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

by David Kirby

  But underneath the surface, the killer whales were afforded no such considerations. Their flat concrete world—laid bare now by the construction—looked grim, featureless, and utterly devoid of anything that made the natural world enriching and inviting to sentient mammals. To Naomi, it was a chamber of dreariness; but the tank was much easier to clean this way.

  “Hey, Dr. Rose, can I ask you something?” The lead curator, Frank Murru, had spotted Naomi staring at Tilikum in a back pool.

  “Sure, go ahead,” she said with a guarded smile.

  “It’s not really true what they say about the males, is it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The male killer whales. They don’t really stay with their mothers their whole lives, do they? I mean, that’s just a myth. Right?”

  Naomi was surprised. Here was an expert at one of the leading aquatic parks in the world, and he was actually questioning one of the basics of the natural history of the animals under his charge. She stood in place and stared at Murru for a moment.

  “Well?” he said finally.

  “Yes. They stay with their mothers, Frank. At least Resident whales do.”

  Murru gave Naomi a hard look. Then he turned and walked away. She wondered if he even knew what a Resident whale was.

  When the tour ended, Irwin thanked Brad Andrews and his team for the VIP treatment. However, he added, SeaWorld was not going to dissuade them from dropping their anti-captivity campaign. Things were just getting started. Then everyone shook hands.

  It would be the last cordial exchange between the two parties.

  Coverage of the press conference was considerable. The AP story was picked up in newspapers across the country. Many in the media treated the showdown like a clash of Titans, though Naomi knew that HSUS and its little captive-whale campaign were going to be thoroughly outgunned, outspent, and outlawyered by the other side.

  “The Humane Society, the nation’s largest animal-rights group, and SeaWorld, the nation’s largest owner of marine mammals, squared off in Orlando as moviegoers lined up for the premiere of Free Willy, a film about a young boy who liberates a killer whale from an abusive aquarium,” the Orlando Sentinel reported.

  HSUS had taken off the gloves “in a departure from its less-strident past,” the Sentinel said. The group had always opposed catching or importing wild whales, “but until now, it had never advocated their release, a position of more radical animal-rights organizations.” The paper said that HSUS was now calling for the release of animals such as Katina, the beloved queen of SeaWorld Florida, “and scores of other whales kept in captivity by theme parks and aquariums.”

  SeaWorld pushed back hard. They were ready for combat, despite the niceties of Paul Irwin’s tour.

  Curator Frank Murru led the assault. Naomi’s conclusions were “based on sloppy science and a selective review of available research,” he told the Sentinel. “Their agenda is to close down zoos and aquariums around the world,” he said, then added, rather awkwardly, “In my opinion, maybe dogs and cats aren’t sexy enough.” As for Katina, he announced that the seventeen-year-old was pregnant again and expecting a calf that September. In other words, she wasn’t going anywhere.

  Naomi figured that SeaWorld had been holding on to this joyous piece of news about the pregnancy for many months, waiting to spring it on the world at just the right moment, when publicity was not going their way. The thought irked her. Katina was a wild animal held in confinement, not some PR chip to be played in a high-stakes marketing game.

  Murru did not argue with the mortality figures Naomi had culled from the MMIR, but he insisted that her conclusions about longevity were way off base. SeaWorld’s animals enjoyed the same full life expectancy as wild whales, which Murru claimed was not terribly long. “We know [wild orcas] live to be twenty-five to thirty years old,” he told the Sentinel. “A thirty-plus-year-old killer whale would be an exceptionally long-lived killer whale.”

  Jim McBain, director of veterinary medicine at SeaWorld parks, truncated the life span of wild killer whales even more. He told the paper that other studies had revealed that females lived until their late twenties, on average, and males lived until their mid-twenties.

  Naomi was ready to explode when she read that utterly outrageous claim. SeaWorld knew practically nothing about killer whales in the wild, she thought—or else they did know and were deliberately misleading people. Why, she could personally identify dozens of Resident killer whales who were well past the “exceptionally long-lived” milestone of thirty years, let alone their mid to late twenties.

