Beneath the Surface: Killer Whales, SeaWorld, and the Truth Beyond Blackfish

by John Hargrove

  Myth and reality have always mingled. We can only speculate about the rise in popularity of the name “killer whale” after the bloody First World War. It had been in use since the eighteenth century but became the predominant term for orcas as the twentieth century coursed its way through unspeakable violence. “Killer whale” began to be eclipsed by “orca”—a word used even by the Spaniards, who originated the assassin nickname—in no small part because of SeaWorld and the immense success of its human-orca Shamu spectacles. The world began to see the animals in a different light.

  And yet that perspective, as positive and as much of a corrective as it is to the image of the orca as vicious murderer, is founded on the lives of whales who do not live in their natural environment and whose behavior and psychology have been completely warped by captivity. SeaWorld has not turned them into gladiator-slaves—as that old Latin name indicated—but in a way they are performing prisoners. They may still have the intelligence of their relatives in the wild, but they have been transformed so completely that they may never be able to return to nature.

  In their appearance and in their biology, orcas have essentially been orcas for more than eight million years. They evolved into the sleek black-and-white masterpieces of predation long before Homo sapiens arrived on the scene.

  They descended, like the rest of the whales, from a terrestrial mammal called Pakicetus (named for Pakistan, where its remains were first discovered). The forerunner of the great mammals of the sea—of the blue whale, the sperm whale, the orca, the beluga, the dolphin—may have looked very much like a wolf with hooves; oddly enough, its other living descendant appears to be another aquatic mammal, the hippopotamus. Whales evolved from Pakicetus about 50 million years ago. Toothed whales diverged from the main line after that; and then the dolphins split off from the toothed whales around 20 million to 30 million years ago. The largest of the dolphins, orcas descend from toothed whales. All whales belong to the order cetacean—dolphins, orcas, the toothed sperm whale and the toothless blue whale. And their ultimate common ancestor is that strange creature, Pakicetus.

  One feature of whale evolution should humble humans. Our species may pride itself on the size of our brains but orcas, dolphins, the great whales and other members of the cetacean family have been “big-brained” for a much longer time, evolving those relatively large sizes about 35 million years ago. Contemporary cetaceans achieved their brain sizes 10 to 15 million years ago. Our ancestors did not evolve their large brains until about one million years ago. As Dr. Lori Marino, an expert on the cetacean brain notes, “This puts into perspective how little time humans have been able to claim to be the most encephalized species on the planet.” And, she adds, “It isn’t clear that we—or anything else—will be able to survive 10–15 million years of the human brain!”

  Alone of all the mammals whose habitat is the sea, orcas have developed the dramatic swordlike dorsal fin that cuts through the water as they dash toward their meals, looking like black-sailed corsairs catching the wind to speed toward booty. The forces of evolution seem to have favored those huge fins for engineering reasons. The dorsals help regulate the enormous energies generated by the speeding orcas—who can swim in bursts as fast as 30 miles per hour—by shifting the warmth away from the center of the body to the extremities so that the killer whales don’t overheat. Like the equivalent fin in sharks, the dorsal allows the orca to navigate sharp turns and quick changes in direction. No one, however, really knows why males have larger dorsal fins. They may well play some role in gender relations—like the plumage of peacocks or the puffed-up feathers of a male turkey. Perhaps dorsal fins with the most flair help attract the females who are at the top of the orca social hierarchy.

  Just as the dorsal fin seems engineered to help killer whales keep up their speed without overheating, the orcas’ black-and-white coloration may have evolved to help them hunt. Fish and other mammals swimming below the whales would look skyward and miss the orca above them because the whales’ white bellies blend into the refracted white light of the sun. Similarly, potential prey swimming above the whales would not detect the orcas below them because the black pigment at the top of their bodies would mask them in the darkness of the deeper sea. And the orcas can turn their eyes every which way to find their prey, seeing what lies above as well as below.

  In many ways, the rationale behind the black-and-white coloration may be similar to what it is for pandas—to blend in with the environment. But panda coloration is defensive—they can hide in the snow, for example—while orca colors are offensive, allowing them to sneak up swiftly on their prey. The white patch around orca eyes may serve another purpose entirely. Some scientists speculate that they allow calves, who swim alongside the adults, to keep track of their mothers. That lateral perspective also allows whales to tell which way the family or pod is traveling.

  Orcas live in what can be called tribes, or better yet, ecotypes. At least ten distinct groups exist, some so separated from each other by time and distance that some experts argue that they constitute separate species. The groups chase different prey and vocalize in distinct ways, like mutually incomprehensible languages. The white eye patches may have slightly different orientations and sizes depending on the ecotype as well. But all share the same knifelike dorsal fin and the general white-and-black coloration (though some ecotypes are tinged gray or sometimes a bit yellow, because of microscopic parasites). However, even with the ubiquitous dorsals, the orcas are not identical: there are variations in the slant, and individual whales can be identified through photographs of their dorsals. No two whales are exactly the same in appearance.

