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orcas’ abiding mysteries, namely, where they go and what they eat during the winter months. What we know about the orcas is mostly based on what we observe of them when they’re in Puget Sound and, for the majority of them, that means the months of May through September. J Pod will continue lurking about in the Sound throughout the year, although even that is sporadic; they’re often observed as far south as Vashon Island in the winter months. However, the K and L pods, which constitute the large majority of the clan, head offshore, but no one is sure exactly where they go, since they spread out
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we’ve now convinced ourselves that in fact they’re very selective. It’s really Chinook that seems to be of critical concern to the whales and us.” Historically, the largest single source of Chinook in the Northwest’s Pacific coastal waters during the winter and spring has
been one place: the Columbia River. The role that the Chinook salmon could play in the orcas’ health was underscored two years ago by a Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife report on killer whales: “Perhaps the single greatest change in food availability for resident killer whales since the late 1800s has been the decline of salmon in the Columbia River basin.
“Part of our study is that we actually genotyped all the Chinook samples we got from the whales, and we’re putting a piece together now about which river systems the whales are taking,
“Because killer whales don’t have any predators, they are ultimately prey-limited.
500 small dams have
been demolished in the United States in the past twenty years,
Most of the 84,000 dams in America are aging—some 70
percent of them will be older than 50 in the year 2020—and will increasingly need repair, replacement, or removal. Some of them need it immediately; a substantial number (4,400) are crumbling and considered serious failure risks, and repairs will not be cheap, costing upwards of $21 billion.
It’s incremental. People don’t understand the number of fish that need to be in the system. You think about what the Fraser River produces; we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of fish that need to be produced. So yeah, it will help, every bit helps, but it’s just a little bit of where we need to get.
a real impact that would help orcas and salmon stocks generally: “I think the best bang for the buck is to go into systems like the Skagit and the Nisqually, those bigger river systems that are still in pretty good shape, and try to make sure that those are enhanced.
usually blamed for the high infant mortality rate of wild orcas. They are also believed to play a role in the mortality of adult orcas such as Hope, whose death ultimately was assigned to a complex of problems arising from all the toxins in her body, and others, both Bigg’s and resident orcas, when they are stressed for food sources. At those times, their bodies begin processing their fat stores, and the toxins are released into their systems. The toxins aren’t believed to kill the orcas outright, but rather, to compromise their immune systems so badly that they become susceptible to a variety
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PCBs.
PDBEs.
Dioxins and furans.
Deniers will deny, spinners will spin, but they cannot erase or alter this truth.
always first. If it were a headline, entertainment would have been in 64 point, education might have been in 14, and conservation would have been in 8 point.” If you ask anyone at these facilities about wild killer whales—especially those in the Northwest, where the effects of the captures that founded the industry are still felt by the surviving resident whales—you are given the “scary oceans” line that in the wild, orcas face many threats to their survival, including lack of salmon,
pollution, and boats, and they don’t face these threats at SeaWorld, so they are better off there. You are also likely to get false information about their longevity. SeaWorld guides like to claim that wild whales only live about 25 or 30 years. (The reality is that they have a lifespan similar to that of humans; the upper limit of age for wild males appears to be about 60, and females have lived to be 100.)
this organization that was generating, even then, $5-600 million a year, and they were putting essentially none of it back into really understanding what was going on with these guys, what it took for them to make a living in the wild,” says Hall. “Here was this tremendous capability, and they simply weren’t using it.
There’s no doubt that Balcomb, whose chief living for many years was made from an Earthwatch grant that subsidized the Center for Whale Research’s summer program, runs a well-oiled operation that one researcher called a “propaganda machine.” However, scientists who choose to try to make a living outside the establishment usually have to resort to such methods to raise funds for their research.
