The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011 (54 page)

In 1972 the Marine Mammal Protection Act prohibited the taking of marine mammals in U.S. waters, but SeaWorld continued to receive killer-whale-capture permits under an educational-display exclusion. In March 1976 Goldsberry pushed his luck and the limits of public opinion. He sighted a group of killer whales in the waters just off Olympia, Washington's state capital. In full view of boaters—and just as the state legislature was meeting to consider creating a Puget Sound killer whale sanctuary—he used seal bombs and boats to chase six orcas into his nets at Budd Inlet. Ralph Munro, an aide to Governor Dan Evans, was out on a small sailboat that day and remembers the sight. "It was gruesome as they closed the net. You could hear the whales screaming," Munro recalls. "Goldsberry kept dropping explosives to drive the whales back into the net."

The state of Washington filed a lawsuit, contending that Goldsberry and SeaWorld had violated permits that required humane capture, and as the heat and publicity built, SeaWorld agreed to release the Budd Inlet killer whales and to stop taking orcas from Washington waters. With the Puget Sound hunting grounds closing, Goldsberry flew around the world looking for other good capture sites. He settled on Iceland, where killer whales were plentiful. By October 1976 SeaWorld's first Icelandic orca had been captured.

Over the next few years, Goldsberry spent freely to help create the infrastructure to net and transport whales out of Iceland. In November 1983, in the cold, rough waters off Berufjördur, an Icelander named Helgi Jonasson drew a large purse-seine net around a group of killer whales. Three young animals—two males and a female—were captured and transported to the Hafnarfjördur Marine Zoo, near Reykjavik.

There they were placed in a concrete holding tank. The smaller male, who was about two years old and just shy of 11.5 feet, would remain there for almost a year, awaiting transfer to a marine park. In the pool he could either cruise slowly in circles or lie still on the surface. He could hear no ocean sounds, only the mechanical rush of filtration. Finally, in late 1984, the young orca was shipped to Sealand of the Pacific, a marine park just outside Victoria, on British Columbia's Vancouver Island. He was given a name to go with his new life: Tilikum, which means "friend" in Chinook.

 

Sealand, situated at Oak Bay Marina, was a wholly alien world for a wild orca. Its performance pool—about one hundred feet by fifty feet, and thirty-five feet deep—was created by suspending mesh netting from the floating docks. The pool was open to the marina water, and thus to any bilge oil or sewage pumped into it by boaters. Marina traffic and motors created a cacophony of artificial underwater background noise, obscuring the natural sounds Tilikum had known in the wild. In the fourteen years before his arrival, seven orcas had died under Sealand's care. Their average survival time was just shy of three and a half years.

At Sealand, Tilikum joined two female killer whales, Haida and Nootka, who were sorting out the social pecking order. (Orca society is dominated by females.) That meant conflict and tooth raking for all three orcas, and even after Haida established herself as dominant, both females continued to push the young Tilikum around. The stress was worse at night. Sealand's owner, a local entrepreneur named Robert Wright, who'd captured his share of Pacific Northwest killer whales in the early 1970s, worried that someone might cut the net to free his orcas or that they might chew through it themselves. So at 5:30
P.M.,
after the shows were over, the orcas were moved into a small metal-sided pool that was twenty-six feet in diameter and less than twenty feet deep. The trainers referred to it as "the module," and the orcas were left in it for the next fourteen and a half hours.

According to Eric Walters, who was a trainer at Sealand from 1987 to 1989 while working toward a bachelor's degree in marine biology at the University of Victoria, the module was so tight that the orcas had difficulty avoiding conflict, and their skin would get scratches and cuts from rubbing against the sides. About once a week, Walters says, one or more of the orcas would simply refuse to swim into the module and would have to be left in the performance pool overnight.

The orca show was performed every hour on the hour, eight times a day, seven days a week. Both Nootka and Tilikum had stomach ulcers, which had to be treated with medication. Sometimes Nootka's ulcers were so bad she had blood in her stool.