  The orcas in SeaWorld and its associated parks are descended from whales originating from disparate parts of the planet. The Pacific Northwest and the waters off Washington State and British Columbia are the ancestral home for some. Corky was captured in this area on December 11, 1969. Other whales, like Kasatka and Tilikum, can trace their origins to the north Atlantic and the area around Iceland. Takara’s father, Kotar, also comes from the area around Iceland. Takara herself is the result of a liaison between Kotar and Kasatka when Kasatka was loaned to SeaWorld San Antonio in the late 1980s.

  Then there are the whales who were born in captivity to orcas from different oceans. Health-plagued Splash was the offspring of Gudrun, a female from the Atlantic waters off Iceland, and Kanduke, who came from the Pacific Northwest. Splash would never have had that kind of parentage in the wild because it is highly unlikely that the populations that produced Gudrun and Kanduke would ever have intermingled. Like her pal Splash, Orkid’s parentage is also Atlantic and Pacific. Both were hybrids without a natural social identity.

  Among the various ecotypes, the whales of the Pacific Northwest have received the most scientific scrutiny and therefore provide us with the bulk of what we know about the life cycle of a killer whale. Out of this oceanic grouping, there are two large divisions that have been studied in detail: the Northern resident population, which is spread generally around British Columbia; and the Southern resident community, present in the same region but with members found as far south as the coast of California. Even though they traverse the same waters, the Northern and Southern communities of killer whales do not interbreed. Some scientists like Dr. Naomi Rose, a prominent marine mammalogist and an expert on orcas, suspect there have been Romeo-and-Juliet-like trysts every so often, but generally the Northerners and the Southerners are the Capulets and Montagues of the orca world. Matches between them are taboo.

  Both the Northern and Southern resident populations are made up of clans and pods and families. Each family is led by a female, forming the basic unit of orca society. Everything in the family revolves around the matriarch. Even when her daughters become adults, their own families stay within reach. No one is ever more than a mile apart.

  Matriarchy—and age—establishes order and authority. Below the matriarch, older brothers lord it over youn
ger brothers, for example. And while older brothers may also have precedence over younger sisters, they treat them with great deference. Daughters who have set up their own families defer to their mothers when everyone gets together.

  Everyone in the matriarch’s immediate court stays close to her physically, surrounding her like a queen bee in an oceanic hive, a few body lengths away. Her circle includes all her offspring younger than five years old—male and female—as well as her adult sons. In some of these families, male relations of the matriarch’s own generation or older—brothers and uncles—are part of the entourage. Sometimes nephews—the sons of deceased sisters—are part of the group.

  Males have no status apart from their mothers or an equivalent female. At the death of a matriarch, her sons will join the families of an aunt or sister or niece, just to maintain social status and a place in some communal hierarchy. Completely orphaned orca males may sometimes try to band together, but studies have shown that such associations are short-lived, lasting no more than four years at most. Pity the male orca with no female relations. He is shunted aside in whale society, very quickly pines away and dies. SeaWorld has basically forced motherlessness on many of its male orcas. It is these males who are often the outcasts of the societies that emerge among SeaWorld’s orcas, subjected to vicious and repeated attacks by the other whales.

  What about mates? Males come from outside the family structure, visit to mate and then swim away to rejoin their mothers. Unlike in SeaWorld, there is no known instance of mother-son mating in wild orca communities. In SeaWorld Orlando, Katina mated with her son Taku, resulting in the female calf Nalani. Kohana was bred with her uncle Keto twice. This is an instance of what appears to be a taboo—strictly reinforced in the wild by generations of matriarchs—that has broken down in the confines of captivity. Orca communities seem to have traditions and practices that are more than instinctive and are taught by older whales to younger ones. The incest taboo between fertile females and their sons appears to be one of them.

  It is intriguing to see how the females reacted to their offspring by incest. Katina, who had previously been a caring mother to her other calves, resisted accepting Nalani. Meanwhile, Kohana—who was unnaturally young when she was first impregnated—rejected both of her calves, the second one dying within its first year.

  Orcas’ sense of community is bolstered by what we might call language. Matriarchal groups that send out the same kind of calls and various sounds that make up vocalization—that is, families that speak the same “language”—form a pod; pods that communicate in the same dialect go on to form what scientists call a clan. The clans combine into populations or communities—the Northern and Southern in this case. In that greater definition, language becomes secondary. Some clans in the same population may not be able to speak the same language and yet they know they belong to the same community and, thus, interbreed. Somehow, they recognize the common line of ancestry, unerringly telling Northern apart from Southern. Genetic field research has confirmed this.

  To complicate the survey of orca society in the Pacific Northwest, another group of killer whales shares the same waters as the Northern and Southern residents. Whale researchers call them transients—as opposed to residents. While the residents tend to eat fish—salmon, for the most part—the transients mostly chase after other marine mammals. They travel in smaller family groups, so much so that people consider some of them to be solitary killer whales. But even when transients travel alone—as many do—they continue to associate with the matriarchal groups that produced them. Their choice of prey determines the size of their packs. Unlike salmon and other immense schools of fish that resident orcas can scoop up as a family—and which provide a big gulp of calories at a single go—the transients go after whales, dolphins, seals and sharks, which must be hunted solo, that is, one at a time. Except maybe for sharks, their prey are also smarter, requiring more energy to hunt down. It is more efficient—in terms of caloric pay-off and effort—to share even a large shark among a small band of two or three whales. Or better, to dine alone. Family reunions can happen later.

