War of the Whales: A True Story

by Joshua Horwitz

  Moby Doll became an instant celebrity, drawing thousands of visitors and dozens of researchers to the aquarium. William Schevill and Bill Watkins flew in from Woods Hole to record her vocalizations for their catalogue of biological sounds and to confirm that she echolocated like her dolphin relatives. What confounded marine biologists was Moby Doll’s docile, even playful disposition. Where was the storied ferocity of the bloodthirsty man killer?

  Until the 1960s, the public perception of orcas was based on an amalgam of misinformation, myth, and legend. In the first century, Roman natural historian Pliny the Elder observed, “A killer whale cannot be properly depicted or described except as an enormous mass of flesh armed with savage teeth.” Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus—the father of taxonomy—classified the two kingdoms of plants and animals into groups according to their form. In the tenth edition of his Systema Naturae, published in 1758, he named the species Orcinus orca, Latin for “Belonging to the realms of the dead.” And a century later, retired whaling captain Charles Scammon would write, “Whatever quarter of the world Killer Whales are found, they seem always intent upon seeking something to destroy or devour.” As recently as the mid-1970s, a US Navy diving manual warned that a killer whale will “attack human beings at every opportunity.” And yet, paradoxically, no one had ever observed an orca attack a human.

  There is good reason why orcas are also known as killer whales.* Though properly classified as dolphins—the largest species of the family Delphinidae—orcas are among the world’s most voracious carnivores. In the Pacific Northwest, “resident” pods feast on Chinook salmon, with each three- to five-ton orca devouring hundreds of pounds of fish a day. The biologically distinct “transient” pods of orcas prey on seals, sea lions, dolphins, porpoises, and other cetaceans. Hunting in packs like wolves, they can wear down and overtake whales many times their own size, including blue whales. Their two interlocking rows of conical-shaped teeth can grab seal pups off beaches or rays out from under rocks on the ocean bottom. Cunning and specialized hunters, orcas have been videotaped ramming great white sharks with their rostrums and then devouring them.

  Top predators such as sharks, wolves, and orcas have always aroused fear and hatred among humans altogether out of proportion to any direct threat they pose. Unlike dolphins, which are plentiful around the world, orca populations are small and besieged by their only predator: man. Though they never had enough oil or blubber to interest whalers, orcas have often competed with humans for food in coastal regions, which made them perennial targets of retribution; sometimes even prompting a military response. In 1956, for instance, the Icelandic government asked the US Navy to attack killer whales that competed with its herring fishery. The United States dispatched an antisubmarine air squadron to target the Icelandic orcas with 50-caliber machine guns, aircraft rockets, and depth charges. During that same decade, salmon fishermen in British Columbia lobbied their government to mount heavy artillery guns on hillsides overlooking the inland straits frequented by orcas. In the absence of direct military intervention, and with the tacit encouragement of their governments, fishermen on both sides of the Canadian border routinely fired on orcas from boats and the shoreline.

  Moby Doll’s winning personality was chronicled in Life magazine and Reader’s Digest. When she died after three months of captivity from a skin disease she’ d contracted in her tank, she was eulogized in newspapers around the world—even after a postmortem exam revealed that Moby Doll was a juvenile male. Aquarium director Newman sought to tamp down the public’s effusive killer-whale hugging. “I worry about this sentimentalizing,” he told a reporter from the Vancouver Province. “It was a nice whale but still a predatory, carnivorous creature. It could swallow you alive.” But Moby Doll’s friendliness to humans turned out to be typical, not aberrant, orca behavior.

  • • •

  Given our primal reaction to killer whales, it was perhaps inevitable that we’ d demonstrate our dominance by training orcas as entertainers. Displaying exotic marine mammals to a ticket-buying public was nothing new. A century earlier, in 1861, showman P. T. Barnum captured two beluga whales in Newfoundland, packed them inside seaweed-lined crates, and shipped them by railcar to his American Museum in lower Manhattan. They both died after just two days of display inside a freshwater tank, but the enthusiastic response of New Yorkers foretold the future popularity of marine mammal acts at aquariums and marine parks around the world. A century after Barnum debuted his belugas, orcas were poised to step up in social class from abhorred “blackfish” to adored matinee idols.

