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

by John Hargrove

  7

  Treasure

  I knew Takara was somewhere in the pool, because my face felt as if it had been buzzed by a hummingbird. But it was not air that fluttered by me; it was sound waves traveling through water, reverberations caused not by a tiny bird but by a 5,000-pound orca. Takara was quite literally telegraphing me—bouncing sonar from within her head toward and off my body. She was doing it to identify who I was and to find out exactly where I was swimming underwater. But there was more to the vibrations than recognition. Takara emitted sounds that told me how excited she was to see me and how prepared she was to perform one of her favorite acts with me in the water at SeaWorld.

  She swam at great speed from the back pool of the stadium to where I had just dived underwater in the show area, out in front, surrounded by an audience of several thousand people in the stands. In the water, as she raced by me, she had seen my hand signal for the specific routine and she was ready. She then swam past me, circling over to the other end of the show pool, where she rose out of the water to take a preliminary bow before the spectators. Then she submerged deep to race back to where I was. Her objective: to rise directly and vertically in front of me, elevating herself high enough but not completely out of the 36-foot-deep pool in an explosive pop—all without making physical contact with me. The trainers called this behavior an “Alien” because it reminded some of us of the scene in the movie where the embryonic monster pops out of its human host. Takara performed it with perfect precision. The audience erupted in applause.

  Takara is a princess—albeit an accidental one. Her mother, Kasatka, is a veteran of the entire SeaWorld empire, traveling from California to Florida and Texas. Kasatka has also become one of the most socially dominant killer whales in SeaWorld since her capture off the coast of Iceland in 1978 when she was a year old. She was certainly the most dominant whale during my time in California. After one of Kasatka’s cross-country sojourns in 1990, trainers in San Diego found out she was pregnant. It caught everyone by surprise. Breeding had not been on Kasatka’s schedule—and no one was sure who the father was. According to company legend, Kasatka and a younger male named Kotar managed to mate despite being separated by a steel gate in a pool at the SeaWorld in San Antonio, Texas. Eighteen months after that encounter, Takara was born on July 9, 1991.

  Her name means “treasure” in Japanese but we all called her “Tiki” for short. Like her mother, she can be identified by the black freckle in the white patch over her left eye. She has another birthmark: a brown patch on the tip of her lower jaw that can only be seen close up. Tiki is mischievous and among the toughest and smartest of the 20 killer whales I have worked with in my career. Our lives intersected again and again. I love her so much.

  Sweetness has nothing to do with why I adore Tiki. I love her because she’s strong, she’s smart and she’s tough—and she’s a spoiled brat who knows when it’s time to behave. Like the most attractive person in the room, she knows how to manipulate everyone around her. She gets her way. And that’s because she had a mother who taught her how to be the boss.

  Kasatka, as I have described earlier, may not have been the biggest whale in SeaWorld, but no one messed with her. Tiki was constantly by her mother’s side, so none of the other whales dared to upset her. She was often her mother’s sidekick in terrorizing the other whales, usually by raking them—which can be as superficial as scratching other whales with their teeth or as severe as cutting them and causing gashes and lots of bleeding. She could also swim so aggressively against the other orcas that they had to give way, sometimes launching out of the water and into the air with astonishing force, literally rammed out of the pool.

  SeaWorld would eventually put Takara’s talent for taking charge to administrative use. The San Antonio trainers saw that their whales were growing desultory and unresponsive because they lacked a female orca dominant enough to keep discipline in the small tribe. Trainers often rely on the ruling female in a group to discipline the other whales. But in San Antonio, the closest animal to a top whale in the hierarchy was male. His assertion of dominance—which was not natural to the matriarchal orcas—sent the whales’ social structure in San Antonio into freefall and chaos. And so, in 2009, the corporation decided to send Takara from Florida (where she had been moved after she was separated from her mother) to Texas. She slammed her way into dominance almost immediately, in fact, on the very day she arrived.

