Beneath the Surface: Killer Whales, SeaWorld, and the Truth Beyond Blackfish

by John Hargrove

  The potential for frustration, strife and lashing out only increases once you throw in the fact that the orcas of SeaWorld have to figure out how trainers—who supply all their food—fit into the calculus of their hierarchy.

  Dr. Rose has an accurate but tragic assessment of the plight of SeaWorld’s orcas. “I personally think,” she says, “all captive orcas, whether caught in the wild or born in captivity, are behaviorally abnormal. They are like the children in Lord of the Flies—unnaturally violent because they do not have any of the normal societal brakes on their immature tendency toward violence. Children can be very violent, but under normal circumstances, they are socialized to suppress that violence and channel it productively as they mature.”

  Suppressing violence is problematic for those orcas, Dr. Rose says. “In captivity, all the orcas are ‘feral’ children—they had no adult orcas to socialize them properly. Human trainers, especially those who have no knowledge of wild orca behavior, are not adequate substitutes.” None of the original captive orcas were mature enough to take on the full role that matriarchs play in the wild. They only had distant and instinctive memories of what their mothers were like.

  Dr. Rose points to the experience of farmers in Africa who would cull fast-growing elephant populations that wandered into farms and villages and caused extensive and costly damage. At first, the cullers would kill only the adults. They would, out of a sense of pity, allow the young to survive. However, the young would grow up without adult supervision—and not know how to behave as adults, becoming even more violent than their elders. In a horrific strategy, the cullers have since learned to kill all the elephants in a group. “I believe a similar problem afflicts captive orcas,” says Dr. Rose. “Their ‘childish’ levels of violence and aggression are not socialized out of them by normal adults. The only adult orcas they know were either caught when very young themselves or were born in captivity. They simply grow up without being properly socialized. The captive whales that are not violent are simply that way inherently—their innate personality is not aggressive. Those that are violent were never properly socialized.”

  For most of my tenure at SeaWorld, I thought of Naomi Rose as the enemy. She is one of the most prominent marine mammal scientists in the world and she had very little good to say about all the hard work we trainers were doing with the orcas. The champions of SeaWorld—everyone from public relations spokespeople to officials of the company to true believers among the public—believed she had betrayed her scientific neutrality to become an advocate for changes that would completely up-end the way our enterprise worked. The company openly mocked her research. Her criticism always raised my anxieties about the future of SeaWorld—my job security—and, like any true believer in the mission of the organization, I never gave her or her science a chance.

  Why should I have? I loved the whales I worked with more than anything and was certain that no one knew them better. The trainers and I were with them every day, sometimes for 12 to 14 hours a day. I knew everything they needed: I knew how each whale stood in the social hierarchy at SeaWorld and was aware of how to manage those relationships to keep altercations down. In all of this, there was discipline and love. I didn’t need some scientist to tell me what I knew better than almost anyone else on earth.

  When we were finally on the same side—after I left SeaWorld and when I was promoting the documentary Blackfish—we had a spectacular clash. She had watched as I taped extra segments for the documentary DVD and she was not happy. She told the director, Gabriela Cowperthwaite, that I was glamorizing the life of a killer whale trainer as I discussed my relationships with Kasatka and Takara, and that this only helped SeaWorld’s case. If anyone didn’t see the film, she said, they could think that my sound bites were promotional spots for my old employer.

  I was outraged and confronted her. How dare she tell me how to describe my life’s work with whales that I loved? No one was going to dictate how I was going to talk about Kasatka or Takara or whatever whale I wanted to describe. These were some of the deepest and most magnificent relationships I’ve had in my life.