  Moby Doll’s runaway success at the Vancouver Acquarium box office spurred a killer-whale grab that soon spread across the Canadian border and around the world. The head of the Seattle Aquarium, Ted Griffin, was particularly avid to have one. But he soon discovered how hard it was to snare an orca without recourse to harpoons and rifles. And he had competition. When he hopped into a powerboat and tracked the local community of killer whales in Puget Sound, hoping to lasso one by the tail, he kept crossing paths with another orca hunter, Don Goldsberry, who was stalking the same pod from a helicopter.

  Griffin’s big break came in 1965 when a 24-foot, five-ton orca became entangled in nets near the fishing town of Namu, British Columbia. Griffin recruited his rival, Goldsberry, to help him bring the whale home alive. They built a 40-by-64-foot floating cage to enclose Namu—named for his place of capture—during his 450-mile swim to Seattle. When they returned home a month later, the docks were lined with cheering spectators and journalists. Five thousand visitors paid to view Namu his first day at the aquarium.

  Griffin didn’t just display his prize catch. He swam with him and trained him to perform the tricks he’ d taught his dolphins, only with a much bigger splash. Namu proved to be a gentle and intuitive playmate. During Namu’s year in captivity, 120,000 paying customers lined up to behold “The Killer Turned Tame!” as Griffin billed him.

  After 334 days of twice-daily shows at the Seattle Aquarium, Namu contracted a bacterial infection that soon drove him to delirium. He repeatedly crashed into the walls of his tank for two days, and then sank to the bottom and drowned. A necropsy found a decade-old .30-06 Springfield rifle slug nested in his flank. Fully a quarter of killer whales captured in Puget Sound during the late sixties and early seventies had visible bullet wounds.

  Before Namu died, he was immortalized in the movie Namu the Killer Whale, starring Namu in a fictionalized account of his relationship with Griffin. Released in 1966, it introduced the world to a bigger and better icon of interspecies friendship than Flipper, the dolphin pop star. “Make room in your heart for a six-ton pet! He’s the biggest hero in the whole wide world of adventure!” the movie poster exalted.

  Marine parks around the world took note of Namu’s charisma, trainability, and box-office magnetism. SeaWorld in San Diego was looking for a headliner for its performing dolphin and seal acts. So Griffin and Goldsberry incorporated their partnership as Namu Inc. and went orca hunting. After harpooning a mother orca from a helicopter, they captured her calf, which would be easier to transport to San Diego than its full-grown parent. Griffin refused to sell the rights to the name Namu, so SeaWorld called its female orca Shamu, a contraction of “She” and “Namu.” Shamu was such a big hit for SeaWorld that it institutionalized “Shamu” as the stage name for all the killer whales it subsequently acquired for its various marine parks. When one Shamu died, a successor Shamu was slotted seamlessly into the Shamu Show.

  By the time the original Shamu died in San Diego, SeaWorld had purchased ten more orcas for its new marine parks, SeaWorld Ohio and SeaWorld Orlando. Meanwhile, Griffin and Goldsberry had grown their capture operation into a highly profitable enterprise. They refined a technique of herding whole pods of orcas into inlets, closing off the cove with seine nets, and then culling the juveniles and calves for sale to SeaWorld and other marine parks around the world. Over their ten-year hunting partnership, Griffin and Goldsberry captured 262
whales in Puget Sound, released the adults, and culled 50 juveniles for transport to marine parks in the United States, Canada, Japan, France, and Argentina. More than a dozen orcas died during capture operations, mostly by drowning in nets. Sixteen of the 50 whales they captured died during their first year of captivity.