  The princess whale came to town with pomp and circumstance. She was flown in on a military C-130 aircraft. It was the only way to transport her mega-poundage plus the water in her container—a total of 35,000 pounds. I was the Texas trainer who went to pick her up at the San Antonio airport at 4:30 a.m., and, after a crane lifted her box out of the C-130, she traveled to the park in an 18-wheeler escorted in front and back by the police. Her enormous, perfectly straight black dorsal fin stuck out of the top of the truck, a surreal sight on a road in inland Texas.

  After getting her to the park, we lowered her into the shallowest of the four pools—the eight-foot-deep med pool. She came over to us right away to take food, a clear sign that the trip had not upset her. It is not uncommon for whales to be so traumatized by transport that it takes days before they regain the comfort level required to eat. Because of their size, orcas need to eat constantly or else face the possibility of illness and death. To complicate things, Takara was at that time seven months pregnant. She needed food.

  It was her third pregnancy and she knew from experience—and from her mother, Kasatka—that she had to eat not only for her own sake but for the sake of her unborn calf. I was certain there were other things that weighed on her. Since her separation from Kasatka, her calf Kohana, just three at the time, had been taken from her and sent to Spain; and, when Takara was moved to Texas, her three-year-old son Trua remained in Florida. But because she was doing so well physically, we quickly opened the gate of the shallow pool to give Takara access to one of the two big and deeper back pools. Two male orcas, Kyuquot and Tuar, were in the pool adjacent to Tiki’s, with the gates closed to separate them from her. They were, however, aware of her presence and decided to give her a noisy and intimidating welcome, slamming themselves against the gates to Takara’s pool.

  Most other whales would have been cowed by this reception. The sound and shaking that emanates from steel gates battered by 5,000-to 8,000-pound orcas is terrifying. You can feel the ground move. Two gates led to Takara’s back pool; Kyuquot was slamming one, Tuar the other.

  Tiki wasted no time. She swam to each gate and slammed it right back, even harder. The clang was unbelievable and, to human witnesses, humbling. The males never slammed her gate again. Whales can bend steel with the force of their bodies, sometimes reshaping the bars so dramatically that a human diver can swim right through the crevice created. After every episode of whale misbehavior like that, SeaWorld had to use a crane to take out the massive steel gates. Then, we’d drive the crane over the damaged metal to straighten it out, returning the gates to their original shape before replacing them in the pools.

  To solidify her position as Queen of San Antonio, Tiki followed up on that slamming session with swiftly applied and almost Machiavellian intelligence. She sized up the social situation in the pool. Kyuquot, the largest male, had the three other whales—Unna, Tuar and Keet—subordinate to him. Being pregnant, Takara knew she couldn’t take on four whales. But she had a strategy. She was aware that Unna, who was usually quiet, and Keet, a male she had known at another stadium, were already effectively subordinated to her. All she had to do was remind the rambunctious male duo that their first run-in with her was not an anomaly. She chose to divide and conquer.

  First, she took on Tuar. Immediately upon being let into the same pool, she raked him violently, leaving a huge gash across the top of his head. He was devastated and terrified of her. In a later session, when I called the whales over, I asked Tuar to position himself beside her. He
did, but throughout he had his pectoral flippers tucked in defensively, a clear sign of nervousness. He knew who was boss and did not dare touch Tiki for fear of offending her even more. For her part, Takara paid him no mind, focusing her attention on me, like a duchess who refused to be bothered by the riffraff.

  After that, she dealt with Kyuquot—or Ky, as we had nicknamed him. He was much bigger than she was—more than 8,000 pounds to her 5,000; and we had initially kept them apart because we weren’t quite sure how he’d respond to her after the gate-banging incident. Her pregnancy also made her more vulnerable. But eventually, they had to come together. If she was concerned about him in any way, she did not show it. Instead, she raked him with her teeth, again and again. He did not fight back. It was painful to watch him bleeding. He swam as fast as he could to try to escape from her but he did not fight back.

