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

by John Hargrove

  But often, a whale prefers one trainer to another for more complex reasons. It lies in the way the trainer chooses to interact with the orca. I am a big believer in the power of touch. You can communicate everything in the way you touch your whale.

  Tiki loved playtime with me. I’d toss balls and enormous flotation devices into the pool and have her toss them back. She’d do it with vocals indicating delight and excitement—sending these massive objects, some weighing hundreds of pounds, into the stands, launched like missiles, sometimes damaging the bleachers and walls and anything in their way. The force would sometimes bend steel bars or knock chunks of concrete off. If her projectile toy hit you, it was unlikely you’d just get up and walk away. Takara knows all about having fun and when she frolics it is a spectacle of things flying in the air—including trainers she’d happily but carefully flip into an adjacent pool. She knew who she liked to have fun with—and who she cared for.

  Normally, performing in the water with Takara is a rough ride; she’s strong, explosive and fast and expects you to be able to handle the physicality of it all. In October 2009, I and another San Antonio SeaWorld trainer were performing a synchronized routine with Takara and Keet during a show. The aim was to submerge with the whales to the bottom of the pool, 40 feet under, and then get the whales to pull up. Once their tails cleared the bottom, the animals would kick in and, with us standing on the tips of their rostrums, they’d push to the surface at an immense speed, simultaneously exploding almost completely out of the water with us standing atop them like human-cetacean jack-in-the-boxes. In SeaWorld lingo, it’s called a double stand-on spy-hop.

  For this act to succeed, Takara and Keet had to be perfectly in sync and we trainers had to keep our equilibrium precisely as the animals sped up to the surface. In this case, however, Takara was much faster than Keet. That meant that when she got to the bottom of the pool, she had to wait for him to catch up to coordinate their ascent. When a whale stalls out like that underwater, it affects the trainer trying to keep himself or herself attached to and balanced on the orca. Because of the way water and gravity work, the human’s body will begin to float during the wait, moving out of position because the momentum has stopped. That’s what happened to me in the brief time it took Keet to catch up with Tiki. Once they were lined up, Takara whipped up her powerful flukes and the sudden burst of power caused my left foot to shift slightly on her rostrum. That was the beginning of disaster.

  I immediately knew I was in trouble when my left foot—my dominant one—shifted off its spot. The thought flashed through my head that I should abort the behavior and break off from Takara. But I convinced myself that I had enough balance to make it. Wrong. She got to the surface with such force that my left foot washed completely off her. It made me lean forward. Tiki was aware something was wrong. In the video of the incident, you can clearly tell that she is trying to stop. You see her arching to try to avoid me. But it was too late and, as I fell forward right as we broke the surface, her rostrum—with more than 5,000 pounds behind it—slammed into my side and sent me into the pool like a rag doll.

  Right away, Takara began to echolocate on my entire body—it felt just like the hummingbird buzz, but I could tell these were different. Her sonar was almost like thought. Takara had, during a previous waterwork show, approached me with echolocation and I could hear and feel it in my chest like I normally did but then it became different. It caused a snapping sound—like that of a rubber band—that I could hear but also feel at the top left side of my brain. I have never experienced anything like it before or after. Later, I joked with other trainers that she was stealing my thoughts and reading my mind. Maybe she was.

  As I tried to regain my senses in the pool after the collision, Takara sent out her sonar while “sharking” me, that is swimming around me in a circle at the surface with her perfectly straight dorsal exposed. It wasn’t because she thought I was prey. She was trying to figure out how badly I was hurt.

  The wind had been knocked out of me but I managed to float to the surface. I motioned a thumbs-up to my control spotter on land, pretending I was fine so they wouldn’t emergency recall Tiki away from me. I needed her help. I had fallen right into the middle of the pool and I knew I didn’t have the strength to make it back to solid ground without her help.

  As she continued to echolocate on my body, I gently snapped my fingers underwater, signaling her to swim in front of me. I placed both hands on her rostrum as I tried to catch my breath. Then I gave her a signal for a pec-push from the show area to the edge of one of the pools in the back. Suddenly, this roughest, toughest princess of SeaWorld became the gentlest of rescuers. I never even felt her pectoral flippers touch my feet as she began to glide me to safety. She then gave me a pec-push step-off onto the back pool’s ledge, smoothly coming underneath me to lift me high enough as I floated that I barely needed to exert any effort to step off her pec and out of the pool. That last move was a behavior she was never trained for. She was aware of how important I was in her life; and she wanted to make sure I would be safe.

  I arrived in the emergency room in very bad shape. The staff performed CT scans to test for internal injuries. When Takara’s rostrum slammed into me, the impact compressed my rib cage, breaking several ribs and injuring soft tissue both in the front and back. The ER doctor would tell me that an impact of that magnitude could have easily stopped my heart. For about a month, any physical contact caused incredible pain and made it impossible to get comfortable or even to lie down without agony.

