not tolerate it and pressures young males to leave. In other species, a male simply feels the urge to move beyond his birth territory when he matures. This was clearly not the case with Resident orcas.
Naomi wrote about the deep and lifelong bonds that form between Resident mothers and their sons and noted that adult males spend at least 40 percent of their time within one body length of their mother—approximately nine and a half hours every day, 365 days a year.
The adult male is so dependent on his mother, Naomi observed, that if he loses her, he may try to transfer that bond, in a slightly weaker form, to another close relative, usually a sister, grandmother, aunt, or even a younger niece. Older sons who survived their mother’s death often traveled, foraged, and even rested up to a half mile away from their sisters, implying that adult males without mothers “are most peripheral to and the least integrated into the matrilineal group,” Naomi wrote. (This could explain why Tilikum tried—unsuccessfully—to bond with Haida and Nootka when he arrived at SeaLand, Naomi would later realize. And though Icelandic whales do not share identical social traits with Pacific Residents, some scientists now believe the two fish-eating populations exhibit at least some cultural overlapping.)
For the adult male of any species to become nondisruptive and thus socially fit for philopatry (nondispersal), his evolutionary path must develop in ways that mitigate, or even eliminate, aggressive behavior. We now know that male humans, for example, experience a precipitous drop in testosterone production after becoming fathers. For Resident male orcas, domestic docility meant greater acceptance within a female-dominated society: Keeping their cool around the pod was better for the mothers, easier on the calves, and ultimately more beneficial for the males themselves. “This almost total repression of aggression,” Naomi wrote, “may be the most significant consequence of the mother-son bond.”
Much of her paper dealt with the question of how male Northern Resident social behaviors fit harmoniously into the larger matriarch-dominated society. Naomi wanted to know, what did these males do all day, and how did that help them socially integrate so well?
The answers were engrossing and closely tied to the evolutionary suppression of male orca bellicosity. Two social behaviors, in particular, helped explain how and perhaps even why Resident males evolved to become the subdominant, philopatric sex—and how such big bulls remained socially fit to stay integrated in the matriline. The consequences of these two behaviors conferred striking benefits to mothers and sons alike.
In the first case, small groups of Resident males had been observed during the social summer season engaged in temporary “bouts” of intensive physical contact. Before Naomi came along, no one had collected enough data on these all-male encounters so it was not understood what was going on. The scrimmages, which she coined MOSIs, or “male-only social interactions,” usually got going in the afternoon. Anywhere from two to four males would wind themselves into a ball of roiling black-and-white energy, slapping the surface with fins and flippers, churning up white water as they rubbed and pushed against each other or leapt in the air like forwards at an NBA game.
Naomi spent a total of twenty-five hours observing MOSIs, which lasted anywhere from several minutes to a few hours. During the group behavior, males were far less attentive to what was going on around them, meaning Naomi could get as close as ten meters away; they were utterly unperturbed by boats during a MOSI. Encounters always involved at least one adolescent male (age six to fourteen), and adolescents were four times more likely to participate than adults. MOSIs usually involved non-kin, though members of the same matriline did sometimes participate.
The most common type of behavior observed during a MOSI was sociosexual, including “frequent body contact, percussive and aerial behaviors and penile displays,” Naomi wrote. Cetacean penises are prehensile—the animal can bend and wrap it at will, like an elephant with its trunk or a monkey with its tail. During MOSIs, Naomi observed male killer whales extruding their phalluses for several seconds and sometimes, though not always, inserting them into the genital slit of another male. Other behaviors she described as being in “beak-genital orientation.”
The contact sport had odd variations. In summer 1988, two different pairs of adolescent males—A32 and A26, the little brother of Top Notch; and A33 and A38—were seen several times engaged in their own unique MOSI. Naomi described one encounter: “The two males swam slowly side by side, dove simultaneously, surfaced to float facing each other about 20–25 meters apart, slowly approached each other, picked up speed (essentially surface-swimming), and finally butted heads together, sometimes at high speeds (a ‘ram’), sometimes more gently (a ‘bop’). After impact, they rubbed past each other, dove simultaneously, and surfaced seconds later again side by side, heading in the same direction as before.”
Liaisons between individuals changed from moment to moment during a MOSI, as some males joined the fray and others moved on, either to return to their mothers or spend a brief time milling around alone. The most common groupings were in pairs, though encounters of three and four whales were seen about one-third of the time. On average, males spent 10 percent of their activity budget in MOSIs. These hyperphysical, energy-devouring bouts played “an important role in the male behavioral repertoire,” Naomi wrote.
But why would males exert so many hard-earned calories on these summertime tangles? What was the evolutionary advantage of MOSIs? Were they “agonistic” in nature, Naomi wondered, meaning they were designed for males to establish dominance and reinforce social hierarchies? Or were they “affiliative,” evolution’s way of bringing unrelated males into a bonding experience that reduced aggression and built mutual trust?
