Death at SeaWorld: Shamu and the Dark Side of Killer Whales in Captivity

by David Kirby

  When Naomi arrived in fall of 1985, the school’s chancellor was trying hard to make the official mascot the “Santa Cruz Sea Lion.” It nearly caused a riot among students, most of whom preferred the banana slug. The following year they voted by a fifteen-to-one margin to retain the slimy, yellow land mollusk, Ariolimax dolichophallus, as their official symbol.

  Naomi did not choose Santa Cruz for its groovy vibe and acid-wash eccentricity. The university was and still remains home to one of the country’s finest PhD programs in marine mammalogy.

  At the time, many marine biologists and ocean scientists considered the study of marine mammals to be an inferior stepchild of the “real” ocean science they were conducting. Naomi had instinctively sensed this condescending attitude. “They must think we’re a bunch of whale-huggers,” she joked. “They think, ‘Well, everybody loves Flipper, for Christ’s sake. This is just a cheap way of getting into marine biology.’”

  Part of the reason for this bias, Naomi assumed, arose from the misguided belief that marine mammalogy was based largely on observation alone. Some detractors, she knew, believed that marine mammalogists did little more than putt-putt around on a little dory, do some afternoon whale watching, maybe record an underwater song or scribble down a few items about foraging and breaching, then return to dry land in time for dinner and zinfandel.

  UCSC boasted some of the marquee names in the fields of marine mammalogy and animal behavior, including Burney Le Boeuf, an authority on elephant seal behavior, Robert Trivers, the respected evolutionary biologist and “sociobiology” theorist, and Kenneth S. Norris, father of American marine mammalogy and perhaps the world’s foremost expert on cetaceans.

  Norris’s presence at UCSC was a major reason why Naomi selected the school, and she arrived there in the fall of 1985 hoping he would agree to become her PhD adviser. Norris had pioneered the field of modern science on the intelligence, social lives, and echolocation abilities of a variety of cetaceans—the scientific order that includes whales, dolphins, and porpoises. He founded the University of California’s Natural Reserve System (which today protects 120,000 acres of habitat), launched a national campaign to reduce dolphin deaths in tuna nets, and helped draft the landmark Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972.

  Norris was also a leading figure in the development of the marine mammal “display” industry. He had been appointed the founding curator of LA’s Marineland of the Pacific in 1953, where he worked intensively with bottlenose dolphins in the captive collection when they were not entertaining tourists. While at Marineland, Norris concluded that an intelligent animal was waiting to be studied behind those mysterious “smiles.” (Bottlenose dolphins do not smile: Their mouths naturally curve upward, giving the illusion of perpetual gaiety, even in death.) He set out to learn how dolphins perceived the world, what they saw and heard.

  If not for the early captive display industry and innovators such as Dr. Norris, much of the groundbreaking work on whale and dolphin science would not have been accomplished.

  Norris left Marineland in 1959 but remained active in the public display industry and a key supporter of marine mammal theme parks. He helped design Sea Life Park in Honolulu and Ocean Park in Hong Kong. In 1965, he was one of four founders of a world-class theme park on the shallow mudflats of Mission Bay, just north of San Diego. It was called SeaWorld.

  Norris had also published several groundbreaking books, including The Porpoise Watcher in 1974, and was widely acclaimed for instructing his students to pursue science with rigor and passion. He was enormously curious and loved discussing his work with anyone who was interested. In Naomi’s world, Dr. Ken Norris was a very big wig.

  Unfortunately, by the time she arrived in Santa Cruz, he was winding down his academic career. Norris was helping a few grad students complete their degree, but he was not taking on anyone new. Naomi was at a loss: This was not part of her plan, and she liked having a plan.

  Her first year at Santa Cruz proved thorny. Naomi knew few people on campus or in town. Even worse, without a master’s degree under her belt, she didn’t know what she was supposed to do. Everyone assumed she had her master’s already and knew what grad school was all about. But Naomi did not know. She found the solitude, uncertainty, and the loss of her hoped-for adviser depressing.

  Nor did she receive the type of guidance she would have liked from the adviser who stepped forward to help her: Dr. Robert Trivers.