  I learned one important thing from the incident: Takara treasured me as much as I treasured her. The greatest compliment I ever got in my career came from several young up-and-coming trainers. They told me that what they wanted most out of their careers was one day to have a relationship with an orca as strong as mine was with Takara.

  8

  Getting with the Artificial Program

  I was beyond excited to be a member of the special team that was assembled one spring morning in 2000 in San Diego. I was still a relatively junior member of the Shamu Stadium orca-training squad. But I had been assigned to be part of what everyone on staff described as a historic event: the first artificial insemination of a female killer whale in the world. I felt as if I were a scientific pioneer.

  The project had been years in the making, starting sometime in the 1990s with the first attempts to collect semen from a male orca. Now, in April 2000, after about six months of training, Kasatka had been sufficiently desensitized to the invasiveness of the procedure, making it possible for us to carry it out the way it had been mapped out step-by-step in advance. Her hormonal readings indicated that she would be ready to ovulate precisely that morning. The sperm had already been flown in from Florida, where it had been harvested and stored.

  SeaWorld has had a successful orca-breeding program since 1985. But the corporation decided that artificial insemination would increase the number of orcas in the parks at a faster rate. It was, management explained, a way to sustain the company’s killer whale population. If not, the whales would have died out or suffered from inbreeding, because only orcas in close proximity would be able to mate. Flying the orcas around the country on C-130s or similarly sized aircraft is extremely expensive; and you have to be sure that the orcas you pair up will actually want to mate. A mismatch would be a huge waste of resources. (SeaWorld could no longer diversify its orca population with new whales from the wild because it had stopped capturing orcas due to a public outcry in the 1970s.)

  The solution was a program of artificial insemination. It would allow SeaWorld to ship sperm to a park where a female orca was ready to ovulate. Veterinarians and trainers could track her readiness through the levels of hormones in her urine and blood. We could even follow the development of the ovum in her fallopian tubes via ultrasound.

  Getting Kasatka ready for the introduction of an alien tube into her body took six months. The
procedure required her to roll ventral, that is, to be on her back, with her blowhole, through which she breathed, underwater. She would have to hold her breath for as long as 10 minutes; and she would have to get used to trainers and vets touching her genital area and injecting air into her cervix to open it up for the eventual introduction of the tube. How do you get a whale used to doing all of that without her reacting badly? What do you do when that whale is Kasatka—one of the most dangerous in the SeaWorld system?

  She was already trained to roll over ventrally and have her dorsal fin pointing down to the pool floor. That was part of the repertoire of behaviors we taught all whales to get them ready for physical examinations or for playful rubdowns. A trainer could just give her the signal and she’d roll onto her back. That was only the first step, however.

  In the wild, orcas can stay underwater for as long as 12 to 15 minutes, if they have to. It’s a matter of choice as they go about their lives, feeding and foraging and swimming freely. In captivity, for SeaWorld’s purposes, we have been able to train the most well conditioned whales to hold their breaths for approximately ten minutes. We would start Kasatka slowly, rewarding her first for two minutes of holding her breath, then two and a half, then three and so on until we got to the goal of approximately ten minutes—all the while making sure she knew to keep absolutely still. The small increments were important because she was supposed to learn not to wiggle or move through the ordeal. If we had started her at ten minutes, she would have displayed discomfort—and that would be harder to train out of her. So we went slowly—that is, like all trained behavior, we approximated it, step by step. Every time she succeeded, we rewarded her with fish or something else she really enjoyed. The project was extremely important to SeaWorld and we needed the whale to feel the process was a positive experience. We were likely to have her go through it again and again to produce calf after calf. She had to learn to feel rewarded by it.

  Next, we had to get her used to being touched in a sensitive part of her body. You can tell a female orca from a male by two additional slits in the genital area. These are the mammary glands where her calf will nurse. The third slit shields the vagina (the same slit in a male orca hides the penis, which is not visible except when it is erect). While Kasatka was ventral, we’d have trainers she trusted by her side, touching her pectoral flippers to reassure her that everything was fine. Their presence signaled that she was in safe hands, that they were watching out for her no matter how strange the proceedings were. That helped keep her calm. One trainer would then start to manipulate the area, gently pulling apart the vaginal walls, as slowly as possible, reassuring her each step of the way to let her know that this is what we really wanted her to do, that it was part of the behavior we required of her.

  In retrospect, the process sounds barbaric: using behavioral training methods to get a hugely intelligent animal to submit to being artificially inseminated for the benefit of a corporation. But that didn’t cross my mind during the months we trained Kasatka for the procedure. I believed it was for the good of the killer whale population.

  I was one of the few trainers assigned to Kasatka’s team to train her for the procedure. We spread the vaginal walls apart a little, the first step in conditioning her to be able to accept the tube of sperm that would be injected in there on the day of the actual insemination. We used a small lubricated plastic tube—no thicker than a ballpoint pen but flexible—to figure out the pathways of her vagina. Each female orca is different—never exactly like the anatomy textbooks diagram. We needed to know how she was structured to avoid causing any internal damage the day we introduced the larger, more important tube into her to send sperm toward the ovum. We slowly got her used to larger and thicker tubes.