Naomi concluded the latter. In the dissertation, she stated that her own data analysis “supports the hypothesis that MOSIs are play interactions,” and that the behavior “creates high levels of tolerance and affiliation.” One solid piece of evidence that all-male sociosexual encounters were not meant to establish dominance and hierarchy: 88 percent of all bouts were reciprocal in terms of who was the actor, and who was the recipient.
According to Naomi, juvenile and adolescent males might have distinct sociobiological motives for taking part in MOSIs. For the younger whales, the activity probably brought the benefit of motor-skill training. For adolescents, it likely reinforced cognitive and social skills, while offering practice for courtship with females and the honing of reconciliation skills with potential male rivals. MOSIs also helped “relieve active libidos with fellow males, since access to reproductive females may be restricted, either by adult males, or by the females themselves.”
A key evolutionary benefit of male-only social interactions, then, was likely a profound diffusion of tensions—sexual or otherwise—among males in the community. Thi
s ritualized abatement of aggression helped ensure their continued integration with the matrilineal group. MOSIs helped keep the peace, not only among related males, but more importantly among non-kin bulls.
Affinity among unrelated males is highly unusual among predators that hunt in packs. Male wild dogs and chimpanzees “are very aggressive when they encounter unrelated neighbors,” Naomi wrote. Not so with killer whales, whose “overt physical aggression between matrilineal groups and pods is not only attenuated, but apparently nonexistent.”
As Resident male orcas grow up and participate in fewer MOSIs, they seem to retain the lessons learned from the sociosexual romps. “Adolescence is a critical period in which to acquire certain skills,” Naomi wrote in her dissertation. “MOSIs are a critical social arena in which to acquire them.” Older males did sometimes join in (perhaps as a refresher course in pod relations and anger management) “to strengthen ties with ‘old friends’ or reconcile with erstwhile rivals.”
The second behavior that allowed male Residents to integrate more closely into their matrilines was a seeming willingness to alloparent siblings under five years of age. Most calves with older relatives were babysat once or more each observation day as their mother foraged, socialized, rested, or looked after her youngest, nursing infant.
The benefits of babysitting are obvious to humans, but hard to quantify in terms of animal behavior. But at least one scientifically demonstrable benefit of alloparenting could be measured in orca mothers. When matrilineal groups travel, they typically swim in “echelon formation,” where the youngest calf sticks next to the mother, and her other children spread out, each one to the side and slightly behind the other. The youngest calf gets the coveted spot not only for protection, but also propulsion: slipstreaming alongside the mother helps the infant save energy. But it’s also a drag, literally, on the larger animal.
Janice Waite, Naomi’s graduate school colleague and friend, discovered that respiration rates were much higher when females were “carrying” an infant than when they were swimming alone. Carrying a youngster that way at all times might wear out even the strongest swimmer. But if the mother had a grown son or two to share the burden, she could conserve precious energy, helping her stay healthy and increasing her chance of raising the calf successfully.
Having a son to alloparent younger offspring conferred other advantages on the mother, and on her larger group. Leaving older offspring with babysitters allowed mothers of newborns to focus on nursing their infants and provided “temporary relief from constant vigilance or from rough-and-tumble play” with juveniles in her brood. Naomi speculated that having older sons around contributed to the overall physical and mental health of childbearing females. She had observed ten females with older males in their matrilineal group whose reproductive rate was “very successful.” On the other hand, one female without any potential allofathers had lost two offspring out of four.
Staying at home has its costs, however. Just ask parents with unemployed adult children who “remain in the natal territory.” Philopatry by its nature increases competition for food and other resources, so the “repayment model” comes into play. The philopatric sex must be able to offer something valuable to offset the drain on resources their permanent presence entails. Babysitting was evolution’s way of charging adult orca males room and board to remain at home with mom.
“The philopatric sex pays back some of the cost of having it there by caring for its parent’s subsequent offspring,” Naomi wrote in her dissertation. “Over time it may be ‘cheaper’ to produce a philopatric sex, leading to a bias toward that sex in the ratio.”
This intriguing hypothesis was fodder for further investigation, Naomi mused. Was it possible that females had more male calves earlier on, in order to lock in future alloparenting services? It was hard to say. “In a social system where having sons around to alloparent subsequent offspring increases a female’s reproductive success, then having more sons, and/or having sons earlier in life, could be favored,” Naomi would later explain to a friend back home. Some unidentified prenatal mechanism might be at play, she speculated, some kind of chemical or biological favoritism toward male-producing sperm.