  The dark side of Namu Inc. remained hidden from public view until a 1970 roundup in Washington State’s Penn Cove. A flotilla of small boats, backed by helicopters dropping explosives into the water, chased the entire population of Southern Resident orcas into Penn Cove. Among the 80 corralled, Griffin and Goldsberry chose seven juveniles to fulfill orders from SeaWorld and other marine parks. One adult and four juveniles died during the capture. Hoping to anchor the evidence at the bottom of Puget Sound, Griffin and Goldsberry slit open the bellies of the four juveniles, stuffed them with stones, and wrapped them in steel chains. When a fishing trawler accidentally raised the four dead whales in its nets a few weeks later, it created a furor among the public and local politicians.

  Namu Inc. was finished. Griffin retired from the business, and Goldsberry became SeaWorld’s corporate director of collections. By the mid-1970s, orcas were inextricably linked to SeaWorld’s brand and entertainment offerings. In honor of the US Bicentennial in 1976, SeaWorld trained its Shamus to reenact scenes of the founding fathers, complete with George Washington wigs and tricornered hats. SeaWorld’s logo featured a breaching orca, and orca-themed paraphernalia was the top seller in its gift shops.

  Meanwhile, the purchase price of a wild-captured orca had spiked from $20,000 a decade earlier to $150,000. After the passage of the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act, any marine park that wanted to collect an orca from the wild needed a capture permit from Fisheries, which was now charged with monitoring and sustaining populations of orcas and other marine mammals. But SeaWorld was committed to keeping its theme parks stocked with orcas, and its captive breeding efforts had failed to produce new generations of performers.

  In February 1976 Goldsberry was hunting orcas for SeaWorld under a Fisheries-issued permit. When he was caught using seal bombs and buzzing aircraft to herd six orcas into Budd Inlet, the Washington State attorney general sued Goldsberry for violating his permit. Eventually the charges were dropped when Goldsberry and SeaWorld agreed to never again capture whales in Puget Sound.1 Public outrage over the Budd Inlet incident prompted Fisheries to conduct a census of the orcas of greater Puget Sound to establish how significantly wild captures had depleted the population.

  • • •

  Balcomb proposed a novel method for his orca census: counting each individual whale by photographing its distinctive dorsal fin. Previous whale censuses had relied on population estimates based on local surveys extrapolated over entire migration routes. Until recently, the premise that each killer whale could be differentiated visually was considered as laughable as photo-identifying every salmon in the Salish Sea between Washington and Canada. But for the past several years, a team of researchers to the north—led by the marine mammal director of the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans, Michael Bigg—had been doing just that.

  When Balcomb proposed conducting a photo-identification census of the orcas in greater Puget Sound, marine biologists still largely derided Bigg’s approach. But the first time that Balcomb examined Bigg’s catalogue of black-and-white photographs, he was convinced. Each magnified image of the left side of a dorsal fin revealed unique patterns of nicks, scratches, and scars, as individual as a human fingerprint. Balcomb managed to persuade Fisheries of the merit of the method, beating out the University of Washington for the seven-month survey contract.

  That first season, Ken and Camille worked alone in a Boston Whaler they bought with the first Fisheries check, using the same Nikons that Ken had been carrying with him since his first expeditions on the Lynnann. They rented the house on Smugglers Cove, with its commanding view of Haro Strait, and worked nonstop through that first spring, summer, and fall.

  First they distributed questionnaires to boaters, lighthouse keepers, and fishermen throughout Puget Sound, asking them to record all killer-whale sightings. Then they were out on the water at first light, every morning, tracking and photographing orcas until dark. Each night they developed and printed the day’s pictures, and then catalogued them. After collapsing into bed for a few hours of sleep, they’ d be up at dawn again to begin the next day’s survey.

  Bigg had assigned a letter to each pod in the Northern Resident Community, A through I, and he gave each individual whale a number. Balcomb began his survey with J Pod, and he and Camille identified the distinct K and L pods. By October, they were convinced that they’ d documented each of the orcas in greater Puget Sound and had sorted them by sex and family grouping.

