by David Kirby
When the pod was not foraging, but traveling or resting instead, adult males stayed much closer to their mothers, usually within a body length or two.
Young calves were virtually inseparable from their mother, though many showed definite adventurous streaks. Naomi saw some of them testing their mother’s tolerance for letting them go explore. Killer whales are born precocious. They are exceptionally curious about their world before they grow up and learn to exercise more caution. Naomi noticed that most adults preferred to avoid an unknown object rather than swim up to it impulsively. “But the young ones will indulge as much of their curiosity as their mothers and siblings allow.”
One day Naomi was following a large pod of Residents traveling south along the Vancouver Island side of the strait near Robson Bight when a young mother and calf, perhaps two years old, appeared on her starboard. Naomi followed behind them and to the side, conducting an observational session for her database. She maintained a distance of about a hundred yards, noting the pair’s speed, diving intervals, distance from each other, and other data on a special sheet she had modified from her colleague Janice’s earlier work on alloparenting.
Soon the Sparrowhawk moved a bit ahead of the pair. But the calf vanished. The mother was swimming just behind where he had been. Then he resurfaced, splashing around just feet from the churning propeller. What struck Naomi was not the calf’s dangerous curiosity, but his mother’s measured response to it. She wrote about the experience later in a cetacean anthology titled The Smile of a Dolphin: Remarkable Accounts of Animal Emotions:
Now that he insisted on examining my boat, she came nearer, overcoming her caution.… The whole time the calf frolicked in my engine wash, she was a steady presence. She didn’t herd him away from the potential danger; she tolerated his curiosity. But she stayed within striking distance. [Somehow] this mother indulged her offspring’s playful spirit and overcame her own natural caution in order to allow him some behavioral latitude. [But] she was keeping pace, keeping vigilant.
The mother was permissive, yet also protective. The special relation between mother and child was palpable. Years later, Naomi would realize that killer whale calves taken from their mothers at a young age were denied this permanent bond. She knew that intelligent mammals, such as Tilikum, were subject to depression and neurosis, just like humans. Could an animal like that fully recover from suffering such a life-changing separation?
By August of 1990, Naomi was satisfied with the amount of data she had collected on Northern Resident males. She needed to start crunching the numbers and outlining the basic chapters of her manuscript, so she accepted the caretaker job at Dan Kirby’s Hidden Cove Lodge. It would be a long, cold six months, a period that would mark the deaths of Mike Bigg, Naomi’s grandmother, and the trainer at SeaLand of the Pacific, Keltie Byrne.
That winter there was an orca incident, too. It happened in early December. Naomi first heard about it one evening on the two-way radio she kept on in the fishing lodge—her only constant contact with the outside world. A female orca had washed up dead on a nearby beach. The sad news deeply moved Naomi and many of the people in the area. She waited until early morning before boating over to Telegraph Cove to get more details from Jim Borrowman and Bill MacKay.
When she arrived dockside, the necropsy was already underway. The whale’s belly had been slit and her dorsal fin removed from the body. It would later be cast into a fiberglass mold.
She was A9, otherwise known as Scar because of ghastly gashes that a boat propeller had ripped into her back, just behind her dorsal fin and just before her tail. That accident, years earlier, nearly severed her flukes from her body. It was a wonder she not only survived but lived so long. The orca was estimated to be about sixty when she died. Scar was the mother of a well-recognized male, A5, better known as Top Notch because of a visible crescent-shaped nick near the top of his dorsal fin.
Back when Mike Bigg first began categorizing the whales, he believed the oldest males were the dominant members of each pod, traveling with their presumed “harem” of females. Mike had identified Top Notch as A5 and named his group the A5 pod. Only later did he realize that the females were dominant, and in a group with an adult male, he was related to them—most likely the son of the oldest female.
Scar, Top Notch, and the rest of the A5 pod had been captured in Pender Harbour, British Columbia, in 1969. Eventually the adults were released, including Top Notch and Scar. They remained outside the nets for days, waiting for the younger whales to be released, but that never happened. Aquatic theme parks snatched up the calves and juveniles, including Corky II, who was flown off to Marineland in Palos Verdes, California. Corky was almost certainly a member of the A5 pod.
Years later, Scar gave birth to another son, dubbed A26. She, Top Notch, and A26 were beloved and well-recognized fixtures up and down Johnstone Strait. Naomi would often see the female and her boys resting close together in the quiet waters of a protected inlet. They were inseparable.
Naomi was saddened by Scar’s demise: She had been following the whale and her sons for five years. But now there was work to do. On that cold, wet morning, she assisted where she could, helping sort through the stomach contents of the poor animal. Even this late in the year, Scar had been finding salmon. Remains of nineteen fish were identified in her belly, seventeen of them chinook. Scar was approximately sixty-four years old and no cause of death could be determined. She had not been injured anytime recently. Hours after the necropsy, her sons Top Notch and A26 were spotted swimming aimlessly around the strait, vocalizing in deep, forlorn cries, seemingly lost in a sad and fruitless search for their mother. Naomi described the day in her journal:
How strange to be up so close to those scars that so distinguished her. How oddly unpoetic for such a beautiful animal to be reduced to literally nothing more than a bag of bones.… She seemed so much smaller than I would have thought—and she was, really, only 20.5 feet.… I sure hope the boys are all right. They did seem to be looking for her that day.