  Yet I was also aware that what I observed at Shamu Stadium was not the natural habitat of orcas. That was the world Dr. Rose knew all about. She and her colleagues had spent much of their lives observing the whales in their natural habitats. She was the expert in how they lived in the oceans, where they were free. Her point about the DVD extras was a valid one. If someone had not seen my other interviews, the sound bites would appear almost entirely like promotions for SeaWorld and killer whale captivity. That’s why telling my story in its entirety is so important to me. What was the point of fighting? We both agreed on the horrors of captivity. It would be months before we communicated again but by then we had both calmed down. When we spoke at a press conference in California in early 2014, we embraced. We were united as allies in the campaign to save the orcas of SeaWorld.

  And so, while writing this book, I finally asked her, “What is a day in the life of orcas in the open sea like?”

  She laughed. “There is no typical day,” she said. “There are no SeaWorld routines. Every day is different—certainly for resident orcas in the Pacific Northwest.”

  She and her colleagues watched orcas for four seasons on a 15-foot Avon inflatable craft and for one season from an observation station on a cliff in Johnstone Strait on Vancouver Island in British Columbia. In the mornings, on the boat, they might spy on a family of orcas engaged in a kind of water ballet: the matriarch in the middle, the adult males flanking the unit like bodyguards, all of them breathing almost in unison, with a calming regularity. “It’s really quite beautiful to watch them,” she says. “They take three to four breaths every 10 to 12 seconds or so.” Then they take a shallow dive for two or three minutes. They return to the surface before diving again. They typically don’t go very deep into the water in this state—the closest they come to sleeping. In fact, says Dr. Rose, “The dorsal fins of the adult males do not entirely disappear below the surface.” The state is not quite what we call sleep because the orcas are not inert. But neither are they fully awake. Researchers call it “resting.”

  When I heard this, I thought of Corky and how she spent her sleep time—submerging every few minutes. What we described as against “the norm” of the other whales at SeaWorld was absolutely natural. She had been born in the wild, after all.

  While resting in their family huddle, the whales are almost certainly in physical contact with each other, their pectoral fins touching underwater. They are not swimming in place but moving forward slowly with each dive, their flukes pumping subtly to propel them forward. The flip of their tails is so gentle that if they come up against a stronger-than-usual current the whales may actually float backward.

  Usually, there is one member of the family who remains fully awake—the designated watchman. Unlike SeaWorld, where we force the whales into solitude and dark silence for about eight hours, an orca family in the open ocean might rest for around two hours or maybe as briefly as 20 minutes. Usually, it is the matriarch who decides when it is time for everyone to become fully conscious.

  When she issues that order, the coordinated calm and almost perfectly synchronized breathing is disrupted and the family once again becomes a collection of individuals. Yet the submersions and emergences retain much of their balletic choreography as they travel and search for food. Only when they start to socialize do the whales break their coordinated pattern and each begins to do his or her own thing—vocalizing, socializing, darting about, swimming beyond what had seemed to be the tight fin-touching bounds of the resting family.

  As they begin their search for food, the whales remain within one to ten body lengths of each other. They move forward in full wakefulness with the same kind of motions as resting: they dive as they push ahead, taking two or three short dives before a long deep one and then repeating the pattern. But these dives come at a faster pace, the
whales moving forward at a speed of about four to eight knots. Though the respiration pattern is similar to when the whales are resting, the deep dives now take them completely beneath the surface. Their tall dorsals vanish entirely as the dives grow longer—perhaps 30 to 60 feet. They have the capacity to travel up to 100 miles a day at eight to ten knots. But that wouldn’t be an ordinary day. Typically, they will probably range about 20 to 30 miles before stopping and doing something else. “Sometimes,” says Dr. Rose, “you will see a pod traveling very fast—up to 15 knots. They can move in short bursts at 25 knots or so. It’s hard to know what the rush is. It doesn’t happen often.”

  When looking for food—“foraging” is the technical term—the orcas will sometimes head to a regular spot where they know the fish congregate searching for their own food. At other times, they are searching for new sites where prey might be available. The orcas pounce, the fish flee and the whales give chase.