Another potential, but far less likely, explanation was that a mother was more attentive to sons early in her reproductive life, and less so to daughters. “But that’s a wasteful way of doing it, and less likely to be favored by natural selection,” Naomi said. “To put in all the physical resources and time to gestate and bear a daughter, only to give her sub-optimal care to the point of her dying? That doesn’t seem like a mechanism evolution would favor, but who knows?”
Naomi handed in her dissertation in late December 1992. Other than for a brief visit in 1994, she would not return to Telegraph Cove and Johnstone Strait for more than sixteen years. But in her thoughts she would never leave the hauntingly beautiful place. At the end of her acknowledgments section, she thanked the location itself, and the remarkable creatures that summered there each year. “I am fully cognizant of the great privilege I have been granted, to gain entry at last, after long hoping, into the magnificent world of wild killer whales,” she wrote. “This was a privilege indeed, and whatever comes after in my life, I will always remember with awe that in these waters of the Inside Passage, I experienced five truly wondrous years.”
Now came the daunting task of making a living—Naomi was not keen on returning to her own “natal territory.” During the coming months, as she began pondering her new career search, and over the years that followed, Naomi would think back on the unusual social behaviors of Resident male killer whales, and the critical role the behaviors played in turning these powerful beasts into cooperative, nonaggressive, contributing members of their society.
But if MOSIs, alloparenting, and other natural behaviors benefited Resident orca society and individual animals alike, what would be the consequences of denying such behaviors to killer whales, ones who don’t live in nature?
By her third year in the field, Naomi had begun to ask herself many related questions: What happens to a female in captivity without relatives to assist with birth, or older offspring to alloparent a calf? What becomes of young males who don’t learn through MOSIs or other ritualized exercises how to burn off aggression, energy, and libido? What stress might it cause when adult males are prevented from foraging or resting alone, or just being apart from the dominant females for a short time? How does an adult male cope when he suffers from low social status and has no female relatives around to replicate the bond with his mother?
Naomi was finally starting to question the ethics of keeping killer whales in captivity. By the time she handed in her dissertation, she had progressed to full-blown discomfort with seeing them in tanks.
It was good timing. In late April of 1993, she applied for the just-created position of marine mammal scientist at the Humane Society of the United States, which she was offered in early May. Almost overnight, she would be transformed from a scientist to a new and rare breed, that of scientist-advocate.
Years later, looking back on her epiphany that moved her from dispassionate researcher to actively engaged campaigner against cetacean captivity, Naomi wrote about her memories of the big male Hyak, and how he helped convince her that orcas and aquariums do not mix. In the 2003 anthology Between Species: Celebrating the Dolphin-Human Bond, Naomi wrote a chapter titled “Sea Change,” noting:
Every time I saw Hyak after that first summer, he seemed bigger and his tank smaller. I started noticing how much time he and the other two spent floating motionless at the water’s surface, something the Johnstone Strait orcas rarely did. I started wondering how the three Vancouver whales filled their time when the aquarium was closed and all the people had gone home. They did not need to forage and they could not travel anywhere; their tank never presented them with any challenges or changes. I wondered how it must be for Hyak to live with two orcas from an entirely different ocean, and I wondered if all three of them remembered their f
amilies. At long last, I was thinking critically.
By the time I finished my doctoral work, I was not so sure about captivity anymore. For me, several summers of experiencing the real thing—cetaceans in the wild—stripped captivity down to its basic element: cetaceans trapped in empty concrete boxes. [Then] I learned details about what goes on behind marine park shows that once and forever convinced me that keeping these socially complex, long-lived, intelligent, far-ranging creatures in tanks is wrong. Orky and Corky were captured in 1968 and 1969, respectively. In my years in Johnstone Strait, I came to know their families.
PART TWO
DARK SIDE
14
Arrival
SeaWorld received its federal permit for the emergency importation of Tilikum on January 8, 1992. The next day, he landed at Orlando International Airport.
The hasty exodus from SeaLand of the Pacific was carried out with little fanfare. SeaWorld’s publicity department, which normally secured glowing headlines each time any new whale came to one of its parks, apparently kept Tilikum’s arrival as low-key and reassuring as possible. The park’s hometown paper, the Orlando Sentinel, buried the news in its “Around Central Florida—Briefs” section. Tilikum was not mentioned by name, nor was any reference to the killing of Keltie Byrne included in the short account.
“The whale arrived at the airport about 6:40 p.m. and ‘is doing quite well,’ said Brad Andrews, corporate zoological director,” the Sentinel reported. Tilikum, who was now twenty feet long and about eleven years of age, had been flown inside a specially built crate aboard a chartered cargo plane that left Victoria, Canada, at 9:30 a.m. Eastern time. No explanation was given for why the journey took more than nine hours. All told, Tilikum was likely in that box for more than eleven hours.