The skeleton was sent to the maritime museum in Sidney, north of Victoria, where it remains on display. Shortly after Scar died, both of her sons left the strait. No one knew if they had also died or swum off somewhere to mourn.
When adult male Residents lose their mother, their lifelong companion, some have been known to die within months. Naomi believed it had something to do with the stress of being alone. “Some people think their heart’s broken, and maybe there’s something to that,” she said. Once cleaved from his mother, a male might easily grow despondent. “But I think it’s more than that,” she said. “They don’t have as much status once their mother is dead, and they were already low status to begin with. If there isn’t any female relative who’s ready and willing to take them in—it’s going to be tough for them.”
Two and a half months later, Naomi came across Top Notch and his brother. It was a great relief, though somewhat bittersweet. “I went on the water because it is flat glass calm this morning and there was a report of whales,” she wrote in her journal on February 15, 1991. “Found A5 and A26 slow milling just in front of Bauza Cove, heading in a generally east direction, around 10:30 or something … it looks like these two guys are wandering around all by themselves—they haven’t attached themselves to any female. It just seems so sad, like they’re looking fruitlessly and listlessly for mom.”
Naomi ended her field studies in the summer of 1990 and, after her stint at Hidden Cove, labored on her dissertation back in Santa Cruz, though she did make it up to Vancouver Island for a two-week visit in the summer of 1991. By now, Johnstone Strait felt like home, and Jim, Bill, Paul, Helena, and others felt like old neighbors. The following summer she led two four-week field courses for college students on West Cracroft Island for the School for Field Studies, a Massachusetts-based study-abroad organization centered on conservation, sustainability, and ecological health. The teaching fee helped Naomi pay bills as she finished her dissertation—a full year and a half
later than the fastidious student had planned.
11
Breakfast at SeaWorld
Mornings at SeaWorld were hectic. All trainers starting out at Shamu as “bucket scrubbers” learned the routine well. They often showed up at 6:00 a.m. to find a pool of hungry whales anxious for fish and attention. A bit earlier, the animal-care staff had driven up in a flatbed truck to drop off hundreds of pounds of fish, semifrozen in giant cubes packed in cardboard boxes in the “fish room,” leaving them there to thaw. The facility, big and brightly lit, was lined with gleaming tiles and outfitted with refrigerators, sinks, and stainless steel countertops, like an industrial-scale sushi bar for Goliaths.
A whiteboard in the busy room listed each orca’s name and the breakdown of fish it would eat that day. Katina, for example, might be given eighty-five pounds of smelt, sixty-five pounds of herring, fifteen pounds of salmon, and a few pounds of mackerel and squid. Orlando’s only male at the time, Kanduke, ate the biggest breakfast of all. Jeff was vaguely aware that Duke was a different type of orca, but he wasn’t sure what the term Transient meant. Carol and Sam (who never worked together at Shamu) had no idea that Duke was a subspecies apart from the girls, and nobody knew Duke was meant to prey on marine mammals. What they were aware of, however, was his bellicose and unsettled disposition.
Duke was kept by himself much of the time in one of the back pools, where he often floated motionlessly at the surface for hours, his flopped-over dorsal fin warming in the subtropical sun. His main function was to breed with the females in Orlando and provide the big splash finale at the end of the show, after everyone else had cleared out of A Pool. But Duke was unpredictable and ornery.
No one was permitted to get in the water with Kanduke. He was also prone to self-injurious behavior, including banging his head against the pool wall or grinding his teeth on the bars of the gates that separated the pools. On several occasions, Jeff saw blood running from Duke’s battered jaws. At night, clouds of mosquitoes would settle on his back.
The main task before breakfast was to stuff fish gills with vitamins, antacids, and sometimes other pills that the apprentice trainers figured were antibiotics because they came in capsules and were only given when an animal was sick, or acting “slow” in SeaWorld parlance. On the counter each morning they found individualized freezer bags with the whales’ names on them, filled with packets of pills each animal was to receive. Trainers were not told what was in the pills, other than vitamins. Nobody asked. But they could see the little packets were marked with letters such as TAG, which they assumed stood for the antacid Tagamet.
At other times, when a whale was ailing and dehydrated, the bucket scrubbers were given syringes and instructed to inject herring and smelt with freshwater from the tap. Whales, like all mammals, cannot drink salt water and rely on prey as their source of freshwater. The hydro injections were tedious, and by the time the fish were carried out to the pool for breakfast, much of the water had leaked out.
Each whale had its own set of metal pails for the day, marked with the first three letters of their name: KAT, GUD, and KAN, for example. Each bucket weighed about thirty-five pounds when filled with fish. A male such as Kanduke could easily go through seven or more pails a day.