  Usually, the fish have no chance. “Orcas can turn on a dime,” says Dr. Rose. “They can double back on themselves, breach, use their tails to lob or smack schools of fish, stunning them.” From the Avon inflatable craft, Dr. Rose and her fellow researchers would sometimes see an oily slick appear on the water. That’s all that would be left of a large, fat salmon that was just devoured.

  The boat provided Dr. Rose and her associates with a panorama of killer whales’ real lives, on a stage immensely bigger than any Shamu Stadium. Even at night, they’d be able to see orcas foraging, because the whales would excite bioluminescent zooplankton in the water. The chase for food would be visible in the darkness. “The large Chinook salmon would glow a pale green while the orcas would blaze a bright green where their white patches were,” says Dr. Rose, “You could see the small faint green streak shoot out from a kelp bed into the center of the strait and a big green comet go after it.” From a hydrophone in the water at the base of a cliff, Dr. Rose and the researchers could hear the orcas constantly echo-locating and vocalizing loudly and rapidly. The resident whales, she says, produced “tons of chatter when foraging” for fish. (Dr. Rose explained that transients, in contrast, stalk their prey in silence because the animals they are usually hunting are mammals, who are much smarter than fish. Transients only vocalize after a kill. I wonder if that may explain Splash’s silence during that night show.)

  Foraging usually takes place irregularly throughout a day or week. About four times a week, when the orcas have foraged to their fill, they may settle into socializing, milling around and keeping within a smaller space. They swim a bit then “double back, almost aimlessly sometimes, as they interact,” says Dr. Rose. Mothers gather with their calves for play dates. Mature females hang around together. “I like to think they are gossiping.” Younger females might “babysit” a younger sibling or even someone else’s calf. “Practicing motherhood,” explains Dr. Rose. Older male siblings and other older male relatives, like uncles, also babysit, but mothers only allow them to watch over siblings or nephews and nieces. Young calves are never left in the company of adult males from outside their matrilines. At SeaWorld, the father of a one-and-a-half-year-old calf attempted to breed with her after the mother was shipped to another park in the corporation. (That calf, Halyn, died in front of my eyes in June 2008. She had caught an infection that caused brain swelling. She was only two-and-a-half years old.)

  The males also hang out among themselves. “The equivalent of guys getting together to smoke cigars, drink beer and watch football,” says Dr. Rose. Older, sexually mature males may swim off for a few hours, sometimes a day or two, to mate with females from another family. The younger males will experiment sexually—among themselves or, startlingly, with the “grannies.” Orca researchers have never seen sex between fertile male and females of the same family. But young adolescent males will have sex with post-reproductive females of the same family. Those females—since they can’t get pregnant anymore—don’t seem to mind that the young males are sexually awkward. It seems to be part of the learning process.

  Orcas and dolphins (and human beings) are among the rare species that appear to enjoy sex. They will mate even if there is no possibility of reproduction. In other animals, sex isn’t really desire: it’s more like an instinctive hormonal drive. Killer whales like to have sex—though, like human beings, there are some very strict parameters about who they have sex with. There are, however, no prohibitions against homosexual trysts; male killer whales in the wild and in captivity have been seen entwined, their erect penises exposed.

  Female killer whales are also among the few mammals that go through menopause. Most female mammals tend to die soon after they are no longer able to reproduce. Not so with orcas and human beings. What is the evolutionary purpose of post-reproductive survival of female orcas? Perhaps, as the dalliances between young males and the grannies may show, they help socialize and train the next generations. Researchers believe it maximizes the reproductive success of sons, by giving them social status and introducing them to what might in human terms be called “eligible” females through their mothers. They may also pass along valuable knowledge, such as where the best foraging sites are located.