  You can’t prevent raking because the whales have to eventually perform and swim together—and the dominant whales will impose their will on the other whales the moment they feel the need to enforce discipline. Sometimes, raking can be so bad we have to call in the veterinarians to give antibiotics to the injured whale to prevent infection. But Ky would never question Takara’s authority. He had accepted that she was the boss. She could wound him if she wanted to. These are the kinds of rules that orcas in captivity live by.

  I have always been drawn to the power and the intelligence of whales like Takara, Kasatka and Freya—and how those two qualities come together in the way the orcas deal with humans like myself. My experience with Takara was unlike anything else in my life. We don’t know enough about cetaceans to define what “whale-ness” is. In my dealings, I think it is a combination of mental acuity, hypersociability and an innocence that is both childlike and savage. And mysterious. Always, mysterious.

  But there are things that whales do that allow humans to guess at the emotional parallels they have with us. Motherhood, for example, is one relationship that humans and whales share. Like her own mother, Takara was an intense parent, exhibiting all the self-sacrifice and tireless work we associate with ideal human moms.

  In the early morning hours of January 7, 2010, after nearly 18 months of gestation, Takara went into labor. I rushed to the stadium and saw her resting on the surface. Her belly faced me. The tail flukes of the calf were already out of the womb. We could tell that her offspring was female because we could see the calf’s two mammary slits ventrally. I saw the look on Takara’s face and knew she was incredibly uncomfortable. The last few weeks of her pregnancy had been difficult but she continued to put on good shows, even though she was hundreds of pounds over her normal weight. Out of concern for her safety and that of the unborn calf, we had canceled certain routines that required her to spin around and slide out onto shallow water. But, even as she got bigger, she continued to perform, with no letup in the behaviors we asked her to do.

  Within 45 minutes of my getting to the stadium pool, her labor was over. She gave birth right in front of me. Takara immediately started directing her approximately 300-pound newborn, leading her to the surface to take her very first breath. Her daughter would be named Sakari, which we picked by vote (it was my choice). It was a Japanese word for apex, the paramount position of orcas in the oceanic food chain. Tiki began to nurse Sakari within a few hours.

  In the afternoon, Tiki passed the placenta, again right in front of me. Trainers have to be on hand for this epilogue to birthing because the mother can sometimes have problems expelling it. The ideal is to remove it from the pool as quickly as possible for the safety of the mother and calf because the placenta is filled with bacteria, which can attract organisms harmful to the whales. Sometimes, when a whale has produced a stillbirth, she will then become very possessive of the placenta, believing it to be a calf. Often, the mother may view the placenta as part of her and the calf. Removing it can then be dangerous. Fortunately, this was Tiki’s third birth, so she knew the drill. She even pushed the placenta in my direction after she passed it.

  Physically, removing the organ remained quite the task. The placenta weighed between 60 and 80 pounds. I needed the help of another senior manager to get it out of the pool. We draped our bodies over the six-foot-tall clear acrylic panels to reach into the water to pull the placenta over and out of the pool. The faster you take it out, the better—and not just because of health hazards. The placenta is absorbent and sucks in water with every second, growing heavier and heavier.

  In the wild, as Dr. Rose described, orcas never stop moving even when they sleep. But for nearly three months, Takara’s swimming took on a kind of anxious energy—and she did not allow herself to slow down, even to pause to rest. She did this to keep her calf from accidentally bumping into some part of the pool’s wall or floor. But there was another exhausting reason for this nonstop motion: it takes orca calves about three months to master the motor skills required to suckle without swimming. That is, they do not automatically know how to nurse while staying afloat and at rest. What appears to be simple—being still—is a learned behavior in captivity. In the wild, mother and calf are in perpetual motion; that is their natural state. But staying motionless is a skill that orcas have to learn in order to survive in artificial pools.

  And so, as the calf learns to keep still, the mom needs to be in constant movement. To get the perpetually circling Takara to eat, we had to reach out and extend our arms into her mouth to throw handfuls of fish to her as she passed us in the pool, refusing to stop.