  As for SeaWorld’s contention that Naomi’s report was “based on sloppy science” and relied on a “selective review of available research,” that was befuddling. Her source for captivity data was a US government publication, which in turn got its information from the industry. If anything, Murru was trashing science that his own company had helped compile.

  The figures on wild whale mortality were taken from the seminal 1990 International Whaling Commission study that Mike Bigg—along with Peter Olesiuk, Graeme Ellis, John Ford, and Ken Balcomb—had just completed when he died. It was not only the most recently published data available, it was widely considered by cetacean scientists to be the gold standard of killer whale censuses. She stood by her statement that 18 percent of the killer whale population in British Columbia had died between 1973 and 1992. That 48 percent of the captive population had died in a comparable period was irrefutable.

  It angered Naomi to be labeled “sloppy”—she was anything but that. But she quickly brushed off the insult. She knew more industry barbs would be flung her way.

  Naomi returned to Maryland satisfied but exhausted. Orlando had been fruitful, but there would be no resting on any laurels. First, there was the pending reauthorization of the Marine Mammal Protection Act, and many fights ahead over the attempt to enact a permanent federal ban on the capture or importation of any marine mammal from the wild.

  Naomi would also have to expand the new case-against-captivity campaign, to ramp up public opinion against the industry during the summer of Free Willy.

  The movie turned out to be a sleeper: Opening weekend box office put Free Willy in fifth place, behind megahits such as Jurassic Park and The Firm, but ahead of another summer favorite, Sleepless in Seattle. The whale movie moved into fourth place the following weekend and remained popular all summer, finishing out the season with a respectable domestic gross of $70 million (about $118 million in 2012 dollars). It was a good movie. Even Naomi enjoyed watching it, and she was a tough critic of Hollywood’s slick style.

  A few weeks after returning from Florida, while relaxing at home one evening, Naomi received an unexpected phone call. It was Dave Bain, the PhD student from Santa Cruz who, along with Janice Waite, had befriended Naomi and invited her to be their field assistant on West Cracroft Island. Naomi still recalled Dave fondly as the tall and somewhat nerdy guy who was recording and trying to decipher the mysterious language of the orcas in Johnstone Strait. After getting his doctorate, Dave had gone on to conduct research at the National Marine Mammal Laboratory, the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans, and the University of California campuses at Santa Cruz and Davis.

  Naomi was happy to hear from her friend and former mentor. But she could tell right away from his voice that this was no social call.

  Dave was now doing work for the Marine World Foundation—an offshoot of the Marine World/Africa USA amusement park in the Bay Area community of Vallejo, California. Marine World had asked him to review and critique Naomi’s anti-captivity paper, plus the letter that Paul Irwin had mailed out with the report. Dave, as usual, was blunt, brief, and matter-of-fact.

  “Your report is riddled with errors,” he told Naomi. “You made a lot of careless mistakes.”

  Naomi shifted uncomfortably. She was tempted to dismiss Dave as she had done the other pro-captivity advocates. After all, he now worked for the industry; Dave had gone the other way. But Naom
i could not ignore what he was saying—she knew the ring of truth when she heard it, no matter how unsettled the delivery made her. Dave was an excellent mathematician and one of the most forthright people Naomi knew.

  “What do you mean, Dave?” she said. “The data I used was from Mike Bigg and the MMIR. I don’t understand.”

  Naomi listened stoically as Dave calmly ripped apart her work. First of all, it was inappropriate to use longevity data for Pacific Resident whales when most of the orcas in captivity were of Icelandic stock. It was likely that Resident killer whales lived longer than other ecotypes, so the comparison was invalid on its face.

  Even worse, the data on wild whales contained nothing about infant deaths: Mike Bigg and colleagues did not include new orcas in their study until they had reached one year of age. Naomi, however, had included all live births in captivity, even those animals that died in the first year. It was an unfair comparison.