  Socializing takes place on the family level and on the superpod level—when families belonging to the same population get together. That kind of reunion, sometimes lasting four or five days, is spectacular, says Dr. Rose. “There will be breaching and tail lobbing and spy-hopping and cartwheels and playful pushing and shovings and pec slaps. And they will all be vocalizing like mad.” Among the Southern residents, two pods of whales may face off in long lines, then swim slowly toward each other and, when they meet, begin to vocalize.

  Mass grooming may take place too. Northern residents rub on pebbles about a dozen feet below the surface off two beaches in Johnstone Strait. The underwater slope of these beaches is perfect for the whales to pass over the rocks and scratch and slough their skin. Dr. Rose says you can see the dorsal fins of the adult males from the surface as they are giving themselves this dermabrasion therapy. The ritual occurs about once a week for some groups but maybe only once a season for others.

  Orcas in the Antarctic have made epic swims northward to South America or Africa perhaps just in order to molt. These aren’t migrations, because the treks aren’t seasonal. The 8,000- to 9,000-kilometer round trips take 40 days and appear to be primarily for the purpose of removing skin that won’t slough off in the cold polar waters. The white areas of orcas who haven’t molted for a while start to appear brownish.

  In SeaWorld, the trainers have to groom the whales daily. We went at it with our bare hands and fingernails and with large brushes. After the sessions, my hands and nails looked as if they had been spray-painted black. There was so much dead skin to remove.

  How long do orcas live? It is a controversial question because SeaWorld contends that its whales live as long as or longer than wild orcas.

  A research paper published in 2005 by the Canadian Science Advisory Secretariat (CSAS) on the Northern resident orcas concluded that female orcas have a mean life expectancy of about 50 years; the statistic for males is 30 years. That is different from the maximum estimated life span. Females are believed to be able to achieve 80 to 90 years, perhaps more in some rare cases; males a maximum of 70 years. SeaWorld points to calculations that its whales have a mean life expectancy of about 46 years. Dr. Rose disputes the validity of that figure because, even though SeaWorld has owned 67 orcas over the last half century, that is not a statistically large enough group to extrapolate a meaningful life expectancy figure for its whales.

  Howard Garrett of the Orca Network says that the 2005 paper has been rigorously researched and is a great resource for statistics about the Northern and Southern residents from about 1973 to the early 2000s. He notes, however, that the resulting estimates for life expectancy may be skewed by the fact that the pods in the area were subjected to shooting and even target bombing for decades before the study. The Sout
hern resident population was also the source of whales for marine park shows in the 1960s and early 1970s, the paper notes, “which undoubtedly reduced its size and altered its sex- and age-composition.” Indeed, the Southern residents have never truly recovered from the ravages of those decades. They are the only endangered population of killer whales in the northern hemisphere and are protected under the Endangered Species Act. (SeaWorld likes to say that they own only five orcas captured in the wild. More accurately, they have owned 32 killer whales captured in the wild throughout the company’s history, only five of whom have survived.)

  As a trainer, I will leave the interpretation of statistics to the experts. All I have is my own experience. I know how long the whales at SeaWorld lived: 36 have died, 50 if you count stillbirths and miscarriages. Looking at the lives of those 36—which include orcas who were born and died in SeaWorld as well as orcas that were already a certain age in the wild before being captured—the average life span was only ten and a half years. If you add in the stillbirths and miscarriages, that average life span drops to seven and a half years. Among the calves born in SeaWorld who survived more than ten days, the average life span is only 8.8 years.

  SeaWorld likes to point to Corky, who is 48 years old and is the oldest killer whale in captivity (there are arguments that Lolita, a solitary orca at the Miami Seaquarium, may be slightly older). When she dies, her longevity will pull up the average—but just by a bit. The rest of the whales at SeaWorld will have to live a long time to be able to bring the averages anywhere close to the mean life expectancy that the CSAS study calculated for orcas in the wild.

  Of the 67 orcas SeaWorld has owned, only two males have lived past the study’s mean life expectancy, debatably low at 30. No female, not even Corky, has yet reached the mean life expectancy of 50.