  Bob Trivers, a raffishly handsome man with a dark, wavy mane and a thick beard and mustache, was a popular figure on campus and a legendary thinker when it came to evolution, biology, DNA, and what makes people and animals do the things they do. Trivers had written two seminal and highly acclaimed papers while at Harvard in the 1970s—one on reciprocal altruism and one on parent-offspring conflict. They had become central canons of a growing discipline created by his mentor, E. O. Wilson, called sociobiology—the study of the genetic and evolutionary causes of social behavior. Why, for example, do males act differently from females? Why are parents so hardwired to “invest” in their children, and why are children so apt to challenge them? Can cooperation be explained by evolution? Can jealousy? Sociobiology examines all of these patterns of behavior, not only within species, but across them.

  Trivers had just published a major book on the subject, called Social Evolution, and he gave Naomi an autographed copy as a welcoming gift. It fascinated her. His theory of reciprocal altruism, for instance, opened her eyes. It explained so much and she often described it to others as: “Reciprocal altruism is just what it sounds like: You do for me, I do for you. Or the prisoner’s dilemma: You screw me, I screw you. Tit for tat. It’s the basis of friendship; it’s the basis of conflict.” Sociobiology lies behind many of our interactions, and the same is true for animals, she explained. “Now, I know people might get upset when you boil down their friendships to some biological mechanism, but it really does explain just about everything. I just love this stuff. I really do.”

  Naomi was equally fascinated by the evolutionary biology that drives gender-specific social behaviors—something that would ultimately help her decide on her dissertation topic. For example, she knew about studies on the evolutionary roots of male social behavior among primates, elephants, and wolves, but what was known about male dolphins? Trivers’s theories would eventually become central to Naomi’s approach to killer whales.

  Trivers had few graduate students under his wing—he was too eccentric for some students. He became Naomi’s adviser, gave her some office space, handed her some theoretical papers to read and analyze, and even agreed to bat around dissertation ideas with her. He was terrific at theorizing, thinking big, and opening the minds of young people. But Naomi did not find him a helpful mentor. He had little interest in marine mammals. To her, he didn’t seem interested in animals at all (the opposite of Ken Norris), but rather the theory of animals.

  The lack of guidance was stressful. The paperwork alone at grad school was daunting, the various filing deadlines confusing. Naomi decided to just concentrate on her courses. She ended up taking more classes than she needed because she didn’t know what else to do: intertidal biology, marine mammalogy, invertebrate zoology, statistics, even Spanish. The heavy workload was a welcome distraction; Naomi felt better when she was busy and engaged. One day in early 1986, she made an appointment with the campus counselor to discuss her feelings of loneliness and lack of support. The counselor suggested she approach other students and introduce herself.

  For someone such as Naomi, who, like her mother, was quite reserved around strangers, that was gutsy. It seemed rather aggressive, but she figured she had nothing to lose. Her charm offensive paid off. Naomi quickly met a young woman named Janice Waite. Janice and another student, David Bain, were among the last grad students under the wing of Ken Norris. Naomi was envious of that, but she was also intrigued by what Janice and Dave were studying: the Northern Resident killer whale community, which spends each summer in and around Johnstone Str
ait, British Columbia.

  Janice, more petite than Naomi even, with light brown hair and a soft smile, was a second-year master’s student from Seattle. Her dissertation concerned the “alloparenting” behaviors of Northern Resident orcas. Alloparenting is when individuals other than the actual parents look after offspring, be it temporarily or permanently.

  Janice began as Dave’s research assistant before devising her own study on orca babysitting. Janice told Naomi about Resident orca mothers and how they occasionally part from their young to forage, socialize, or even rest, leaving their calf’s aunt, grandmother, or older sibling to “babysit” the youngster. Naomi was engrossed by the idea. She wondered how Bob Trivers’s theories of social evolution might be applied to orca alloparenting.