  Finally, it was a statistical sleight of hand to calculate longevity figures using only data on overall mortality. Just because a greater percentage of whales had died in captivity than in the wild over a comparable period did not mean that whales in nature lived longer. Dave explained this to Naomi but it went over her head. She was never great at advanced statistics.

  Dave said he was disappointed by what Naomi had done. He was honestly trying to help her out, give her a heads-up that she had made a fool of herself. She had stained her scientific integrity in her quest to promote animal welfare. The scientific community would not soon forget her blunders.

  Before hanging up, Dave told Naomi he was helping Marine World draft a letter to Paul Irwin with a point-by-point rebuttal to the HSUS report, letter, and press communiqués on captivity. It was going to be long and tough.

  Naomi told Dave she would look into his critiques, but advised him she would never give up her advocacy work. She was glad to be out of academia. She could never have gone to work for the display industry, the way he had. She was right where she wanted to be.

  She thanked her old friend and hung up. More than anything, she was embarrassed. She was mortified—and angry at herself—for tripping into such rookie pitfalls right off the bat at work. She held no animosity toward Dave. He was defending public display because he sincerely believed in the value of researching the whales at Marine World. His work was important, and he was going to defend his ability to do it. Naomi did not mind his intervention. She was actually somewhat grateful.

  It was a good thing Dave called, Naomi thought to herself. He kept me from making an even bigger ass of myself.

  But the next day, the episode was not sitting well with her. Naomi decided to respond to Dave in writing. She sent him a long e-mail, in which she upbraided Dave for clinging to his claim of scientific objectivity while collecting a paycheck from the industry, which is excerpted here:

  Dave: I am writing this letter as a personal friend rather than as a professional colleague or, for that matter, an adversary. I will understand, however, if you feel obliged to show it to your employers. It is, of course, in regards to our conversation last night. I would like first of all to thank you for taking the time to call me with your concerns.… I am still a bit uncertain as to your actual motivation in so doing, but I suspect it had something do with a misguided notion on your part of “rescuing” me from my “wrongheadedness.” I hope I put such notions to rest. I made a very conscious decision to become an advocate for a cause I believe in deeply; I feel I paid my dues in the academic world of science and am now free to use my knowledge and experience to contribute to and aid a non-profit organization whose [ideals] I have always supported. You, of course, have done something similar; you have chosen to use your knowledge and experience to further the cause of a for-profit organization whose work supports you.

  However, I would like to point something out. Although you are quite right in saying I have compromised my objectivity by becoming an animal-welfare advocate (and I did so gladly), you are in the same position. If you believe that you still wear the pure mantle of objectivity securely around your shoulders, please think again. I am not the only one who considers that those who work for a for-profit enterprise such as Marine World are mouthpieces for that enterprise (hardly objective) when the topic of conversation is the very thing that keeps that enterprise alive, in this case captivity for marine mammals. The only thing you have that I do not (and, incidentally, even this is debatable) is a doorway back to academia, which is an advantage only if that is where one wants to go.…

  It is unfortunate that there is a statistical argument against the set of numbers presented in our letter, but frankly, as you yourself pointed out, statistics in many cases are just smoke-and-mirror shows. With some hand waving, one can make any case one wants to, using the same set of numbers.… I must admit I felt your implicit accusation that I lacked integrity because I was willing to use some smoke to further my cause to be somewhat hypocritical. Although you do not directly operate the smoke machine, your employers are past masters at operating that device. I take great pride in my integrity, Dave; I will endeavor to play this game we play with truth and fact, but let us not kid ourselves. This is a game. I suspect in the integrity sweepstakes, you and I are neck and neck. If anything, I’m a bit in the lead, because we both know that what really motivates Marine World is not a desire to educate the public, but money. The HSUS, as a non-profit organization, is hardly in the league of marine parks when it comes to money.

