Most of all, she is probably atop the list of return candidates because her home pod is well known; indeed, her mother is still living and can be readily located. That is because of the legacy she represents: Lolita is the last surviving whale from the Puget Sound captures of the 1960s and ’70s, an episode that provided the foundations for the captive-orca industry. Her capture, in Penn Cove in 1970, is vividly portrayed in Blackfish, part of a horrific episode in which five orcas were needlessly killed.
“When I heard the Lolita story, I imagined how amazing it’d be to bring her back to her mother decades after her capture,” Gabriela Cowperthwaite, director of Blackfish, told me. “This singular, feasible event could catapult us into such a dignified direction. We owe this species big time. And we could start with her.”
• • •
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 permanently in a plain concrete pool is akin to putting a human in a small plain white room.
During the first years of her life, Lolita was a typical Puget Sound Southern Resident orca, feeding on wild salmon, playing with her family, following her mother’s lead as her native L pod swam through its home waters. In 1970, when she was probably three or four years old, Lolita was among a large clan of nearly 100 orcas driven into Penn Cove by “orca cowboys.” As the young orca’s family members lined up in the waters outside the capture and vocalized to the whales inside, the captors selected seven whales to sell to various marine parks around the world and proceeded to lasso them, wrestle them into slings, and lift them out of there. The Miami Seaquarium bought the young whale and named her Lolita.
Since then, 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, whale activists say, the average lifespan of an orca is eight and a half years (a figure disputed by the industry). Of the 130 or so wild whales who have been captured since 1961, only 13 remain alive today.
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.
It is that fact that first created a realistic opportunity to pry Lolita out of the hands of her owners. When the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), a division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), listed the Southern Residents as endangered in 2005, its listing practically singled out Lolita by asserting that orcas from the endangered population already held in captivity—and Lolita is the only surviving such whale—would not be included as part of the population, but following a petition filed by animal advocates, the NMFS decided to reconsider that position. In January 2014, NMFS and NOAA made it official: The agencies announced Lolita would be granted status as a member of the Southern Resident population. What that meant, exactly, was anybody’s guess.
For one thing, NOAA has over the years maintained in its rulings that releasing a whale back into the wild could harm both the whale and the endangered population and has been disinclined to support efforts to return Lolita. (Indeed, NMFS sided with Arthur Hertz in his attempts to have Keiko recaptured in Norway and placed back in captivity at his Seaquarium.) The language of the January 2014 finding specified that they would consider simply reintroducing Lolita to the wild a violation of the Endangered Species Act. However, Lynne Barre, at the NMFS, added that the agency was awaiting public comment before deciding exactly the direction they would take in assessing what kind of protections Lolita might be granted under an ESA listing.
“We won’t really have an answer to those kinds of questions until we do a full analysis,” Barre said, noting that the decision was part of a trend within federal agencies generally to rethink the handling of endangered species of animals.
The immediate impact of the ruling would be relatively limited, since Lolita is the only captive orca from an endangered population in the United States, and it is certainly not clear that a favorable ruling would force the Seaquarium to return her to the Salish Sea. However, it could also potentially affect a number of other animals from endangered populations that are held in American marine parks, zoos, and aquariums as well. Most of all, enabling Lolita’s return to her native waters would likely create pressure for other releases as well—at least, if it succeeds. And that’s a big if.
Lolita is also at the center of another federal-level case, a lawsuit that centers on a fairly mundane but telling question: How strictly will the federal agency responsible for licensing aquariums, the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), part of the Department of Agriculture, enforce its own regulatory standards for the industry when dealing with the Miami Seaquarium and its killer-whale pool? 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 Seaquarium. The center of the fight is Lolita’s pool or, more specifically, the concrete island that comprises a twenty-foot wall near the center of the pool and provides a platform on which her trainers can stand during shows and onto which Lolita slides and poses at the end of her performances.
APHIS regulations require pools containing orcas to have a “minimum horizontal dimension” (MHD) of at least 48 feet, yet the distance from the island in Lolita’s pool to the pool’s edge is only 35 feet. APHIS officials, noting that nothing in the regulations explicitly prohibits such a structure, have given the island a “waiver” by asserting that “the platform does not hinder Lolita’s ability to move about freely” and is no obstacle to her free movement.