  Dave Bain, meanwhile, was finishing up his PhD work on the acoustical world of the Northern Residents. The tall, lanky student with blue eyes and pale, thinning hair was in his final season at the field camp he and Janice had helped set up on a large, rocky island, West Cracroft, which faces Johnstone Strait across from Vancouver Island. Dave had spent the past years recording the different pods’ vocalizations through a homemade system of underwater microphones, known as hydrophones, designed to isolate individual vocalizers. He was trying to break down their dialects into something of a language, trying to decode their whistling racket.

  Naomi became friends with Dave and Janice. She was intrigued by their work and excited by the thought of camping out up north and conducting actual field science on wild animals.

  “Your project is really cool,” she told them. “I still don’t know what I’m doing for my PhD yet, but maybe I could go up there this summer and work as your field assistant?”

  Janice and Dave loved the idea—they were always looking for people to help with collecting data and working around the camp and on the boats. They needed at least three or four others to help them, and volunteers were not exactly lining up at the door: The work was hard, the pay was nil, the place was remote, the weather was damp, and the horseflies were hungry.

  The idea morphed into something more than a one-summer plan for Naomi. With Dave finishing his PhD that year and Janice leaving the following summer, they talked of handing off the field camp to Naomi. Janice said they could cede the whole Northern Resident project to her, as long as she could come up with an orca-oriented subject for her dissertation.

  Naomi jumped at the idea. It didn’t matter that the subject was killer whales. Janice and Dave could have been studying sea otters and Naomi would have been interested. Just the idea of working in the field with marine mammals was alluring. This is what I want to do, she told herself. I want to be in Canada this summer with these guys.

  5

  Johnstone Strait

  On a cool and foggy morning in June 1986, Naomi Rose left Santa Cruz for the long drive north to Vancouver Island.

  She joined up with an Australian friend she had met while traveling in Europe and set off on a road trip with him. The two stopped at Mount Saint Helens, just starting to show some green after the 1980 eruption, and visited the World Expo in Vancouver. They separated after that and Naomi caught the ninety-minute ferry across Georgia Strait from Vancouver to Nanaimo, an attractive Canadian municipality built around a protected harbor on the east coast of Vancouver Island. The island is named for Royal Navy captain George Vancouver, who charted the area for Great Britain aboard the HMS Discovery in the 1790s.

  That night Naomi rendezvoused with Dave and Janice and the other field assistants, all of them crashing at the home of legendary whale expert Mike Bigg. He and his colleagues had developed the modern system of photo-identification for killer whales, which notates such things as size, gender, travel companions, dorsal fin marks (nicks and notches), surface scars, and the gray “saddle patch” area directly behind an orca’s dorsal fin, with no two patches exactly alike.

  Not until Mike and others demonstrated how orcas can be positively identified could genuine research on whale populations get underway in earnest. Mike Bigg was loved and respected for his gentle nature, generous spirit, and willingness to share his data with anyone interested in killer whales. His work was revolutionary. Mike was widely regarded as the father of modern orca research. Naomi was electrified by meeting him.

  The following morning, the group began their final leg: the five-hour journey up Highway 19, an unforgettable stretch of roadway that heads northwest along the island’s leeward coast, past Qualicum Beach, Fanny Bay, and Campbell River, where the Strait of Georgia narrows into Discovery Passage. The passage is a dazzling sight, with steep granite peaks rising from the cold waters of the channel. From there, Highway 19 winds westward over the island’s mountainous spine, passing through sheer gorges veiled in daubs of mist. Finally they turned onto a winding lane that led downhill past Beaver Cove, with its families of black bears and nesting bald eagles, to minuscule Telegraph Cove.

  The quaint settlement at Telegraph Cove could have been the setting for the TV series Northern Exposure. Colorfully painted clapboard cottages with white trim line the wooden boardwalk that curves around the cozy harbor. It got its name in 1912 when the village was selected as a lineman’s station and terminus of the telegraph service from Campbell River.