  Once Takara was confident enough in her calf’s motor skills and coordination—and the calf had learned to pause in the water—Tiki rested, absolutely exhausted, floating on the surface as the youngster nursed at her mammary slits, which lie toward the end of her belly where her body starts to taper toward the tail. Takara nursed Sakari for about two years and taught her everything about being a dominant female whale even as she protected her daughter from smacking into the wall and making sure the other whales did no harm to her.

  While it is highly unlikely that another whale would try to harm the calf of a dominant female, the possibility should never be discounted. In one instance in Japan, adult whales grabbed and pulled the calf of another orca through the steel bars of a gate separating them from each other, tearing the young orca apart in the process. In any event, Takara made sure no injury came to her calf. It was probably another incentive for her to establish her dominance in San Antonio immediately upon arrival—with enough time for her authority to sink in before her baby arrived.

  I was overjoyed when SeaWorld moved Takara to Texas in February 2009. I had returned to work at SeaWorld San Antonio in March 2008. I had loved working with her and Kasatka when mother and daughter were in San Diego. Tiki was always a character, even when she was a calf. Like a human kid, she would break from a training routine to watch what was happening on television—in this case, SeaWorld’s jumbotron. She liked looking at the screen so much we would give her time to watch the images (which often included herself in replay) as a reward for a good training session. I knew Tiki and her mom so well I could read their moods from the sounds they vocalized through their enormous skull cavities, emanating as various types of clicks and whistles. Every mood of the whales was represented by a different-sounding vocalization; there are subtle ranges among the sounds themselves to reflect how strong each mood is. Learning these complex vocal patterns takes years but, with experience, you can make an accurate assessment of the whale’s emotional state.

  The sounds are complex and we may never learn to decode whale-talk. But you can sense the whale’s moods through the sounds it is making. I can recognize the vocal patterns that represent joy or excitement or enthusiasm. We know that others are sexual. And then there are those that the trainers pay close attention to: the sounds of annoyance that are harbingers of aggression or hostility. This secret, almost undecipherable language provided a glimpse into the inner life of whales.

  By the time Tiki came t
o Texas, we had been apart for close to eight years. Would she remember me? Some experienced trainers believe that whales forget humans within a year after they stop working together. I know it isn’t true. Killer whales have long memories.

  I have first-hand experience of how good Tiki’s memory is. In SeaWorld San Diego, we trained her on a behavior we called a “zipper.” It required the whale to swim swiftly around the perimeter of the pool and then break the surface of the water in specific positions while still swimming fast. But when Tiki moved to Florida, the trainers in Orlando used a different signal for the zipper, replacing San Diego’s finger-touch and visual command with an entirely different visual one. When I was reunited with Takara in Texas, I decided to see whether she would remember the signal we had used together in California. I touched her side with two fingers and slid them across her body, asking her for the zipper. It had been five years since she left San Diego but she recognized the signal immediately and performed the routine perfectly in her first attempt.

  That Takara could remember and interpret something as insignificant as a light touch from a trainer she hadn’t seen in years was evidence that all orcas are able to remember complex and intimate relationships that involve innumerable little cues and interactions that number into the thousands. The relationship between whale and trainer may not be composed of the subtle, interpersonal nods and gestures human beings use to express their feelings, but they have their own depths. I believe the whales notice everything, that they invest all stimuli and memory with what humans can interpret as feelings.

  Takara—like all killer whales—also can tell one trainer from another. That can be good and bad, because the whales learn to play favorites and discriminate. I knew early on that I was one of her favorites. Sometimes, a whale prefers one trainer to another for completely random reasons. Perhaps it’s the way you look at her or the way you carry yourself. Or even the sound of your voice or the way your hand moves when you give them signals. We discovered, for example, that Kasatka and Takara and, to an extent, Freya preferred male trainers and would sometimes snub—or barely tolerate—women who were assigned to work them.