A collection of animal-rights groups and a handful of private citizens filed the lawsuit in the fall of 2011, claiming that APHIS was derelict in its duty to enforce the law, and they now await an initial hearing in federal court in 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 themselves. Its function, as it has evolved over the years, is more to act as part of the industry’s infrastructure rather than to e
nsure that the industry treats the animals in its care well.
In her nearly twenty years as the marine-mammal specialist for the Humane Society of the United States, Naomi Rose had numerous contacts with APHIS inspectors, directing complaints from their constituents to the federal agency and requesting inspections of suspect facilities. In all that time, she says, only once did the inspection result in any substantive change to the facility.
“Generally speaking, when they have gone in and done the inspection that I’ve requested, they just give the place a pass, or cite them for something small that they could correct very quickly,” Rose says. “Rust on the gate, that sort of thing. And then they get the sign-off. So even though they have been responsive to those requests, they have led to only one substantive action, and that was way back in the 1990s. They certainly never do anything until you write the letter.”
• • •
There are a number of other orcas who are prime candidates for release to the wild besides Lolita. 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 (she was rescued, after being separated from her family and found emaciated in the Netherlands, with the proviso that she not be put on public display, a promise her rescuers then ignored). Even though she has been identified as a North Atlantic orca, Morgan’s home pod remains uncertain, although John Ford’s acoustic research on Morgan provided a close identification of her pod (it’s believed she originated with a well-known pod in Norway). This is not the case, however, with another prime candidate for return to the wild, 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’s—who was netted on a beach in an area frequented by his home pod.
More recently, seven killer whales captured last summer by Russian fishermen in the Sea of Okhostk, northeast of Japan, dramatically increased the list of captive orcas. Two of those whales were scheduled for public display at a dolphinarium in Sochi sometime after the closing of the Olympics in February, while the fate of the five other whales is unknown. Whale activists are demanding the release of all seven orcas, since it is believed their natal pods could be readily identified and located.
And then there’s 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, and whale scientist Paul Spong of British Columbia’s famed OrcaLab, like Ken Balcomb, has a well-developed plan for her return to the wild, beginning with a sea pen, just as he did with Springer. However, as a SeaWorld property, there is little likelihood she will be leaving San Diego anytime soon.
Indeed, the industry remains adamant that none of these whales should be returned to the wild. The Alliance of Marine Mammal Parks asserts (as it has done for years) that “to experts concerned about the risks to which release exposes both the individual animal and the wild population, the issue is a simple one. Without a compelling conservation need such as sustaining a vulnerable species, release may be neither a reasoned approach nor a caring decision.”
Nearly everyone involved in orca-rehabilitation issues, however, agrees that the best candidate is Lolita. Ken Balcomb’s brother, Howard Garrett, has been running a campaign to “Free Lolita” since the mid-1990s (his Orca Network is part of the APHIS lawsuit). “If anything, we’re seeing more energy now than we ever have,” Garrett told me recently, acknowledging the role Blackfish (in which he appears as an interviewee) has played in that: “When it’s placed in front of your eyes like that, people instinctively understand that it’s wrong. 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.”
Balcomb and the “Free Lolita” campaign have developed specifics for returning Lolita to her native waters. They want to set up a sea pen at Kanaka Bay off San Juan Island, a place frequented by L pod whales (and not easily accessed by people). From that pen, it is hoped she might be able at least to reestablish contact with her family, if not rejoin them. “We propose to retire her to a sea pen here in the San Juans, where she can at least live out her days in a natural environment,” Balcomb told me. “And if she establishes contact with her family, and shows an inclination and ability to hunt and roam free, then we may choose to reunite her with her family. But that’s far from a given.”
Lolita still uses the signature calls of the L pod orcas in her tank in Miami, and when a Dateline NBC reporter played recordings of Southern Resident vocalizations for her, she responded strongly, spyhopping, raising her head above water and peering about and apparently listening to the calls.
None of this concerns Arthur Hertz. Hertz is the president of Wometco, the holding company that, until recently, owned the Seaquarium and the rights to Lolita. Hertz doesn’t talk to the press. His PR firm, however, provided me a boilerplate statement about Lolita, insisting: “Moving Lolita in any way, whether to a new pool, a sea pen or to the open waters of the Pacific Northwest, would be an experiment. And it is a risk with her life that we are not willing to take. There is no scientific evidence that the 48-year-old post-reproductive Lolita could survive if she was returned to the ocean.” The release further insisted that the facility has always been in compliance with federal rules and that Lolita is “healthy and thriving.”