  If a blue whale—the biggest animal on the planet—suddenly comes into range, perhaps six or seven transients will join in to bring it down. But all the orcas really want to eat are the whale’s tongue and blubber. The attacks are cruel in human eyes: orcas will not kill a large whale outright, merely rip out its tongue during the attack, feasting on it as the huge animal swims off to bleed to death. Sometimes, transients will eat only the fat of the animal because that’s where all the calories are.

  The largest toothed cetacean is the sperm whale, but its teeth are only used for gripping, not biting. In contrast, transient killer whales are surgeons. According to Dr. Rose, an orca researcher she knows once came upon a porpoise slaughtered by a killer whale with such precision that its internal organs had popped out of a small incision near its gut area. That incision had been perfectly made with teeth after a well-targeted ramming blow. The macabre seagull jewelry that Takara created in SeaWorld comes to mind.

  Orcas in different environments have developed distinct hunting skills. Killer whales in Norway will work together to surround herring, shepherding the large schools of fish into tight little globes of swirling fish before stunning them en masse with their flukes for a feast. In Patagonia, at the southern tip of South America, orcas hurl themselves onshore, beaching on purpose in order to drag sea lion pups into the sea. It is a behavior that is passed on from generation to generation. Orcas—transient or resident—will do what it takes to eat what they want. Even if that meal is on land. But not all whales learn the lesson perfectly. Orcas have stranded themselves on land and died as a result of this hunting tactic.

  SeaWorld recognizes the importance of the matriarchal whale and has used those dominant females to keep order in its marine parks. But consider this: these whales originate from different parts of the world and from families that communicate in distinct dialects. Dr. Ingrid Visser, who has studied the orcas off the coast of New Zealand as well as those in the North Pacific ocean, says, “The culture and behavior of wild orcas vary greatly throughout the world, just as with people who hail from other nations.” Gathering them in the quarters of even the biggest of aquatic theme parks is like squishing people who speak different languages into a single jail cell—for years. Perhaps they will figure out how to communicate. But what more often emerges is a horrible caricature of what happens in nature—where whales from other pods are chased away with the threat of violence. In the confines of SeaWorld, there is nowhere to swim away to escape and so violence is not just a threat but often a consequence.

  In the mid-2000s, SeaWorld of California brought in a senior research scientist from the corporation’s affiliated research facility to study the vocal patterns of Corky and Kasatka and find an explanation for why Corky was so often brutally attacked and raked by Kasatka. The scientist discovered that neither Corky nor Kasatka could replicate each other’s vocalizations—that is, their dialects. That was determined to be a contributing factor to the hyperaggression incidents that took place between them.

  Aggressive behavior does exist in the wild. When residents and transients cross paths in the waters of the Pacific Northwest, unfriendly pushing and splashing takes place, usually with the residents—who travel in large groups of up to 200 whales—chasing the transients away. Researchers have also recorded incidents of aggression within resident pods, when a male strays from his matriarchal family and tries to join another. The local matriarchy’s male “enforcers” then shoo the intruder away, sometimes sandwiching him between them to escort him out of their territory.

  According to Dr. Rose and other researchers, raking with teeth—so ugly and bloody in SeaWorld—is used only by very young resident calves, who don’t know any better, and is discouraged by the matriarchs. The reigns of terror imposed by dominant females at SeaWorld are unknown among the pods of the Pacific Northwest. The m
ore loner-like transients show greater evidence of raking. It occurs more often among the orcas in the waters of New Zealand. Dr. Ingrid Visser, who has studied the killer whales in that country, speculates that the raking occurs because orcas from the Antarctic have strayed into the territory of local whales. As Howard Garrett of the Orca Network, a nonprofit opposed to killer whales in captivity in SeaWorld and elsewhere, says, “Groups put together in captivity are likely to have unresolvable relationships and exaggerated tensions that are often demonstrated by rakes, sometimes deep rakes.”

  In the expanse of the oceans, orcas acquiesce to what seems to be the natural order they have inherited at birth. The confrontation between Kandu and Corky in 1989 would never have happened in the open seas because they would have lived in widely separated pods: Kandu in the North Atlantic near Iceland; and Corky among her relatives off the Pacific coast of Canada. You have to wonder how they even communicated with each other, if at all. Did Corky even know that Kandu was trying to tell her who was boss? And did Corky’s lack of response just infuriate Kandu even more, so much so that she charged her and broke her jaw and bled to death? In captivity, adult orcas may use their teeth more often because they don’t know how else to get their way with the other whales.

  The original generation of captives has now produced orcas that know only captivity—a cluster of animals that, I imagine, communicate with each other in some strange amalgamation of their original dialects. “These whales were interbred and produced hybrids with no conservation value and with no natural identity,” says Dr. Deborah Giles, a biogeographer with the University of California, Davis, who spent nine summers studying the orcas of Puget Sound.