  To simulate the actual tube, we used a soft plastic proxy of the same dimensions; it injected air into the whale’s cervix just as the real device would. We had to prepare her for that as well. Because the insemination would be performed by a veterinarian—and not a trainer—we had to get Kasatka used to a stranger joining her trainers. The veterinarians don’t have relationships with the whales and they know better than to just step over the protective barrier and insert something into a 5,000-pound killer whale without the animal being properly conditioned to accept their presence and their intrusion. It is extremely rare for SeaWorld veterinarians to be next to the trainers with the whales. Usually, they are on the other side of the wall that separates the pool and its immediate perimeter from the rest of the stadium. We had stand-ins playing the part of the vet, making that role a variable part of the training so Kasatka would know that someone she was unfamiliar with would always be part of the process.

  For Kasatka, the air in the cervix was the most difficult part of the training. She kept her eyes closed every time we practiced it. To help keep her comfortable, we had Takara nearby in the same pool. It was important that she could sense her daughter’s presence. She and Takara were inseparable and we knew we had to have the younger female close. She would be by her mother’s side on the day of the procedure itself.

  As we practiced, the vets monitored Kasatka’s urine day by day to find out when she would ovulate next. They tracked her luteinizing hormones as well as her progesterone and estrogen levels. The veterinarian, Todd Robeck, who would perform the actual insemination was on site in San Diego. But the sperm had been flown in from Florida where Tilikum, the donor, was based. The whole process would come down to the one moment when she started to ovulate. Via sonogram, we would know when the ovum was about to drop and practically to the minute when to inject the sperm. Everything had to be right. Everyone had to be ready to work efficiently and precisely. You couldn’t waste the semen that had been excruciatingly difficult to harvest in the first place.

  If preparing a female killer whale for artificial insemination was a complex choreography of sonograms and chemistry, taking semen from a male orca was, well, sensitive and dangerous. Tommy Lee of Mötley Crüe—a supporter of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA)—infamously accused SeaWorld of “having someone get in the pool [with Tilikum] and masturbate him with a cow’s vagina filled with hot water.” That isn’t how it’s done. Though it wasn’t too far off from the way SeaWorld first tried to do it.

  The first would-be donor was Kotar (whose alleged through-the-gate tryst with Kasatka in San Antonio produced Takara). The attempt was made in the early 1990s. After training him to roll on his back and basically keep his blowhole underwater, the team in San Antonio began to manipulate his penis to produce an ejaculation. That was more than the orca was willing to put up with. He raised himself up with a fury at the abuse and turned an open jaw toward the trainers at work. That hands-on strategy of sperm collection was rethought.

  The trainers then devised an unlikely but ingenious approach to collecting sperm from male orcas without having to manipulate their penises. They would associate the procedure with sex—by having a whale that the potential donor orca was sexually attracted to in the same pool, male or female. When the trainers saw the donor had a full or partial erection, they would call him over and see if they could get him to slowly associate the process they were initiating with “sex in mind.” Then step-by-step, in session after session, the constantly rewarded whale would incrementally learn to produce an erection.

  The orca’s penis is not visible unless erect. But when aroused, it cannot be missed. It is pink with some white coloration and four to six feet long. But getting a male trained to produce an erection is only one step toward getting him to ejaculate. A whale has to guess that is what you want him to do. It requires the orca to do what trainers call “prospecting”—trying out several possibilities to find out what results were needed to gain reinforcement or rewards from the trainers around him. At first, there was a lot of thrusting, which the trainers wouldn’t reinforce. The usual result of a next attempt would see the orca producing urine. We didn’t want that either. Eventually, through leaps of the
killer whale imagination, there would be some semen but combined with urine. That sperm sample is unusable because it is contaminated. With luck and even more careful reinforcement, the orca would finally produce pure semen. It is astonishing proof of the orca’s control over its physical functions—able to produce semen without friction, almost entirely by its imagination, coaxed along by behaviorist principles.

  (One precaution taken after the sperm collection procedure: the trainers who got a male orca to produce an erection were never allowed to work with that whale in the water because the whale most likely would associate them with sexual arousal, which was almost always a precursor for aggression.)

  A good harvest was 50 cubic centimeters of semen—or just over three tablespoons. The goal, however, was to get larger and larger volumes because the fluid was so valuable to the corporation. The sperm was collected in a plastic bag attached by an elastic band to the base of the orca’s penis. The container was completely sterilized and could not come into contact with the pool’s salt water—or anything that could possibly contaminate and kill the precious sperm. Immediately after ejaculation, the bag would be rushed by a trainer to the veterinarian lab, where the sperm would be frozen. Every second counted because the moment the spermatozoa were out of the orca, they would begin to die.

  Not all male whales could produce semen this way. It required a special kind of killer whale mentality. SeaWorld has been trying to train Ky—who was born in 1991—for years; and he still does not fully understand what he needs to do to satisfy the trainers.