  That is all I have to say, really. As I said on the phone, I intend to forge ahead. I have much to offer to this cause and I am having the time of my life, because I fit here and I am following my conscience.… As I said on the phone, I did not deliberately wave my hands over the numbers the HSUS used; I believe those numbers tell a true story. You now have your chance to tell Marine World’s story.

  Then Naomi waited for the letter from Marine World to arrive. It was, as Dave had warned, long and tough. The five-page broadside was signed by Marine World/Africa USA president Michael Demetrios, who said he would be citing information supplied by Dr. David Bain, “a colleague and personal friend of your in-house scientist Dr. Naomi Rose.” Dave had spent more time observing wild and captive orcas than any other biologist in the country, he contended. He had the “expertise and integrity required to comment fairly on the accuracy of Dr. Rose’s work.”

  Demetrios began with the longevity and survivorship numbers for Northern Resident whales, and the HSUS’s methods for comparing them with animals in captivity. Again, as Dave had warned, Demetrios attacked Naomi for choosing one specific population of orcas “which are not representative of most populations in the wild.” The Northern Resident community was “doubling every generation,” he wrote, “with calving rates that are higher and mortality rates that are lower than most populations in the wild. Making universal statements about longevity for all killer whales based on this unrepresentative ‘best case’ scenario is unscientific and misleading.”

  Then he laid into Naomi’s inclusion of captive newborns in her mortality data but not infants who died in the wild. “The number you missed is not inconsequential—the wild neonatal mortality rate was calculated by Mike Bigg at over 40 percent for the first six months of life. That amounts to about 100 deaths of northern Resident calves over a 20-year period. To overlook 100 deaths in a survivorship study of the wild population severely undermines confidence in your credibility, methods and intentions,” Demetrios complained. If Naomi had included infant deaths in the wild as well, he claimed, “then the mortality rates of that wild population and the captive population become roughly the same: about 2 percent per year. The average age at death for the wild population becomes about 7 to 10 years of age, about the same as you quoted for captive whales.”

  Then came the assault on Naomi’s methodology that Dave had warned her about. “Most so-called ‘longevity’ statistics are absolutely meaningless for drawing conclusions about the well-being and life expectancy of wild versus captive killer w
hales. They are good, however, for manipulating perceptions for propaganda reasons, which you do, either knowingly or unknowingly, throughout your material.”

  All scientists who had analyzed data from the MMIR had stressed how inappropriate it was to estimate longevity “using measures that depend heavily on factors other than life expectancy.” Those researchers, Demetrios added, “specifically say that numbers for average age are irrelevant until all the animals in the study group are dead, yet time and time again, that is what anti-captivity activists do.”

  Naomi’s statistics on wild whales were “equally misleading.” The HSUS report had claimed that females lived fifty years on average, with a maximum life expectancy of eighty, “with the implication that something is wrong if captive killer whales don’t reach these same ages. What you don’t say is the fact that about 8.5 percent of wild females don’t reach the age of 50 and about 99 percent don’t reach the age of 80. (Those percentages are for animals that have survived infancy.)”

  Naomi was also wrong to have criticized the industry’s captive breeding program. Here, she got her numbers wrong, too. There had been ten successful killer whale births in captivity, not six, as she had put in the HSUS report’s introduction.

  “We have clearly reached a major milestone in the care of these magnificent animals: sustained captive breeding. It is one of the greatest success stories in the history of zoological park animal care,” Demetrios said. “Rather than offering congratulations to the many caring and dedicated training, veterinary and husbandry staff professionals who worked hard to reach this milestone, or even acknowledging its reality, the HSUS and Dr. Rose have told the media and the public that the effort is a failure. It is difficult to comprehend how a biologist could take such unsupported statements about the killer whale breeding program, apparently sacrificing accuracy to further a philosophical position.”

  Captivity, Demetrios said, does not mean a “loss of freedom” for marine mammals, but rather the “absence of the hour-by-hour, day-by-day, season-by-season struggle for survival.”