Both sides, for that matter, claim to have the animals’ welfare foremost in their minds, but the industry’s credibility in this regard is thin, to put it charitably. This is, after all, an industry that was founded on cruel animal-capture techniques considered inhumane and illegal today. While orca care in captivity has improved measurably in the recent past, the industry still regularly engages in appalling practices like “whale laundering” or warehousing orcas captured overseas (orcas are not legally available in U.S. waters) at a windowless backroom tank in another nation until sufficient
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Whale laundering and warehousing
warehouses are also used to house uncooperative or aggressive animals. The warehousing of Junior, an Icelandic orca who was captured in 1986 and languished without daylight in an Ontario warehouse for four years before he finally died in 1994 may be the most atrocious example of this. Most of
Most wild orcas have died prematurely in captivity. Of the more than 130 orcas who have been captured in the wild since 1964, only 13 remain alive today (not counting the eight orcas recently captured by Russian fishermen, whose fate is currently unknown).
13 out of 130 known captures since 1964 remain alive
wild. In contrast to many animals in zoos and aquariums, who often enjoy comparable if not better lifespans in captivity, killer whales have dramatically lower lifespans in captivity than they do in the wild: Wild whales of all sexes live only an average 8.5 years in captivity, while in the wild the average lifespan is 30 years for males, and 50 for females. Captive-born orcas have shown a high mortality rate as well.
Agh lifespan in captivity 8.5yrs in Wild 30-50yrs and some up to 100
high rate of lethal infection in killer whales. Many of these are induced by the whales’ dental issues, caused by the tendency to chew on metal gates and concrete pools. Even their dental care, when the pulp is simply drilled out of their teeth and the hole
high rate of aberrant behavior in captive orcas, particularly among those who are required to perform unnatural behaviors, including the entertaining stunts that wow so many spectators.
aggressive and violent behaviors with each other, something rarely if ever observed in the wild. Much of this is believed to be the product of marine parks’ tendencies to throw together orcas from disparate social groups and ecotypes (transients thrown in together with residents, Icelandic whales with Northwest orcas) so that the cultural boundaries that have defined these whales’ behaviors all their lives is discarded and ignored.
Violent behaviors in captivity between whales as well as towards humans (unheard of in Wild)
The only times that humans have ever been injured or killed by orcas have occurred in captivity. In the wild, their relationship with humans has been unremittingly tolerant and genial, but in captivity, people have been mauled, crushed, raked, and killed.
“the Blackfish effect.” There were many people entering their stadiums now asking that touchy question at the core of the national debate the film ignited: Is it ethical to keep large, wild-born killer whales in captivity? For many people who viewed the film, the answer is an obvious and resounding “No.” The evidence it presents against captivity is both wide-ranging and scientifically (not to mention morally) persuasive.
Blackfish movie
Of the 52 killer whales in captivity at various marine parks around the world (not including eight recently captured in Russian waters), only 13 were born in the wild. Not even the most fervent whale advocates propose releasing captive-born orcas into the wild (although they would argue for improving their living conditions), but keeping wild orcas in concrete pools, they argue, is simply cruel.
52 whales currently in captivity (possibly 60) only 13 born in wild
The average female orca, like Lolita, is about 20 feet long and weighs
about 7,000 pounds (males are bigger); the widest part of her pool, at 80 feet, only lets her swim a few body lengths. She needs only two quick flicks of her flukes to travel the span. With her family in the wild, she would swim a hundred miles per day or more, but this is only the most obvious limitation of her captivity. Orcas in the wild are highly social animals, gregarious and playful, whose world revolves around their family pods. They also are complex, large-brained creatures with some sensory capacities, like echolocation, far more sophisticated than humans’ own. Holding them
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Females 20ft/7000lbs, males larger
her life has been a routine of confinement in a noisy tank that is 30 percent smaller than the tiny Mexico City pool from
which millions of school kids “rescued” Keiko. It is the smallest pool for any orca in North America. For the first 10 years, she had the companionship of Hugo, another Southern Resident orca, but since his death in 1980 (he died of an aneurysm after years of bashing his head on the walls of the pool where Lolita still lives, in what has been described by whale activists as a suicide), Lolita has been alone in the tank with only the companionship of dolphins and her human trainers.