Throughout the morning, trainers assessed each animal’s health, mood, and response to signals and tried to evaluate their social interactions for signs of precursors that might send them “off behavior.” Just before each show, the trainers huddled to discuss which animal would perform which behaviors, including wet and dry work. They also assigned responsibility for one whale to each trainer while that whale was in the show pool, though a trainer might “hand off” the animal to another trainer for a specific segment or behavior.
The main primary reinforcement at SeaWorld, food, was meted out during the day and into the evening, most often during training sessions and shows: It added motivation for the whales, who quickly came to associate training and performing with getting fed. Buckets were also spread out physically around the stadium at strategic points where trainers could reward a whale between behaviors. Sometimes a whale ate another whale’s fish or two, but everyone assumed it would all even out in the end, and it usually did. No orca ever went hungry at Shamu Stadium.
But no one got a free lunch—or breakfast. “They have to comply with our program in order to get that food in the morning,” Jeff explained to Carol. Even when feeding an animal breakfast, you had to get and keep it under behavioral control. That meant separating them, so each animal could be fed from its proper bucket. Usually, the whales were anticipating breakfast and peered over the ledge looking for buckets. Most mornings, they complied, Jeff said, but not always. “Sometimes something whacky is going on in the social environment and you can’t get them under control right away. When this happens, we walk away and come back and try again a few minutes later.”
The bucket scrubbers put medicated fish on top of the breakfast pails so they could be fed to the whales first. It was the only way to ensure that the right vitamins and meds went to the right whales. Jeff gave some medicated food first, followed by a “chaser” of fish not stuffed to the gills with pills. The animals knew when they were getting pill-stuffed herring and would sometimes spit the spiked food out. The chaser usually prevented that from happening. It was sort of like with a cat, when you try to disguise a pill in the rest of its food.
Any animal that consumed up to 250 pounds of food each day was also going to leave a lot of stuff behind. Orca feces enter the water in a murky greenish-brown liquid, rather than a solid mass, and quickly dissipate into trailing clouds behind the animals. Salt water, bromide, and state-of-the-art filtration take care of the rest. Moreover, the bulk of water work was done near a whale’s head or back. Direct contact with jetsam oozing from the anal slit, luckily, was minimal. The whale poop habitually drew bays of laughter from the tourists who saw it.
When cetaceans urinate, it’s usually not detectable in the water. While Jeff was working at Whale and Dolphin Stadium, one of his colleagues noticed that when false killer whales hauled themselves up onto the slide-out area, they would often pee. It was easy to figure out why: They had lost buoyancy and their urinary bladders grew pressurized. It was only natural for them to let it spill out. The trainer quickly learned to reward that behavior with a whistle bridge, telling the animals they had done a “good job.” After just a few times of doing this, the false killers urinated when asked. Trainers waited near their genital slits with jars to collect samples for testing. They would then reward the animal with fish and show it the jar of urine.
When the bigwigs at Shamu Stadium saw this, they adopted the procedure for killer whales as well. Before long, the trainers simply had to call the orcas into the slide-out and show them a collection cup, and they would pee on command. They were also trained to present their flukes to extract blood through a plastic tube.
If not on breakfast duty and the morning shift, junior trainers were sometimes assigned to “night watch,” which was essential when newborns or sick whales required round-the-clock attention. Night-watch staff also observed the whales resting or milling about in their respective pools. Cetaceans do not fully sleep the way other mammals do. They do not breathe automatically and must remain at least partially conscious to avoid drowning. Instead, one-half of their brain “sleeps” at a time, and never for more than ten minutes.1
The main task during the overnight shift was counting respirations. Every thirty minutes the staff would time the breathing patterns of a whale, noting how many times the animal breathed in five minutes. Any noticeable change, faster or slower, indicated a potential problem, and they were told to then contact the on-site vet. Night watch was boring, the trainers thought, but at least they could catch up on their reading or grab coffee in the lounge.
The junior staff members at Shamu Stadium were not truly “trainers,” but really more like performers and behavior “maintainers.” They read the lines and went through the motions
and even began to give hand signals to whales during performances. But whale training had already been completed by senior staff. Infant whales needed less training: They learned show behaviors by watching and mimicking their mothers and remembering which hand signals or underwater tones were associated with each movement. But younger animals did need training to learn certain husbandry behaviors, such as presenting their flukes for blood tests, and the apprentice trainers were sometimes assigned the task. They conditioned the young whales by pinching their flukes with two fingernails, to simulate a needle prick, then offered a reward for not flinching.
Rookie animal trainers at the time received surprisingly little instruction in how to work with animals. They mostly learned by observing, much like the baby orcas. They were also given reading materials, including the booklet “Animal Training at SeaWorld and Busch Gardens.” It covered the basics, such as operant conditioning, positive reinforcement, and stimulus discrimination (SD), in which animals learned to distinguish between different stimuli (usually hand signals, but sometimes underwater tones) and then to display the correct behavior.
The philosophy behind animal training at SeaWorld was straightforward: “1) Trainers create an environment that is fun, interesting and stimulating for the animals; 2) Trainers reinforce desirable behavior with a variety of rewards and do not draw attention to undesirable behavior; 3) Trainers build strong and rewarding relationships with the animals based on a history of positive and stimulating interaction,” the manual stated.