  Their total was 70 killer whales. Balcomb calculated that the 50 juveniles that Griffin and Goldsberry had collected and sold in the preceding decade, plus the 13 orcas killed during capture operations, had depleted the Southern Resident population by almost 50 percent.

  Balcomb’s bleak results were not welcomed by Fisheries or by the local aquariums, universities, and marine parks that had applied for permits to collect more orcas. If Fisheries accepted Balcomb’s assessment that the local orca population had been severely depleted, it would be obliged under the Marine Mammal Protection Act to implement a recovery and protection plan. No further capture permits could be issued until the species had recovered to sustainable levels. Fisheries declined to renew Balcomb’s contract.

  That same fall, Michael Bigg submitted his final report to Canadian Fisheries. Prior estimates had put the Northern Community’s population in the thousands. Bigg’s count came to just 252. When he concluded that ongoing orca collections from British Columbian waters were unsustainable and recommended strict limits on wild captures, Canadian Fisheries shut down his survey and reassigned Bigg to other projects. Universities and aquariums on both sides of the border attacked Bigg’s and Balcomb’s methodology and results.

  The following spring, John Twiss of the Marine Mammal Commission in Washington, DC, awarded Balcomb a $7,000 grant to conduct a confirmation study. That was the last federal or state funding Balcomb’s survey would receive for 28 years. Canadian Fisheries didn’t renew funding for the Northern Community survey until after Bigg’s death in 1990. But by the end of 1976, Balcomb and Bigg had resolved to combine and continue their annual surveys of the Northern and Southern populations of orcas, with or without government funding.

  • • •

  Each summer, from 1976 onward, Balcomb found a way to keep his survey boats in the water and film in the cameras, despite his lack of funding. The orcas themselves proved to be powerful magnets for volunteers. Local islanders and far-flung whale enthusiasts would simply walk up the road at Smugglers Cove in early summer, knock on the door to his house, and offer to help. Balcomb enlisted other volunteers during his winter cruises aboard the Regina, and he covered gas and photo expenses by selling orca buttons and T-shirts and calendars in town. In the leanest summers, he resorted to eating roadkill rabbits.

  The summers were always tight financially, but there was no shortage of camaraderie among the survey partners. The researchers on both sides of the Canadian border were constantly helping one another get by, sharing data and volunteers—including Naomi Rose, who was conducting her graduate research with Michael Bigg’s group. After Camille left that first winter, during the Regina Maris’ maiden voyage, Balcomb recruited his half brother Howie Garrett to be his boat buddy. Best of all, Balcomb’s son Kelley, now a teenager, started spending summers on San Juan Island photographing whales alongside his father.

  In 1979 Balcomb launched the Whale Museum in Friday Harbor, at the tourist end of the island. He wanted to educate the public about orcas, build support for the ongoing census, and have a permanent repository for all the bones and skulls that were piling up at his house. A few years later, Balcomb founded the nonprofit Center for Whale Research to support his research. As his local reputa
tion grew, he attracted a few high-dollar donors who contributed money and boats to the survey. Earthwatch began sending paying volunteers, which gave him a little breathing room. In the 1980s, whale watching started up in earnest as a local commercial enterprise, introducing the public to wild orcas and injecting tens of millions of dollars into the community each year.2

  Summer after summer, the census continued, and the database grew into one of the most complete profiles ever compiled of a wild animal population: births, deaths, diets, social associations, and complete family trees across two distinct communities and 18 pods in British Columbia and Washington. Balcomb’s and Bigg’s research offered the first science-based understanding of orca behavior and communication, and an appreciation of a mammal group whose social complexity equaled that of elephants and great apes. Perhaps most significantly, their census had uncovered one of the only matrilineal societies among whale populations. Male orcas stay with their mothers and maternal relatives throughout their lifetimes, and the matriarchs maintain a central position in the pod as multigenerational transmitters of the pod’s culture.