Lolita is 47 years old. In the wild, females typically live between 50 and 60 years, sometimes as long as 90. Her presumed mother, the orca known as Ocean Sun, or L-25, is believed to be 85 years old. In captivity, wh...
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Lolita is the last survivor from the dozen years or so that Southern Residents were captured in Puget Sound, a practice that ended with the lawsuit filed by Washington State against SeaWorld in 1975. Those eleven years of captures made possible captive-orca displays like those at SeaWorld and Miami Seaquarium. In the process, some 47 whales were removed from the Southern Resident population, more than a third of the total. The population has never fully recovered; nearly a whole generation of reproduction was represented in the whales captured and killed.
47 whales removed from southern or a resident population (more than 1/3 of original total population) in 11 years of capture program
A federal lawsuit filed by a coalition of animal-rights groups seeks to force APHIS to enforce regulations regarding the size of enclosures for cetaceans, something APHIS has done with regularity for thirty years, when it comes to licensing Miami
Emails from APHIS officials obtained as part of the legal proceedings and various Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests have revealed that APHIS officials have a deeply contemptuous attitude toward the activists seeking to free Lolita and a strong bias toward the Seaquarium. Indeed, a careful examination of the agency’s record makes clear that it is so close to the industry it is supposed to regulate that its rulings, internally, are concerned more with the health of the companies that run aquariums and marine parks than with the health of the animals
Next up on the list would be Morgan, a young female orca held at Loro Parque in the Antilles, and herself the object of considerable controversy
Kshamenk, a mammal-eating orca held in a tiny pool in Argentina—shamefully, it is a tank designed for dolphins that is half the size of Lolita
More recently, seven killer whales captured last summer by Russian fishermen in the Sea of Okhostk,
Corky, the longest-lived captive, taken in 1969 from the Northern Resident population near northern Vancouver Island. Again, her home pod is well known and easily locatable,
These animals do not deserve these prisons.” Garrett contends that Lolita is the logical whale to be a pioneer because those scientists not only know her family pod’s identity and habits, they know that her mother and siblings remain alive. “She’s the one,” he says. “She deserves to get out of that tank in Miami. She has the strength to do this. She’s proven that.
Lolita’s pod, including her mother, spent a number of days chatting and milling and munching on Chinook, more or less in the total area of the bay, and they always stayed together. Because for orcas, home isn’t just a place. These creatures’ home is each other.
“The killer whales are one of the most highly respected creatures in Kwakwaka’wakw culture,” says storyteller Andrea Cranmer of Alert Bay, who told this story for a CBC radio audience. “They can take sickness away, guide you to safety, and are regarded as being the same spirit as man.
Can an animal be a person? That is the essence of the challenge the killer whales pose to humans, especially those humans who hold them captive. But it is also a larger challenge to all of us, especially if we endeavor to take our role as stewards of the world in which we live seriously. It is a strange and alien concept in a world dominated by Western thought, in which humans have historically been regarded as exceptional beings apart from nature and in which all nonhuman occupants of the world are considered animals, at best property and at worst vermin,
deeper and more omnipresent than it is for humans; their identities are defined by their families and tribal connections; and their empathy is powerful enough to extend to other species. If orcas have established empathy as a distinctive evolutionary advantage, it might behoove a human race awash in war and psychopathy to pay attention.
have rich emotional lives. Their brains are extremely developed in the areas associated with emotional learning, and their tight social arrangement, in which family bonds remain for life, is complex and sophisticated. They also have a demonstrated capacity for empathy.
Emory University neuroeconomist, has concluded that dogs, for example, provide plenty of food for human thought even beyond what we all thought we knew. “The ability to experience positive emotions, like love and attachment, would mean that dogs have a level of sentience comparable to that of a human child,” writes Berns, “and this ability suggests a rethinking of how we treat dogs.
definition of intelligence is self-servingly geared to place us on top.