  At the cove, Dave and Janice introduced the new crop of field assistants to their old friends Jim Borrowman and Bill MacKay, who ran the Stubbs Island Whale Watching tours aboard their old sixty-foot workboat, the Gikumi (GHEE-kah-mee), which means “the chief” in the Kwakwala language. She had been custom-built for Mr. Fred Wastell back in 1954 and used to haul logs to the sawmill at Telegraph Cove and to deliver lumber and dry goods up and down the coast, before being converted to a tour boat in 1980. Bill and Jim always ferried the students out to West Cracroft at the beginning of the summer. They instinctively adopted a protective posture toward students who ventured into the area and checked in on them from time to time on the lonely island—out of concern for the young Americans and gratitude for their scientific interest in the Northern Resident whales.

  The gang from UCSC loaded their gear—tents, tarps, and sleeping bags; stoves, pots, and pans; dried food, fresh food, and water; canteens, shovels, and axes; insect repellent, toilet paper, and bandages; maps, charts, and car batteries; binoculars, hydrophones, and cameras—into the Gikumi and another boat that would be their lifeline to the outside world for the next ten weeks: the Tesseract (named for the mysterious government project in Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time). She was a sixteen-foot C-Dory Classic Cruiser, white with a fiberglass hull. Everyone called her Tessie.

  They launched their brimming vessels and set out into Johnstone Strait, turning right toward the southeast and plowing hard against the powerful and hazardous currents carrying the afternoon tide. The riverlike strait, a ribbon of seawater that separates Vancouver Island from the mainland, is named for James Johnstone, master of the armed supply ship Chatham that accompanied George Vancouver and the Discovery to the area. The strait’s islets, forests, fjords, and granite spires could pass for Norway or parts of New Zealand. The passageway was sculpted by prehistoric glaciers that left it extremely deep—up to two thousand feet in some places—especially striking since the channel is only about a mile and a half wide in some places.

  The strait’s northern terminus, near Telegraph Cove, connects to Queen Charlotte Strait via a channel called Blackfish Sound. Blackfish is the word for “killer whale” used by the local Kwakwaka’wakw (quah-QUAH-kah-wok) people, as well as some white residents in the area. The First Nations people have lived here for thousands of years and control much of the region’s land and water. Blackfish Sound is an apt name: In the summertime these waters pulse with two hundred Northern Resident orcas, plus a revolving number of Transients. There are also humpback, gray, and minke (MINK-kee) whales, Pacific white-sided dolphins, harbor porpoises, Dall’s porpoises, harbor seals, Steller’s sea lions, and other marine mammals.

  Back then, a moving feast of salmon fed Resident orcas
each year as several migrating species funneled through the strait en route to the freshwater streams of their birth. The first migrating salmon, the fatty chinooks, typically showed up in late May and kept passing through until August. Next came the masses of sockeye, usually from June to August, followed by the pinks in July and August, the coho in mid-July, the northern coho in September, and the chum from late August until October. In late December, winter chinooks made their own run through the passage. (Salmon stocks have been drastically reduced since then, presenting a significant threat to Resident orcas of the Pacific Northwest.)

  It took the students close to an hour to reach their new wilderness quarters—twin sites called Cliff Camp and Boat Camp, etched from the rugged shoreline of West Cracroft, a large and lonely island with no permanent residents, buildings, hot water, sewage, or electricity but plenty of wild animals, some of them dangerous, including cougars and bears.

  The two camps were directly across the channel from a sheltered Vancouver Island bay known as Robson Bight, where the Lower Tsitika River flows into Johnstone Strait. The site selection was no accident. In 1982 the government of British Columbia set aside the bight as a special ecological reserve and sanctuary for killer whales. The reserve includes beaches and tidal zones and extends one kilometer into the strait. No one is allowed to enter by land without a permit. Visitors on boats are asked to remain outside the one-kilometer perimeter.

  For generations—if not centuries or more—Northern Resident killer whales have halted to spend an hour or so almost every summer day in the calm waters of the bight. The area’s biggest attraction from an orca’s perspective is a series of small beaches lined with smooth, round stones. Killer whales come in next to shore and rub their huge bodies on the ocean floor. They exhale to reduce buoyancy and spin around in apparent ecstasy on the stones, making repeated passes through the shallows. Often they vocalize wildly, like kids on a playground. At times several whales rub at once; other times they take turns, one by one.