Hertz has refused to even discuss Lolita’s sale with the Balcomb group although the offers are in the $2 to $3 million range, according to Howard Garrett. Hertz has even refused to discuss selling her to another aquarium, and there are doubts that SeaWorld would be interested in acquiring her. In the meantime, Lolita’s pool continues to age. Damning video footage, taken in the 1990s by Russ Rector of the Dolphin Freedom Foundation and played on local news stations, showed the underside of Lolita’s tank at the time: a maze of temporary jacks and supports, rigged to keep the steadily leaking tank bottom in one piece. An algae-covered window looks into the tank. Rector says that when he put his hand on one of these windows as Lolita did her big breach, the glass panel moved a half-inch. The Seaquarium was hit with a number of code violations by city officials in 2003 (mostly involving electrical wiring, some cracked concrete, and a loose railing) and promptly underwent renovations and repairs to address them. No one from the public has seen the pool’s underside since then, although the park underwent major upgrades in 2006 after a hurricane damaged parts of the facility, and it had to close.
Hertz promised to expand and improve the pool, but continued to face one hitch: He couldn’t. The Seaquarium is located on tiny Key Biscayne, a long spit of sand that connects to Miami by the crowded Rickenbacker Causeway across Biscayne Bay. Key Biscayne residents have clamped down on business expansion and tried to rein in growth and traffic problems. They fear a Seaquarium expansion would worsen their problems. The Village of Key Biscayne successfully fought the Seaquarium’s attempts to expand in the 1990s and continues to deny Hertz’s efforts to increase parking and improve the pool. In 2003, Hertz told local journalists that he was embarking on a project to expand Lolita’s tank, but the project never came to fruition.
A twist in Lolita’s story developed in late 2013, when the Miami Herald reported that the Seaquarium was in negotiations to sell its facility—and presumably all of its animals—to a California-based theme-park business, Palace Entertainment, that owns facilities across North America as well as in the Antibbes. The sale was completed in March 2014. Whether that means Lolita could end up elsewhere is anyone’s guess; the new buyers have declined to comment on any aspect of their acquisition.
A source told the Miami Herald that in the recent bid by Palace Entertainment to purchase the Seaquarium, Hertz was offered $30 million for the facility. Accord
ing to the Herald, the Seaquarium’s revenues have been rising in recent years despite its aging state. In the meantime, the park’s private surveys have shown that two out of three ticket-buyers are coming there to see Lolita. When her daily shows come around, most of the rest of the park goes vacant as everyone packs into her stadium.
Two years ago, there were concerns when Lolita developed dental problems, which can be fatal for captive killer whales. Since then, her health has reportedly improved, but the people working to free her don’t know how long all this will last. “We know that whales in captivity only live a few years,” says Howard Garrett, head of the Orca Network. “She’s already lived far beyond what anyone could expect. For Lolita, it’s just a matter of time. They very well could wake up one morning and find her dead. That’s what usually happens to these orcas.”
• • •
On a typical day, Lolita twice does performances for the crowds who pack the concrete confines of the Miami Seaquarium, once in the early afternoon and again later in the day. These shows are about twenty minutes each and feature acrobatics both from the killer whale and from the Pacific white-sided dolphins (a species nicknamed “lags” by trainers), usually between three and six of them. The other main feature is nonstop blaring rock music of the predictably anthemic variety, rattling around the concrete-and-steel stadium.
Lolita’s trainer performing “water work” with her in January 2014.
The dolphins are high leapers and impressively fast, but nothing makes the crowd gasp as Lolita does when she breaches, as she does several times for the crowd. If it’s a hot day (as it usually is in Key Biscayne), she splashes the crowds in the first four or five rows with the immense waves she can produce when she breaches (and at one point gives people a complete drenching by splashing them with her powerful tail flukes). The main impression that emerges from all this splashing, however, is that the huge displacements of water created by her leaps and bounds are just like those of a big kid in a bathtub. In this tiny pool, that’s about right.
Of Orcas and Men Page 26