Walters was interested in the science of training and was encouraged when Sealand brought in Bruce Stephens, a former SeaWorld head trainer, to make recommendations to improve Sealand's practices. Stephens gave each trainer a handbook, which warned, "If you fail to provide your animals with the excitement they need, you may be certain they will create the excitement themselves." He emphasized that killer whales needed constant change to keep them engaged and responsive, and made a series of recommendations for new learning sessions and playtime for Sealand's orcas. But within a month, Walters told me, Sealand was back to its usual routines. "They basically ran it like you would run McDonald's," he says. "It just can't be good for an animal that is so intelligent to do the same thing every day." (Wright still runs a marina at Oak Bay but declined to speak to
Outside
.)

As Stephens had warned, bored killer whales look to make their own fun. If any unusual object ended up in the water, Haida, Nootka, and Tilikum would race for it and play keep-away with the trainers. Once the orcas took something, they were determined to hang on to it. Walters worried about what might happen if one of the trainers—who worked in rubber boots on a painted fiberglass deck—fell into the pool. Many marine parks try to defuse the danger with desensitization training that teaches the killer whales to stay calm and ignore anyone who falls in. The training might start with just a foot in the water (the orca is conditioned to ignore it) but ultimately requires gradually easing an entire person into the pool. According to Steve Huxter, who was the head of animal training and care at the time, desensitization was a Catch-22. After thinking about it carefully, "Bob [Wright] was not willing to take that risk."

Each whale had a distinctive personality. Tilikum was youthful, energetic, and eager to learn. "Tilikum was our favorite," says Eric Walters. "He was the one we all really liked to work with."

Nootka, with her health issues, was the most unpredictable. According to Walters, Nootka pulled a trainer into the water. (Walters quickly yanked her out.) Twice she tried to bite down on Walters's hands. Not even the audience was safe. A blind woman was once brought onto the stage to pat Nootka's tongue. Nootka bit her, too.

Frustrated, Walters quit in May 1989. A year later he wrote a letter to the Canadian Federation of Humane Societies, to share with participants at a conference on whales in captivity. In it he detailed Sealand's treatment of its marine mammals and the safety concerns he had. In closing, he wrote, "I feel that sooner or later someone is going to get seriously hurt."

On February 20, 1991, Sealand had just wrapped up an afternoon killer whale show. Keltie Byrne, a twenty-year-old marine-biology student and part-time trainer, was starting to tidy up when she misstepped and fell halfway into the pool. As she struggled to get out, one of the killer whales grabbed her and pulled her into the water. A competitive swimmer, Byrne was no match for three orcas used to treating any unusual object as a toy. "They never had a plaything in the pool that was so interactive," says Huxter. "They just got incredibly excited and stimulated." Huxter and the other trainers issued recall commands and threw food in the water. They tried maneuvering a life ring close enough for Byrne to grab, but the orcas kept her away from it. In the chaos and dark water, it was hard to see which killer whale had her at any one time. Twice she surfaced and screamed. After about ten minutes, she popped up a third time for an instant but made no noise. She had drowned.

Bryne was the first trainer ever killed by orcas at a marine park. It took Sealand employees two hours to recover her body from Nootka, Haida, and Tilikum. They had stripped off all of her clothes save one boot, and she had bruises from bites across her skin. "It was just a tragic accident," Al Bolz, Sealand's manager, told reporters at the time. "I just can't explain it."

Paul Spong, seventy-one, the director of OrcaLab, in British Columbia—which studies orcas in the wild—did part-time research at Sealand before Tilikum arrived. He is not so befuddled. "If you pen killer whales in a small steel tank, you are imposing an extreme level of sensory deprivation on them," he says. "Humans who are subjected to those same conditions become mentally disturbed."

Byrne's death led to a coroner's inquest, which recommended a series of safety improvements at Sealand. The park responded, but according to Huxter, "the wind came out of [Wright's] sails for the business." In the fall of 1991, Sealand contacted SeaWorld to ask if it would like to buy Nootka, Haida, and Tilikum. Sealand closed in 1992.

 

If you want to try to get an inkling of what captivity means for a killer whale, you first have to understand what their lives are like in the wild. For that, there's no one better than the marine biologist Ken Balcomb, sixty-nine, who has spent thirty-four years tracking and observing killer whales off the coast of Washington State.

In early May I meet Balcomb in his cluttered yard on San Juan Island. He's trying to find the source of a leak on his Boston Whaler. His wood-framed house, which also serves as headquarters for his Center for Whale Research, sits perched atop the rocky shores of the Haro Strait, a popular orca hangout; Balcomb says he sees them about eighty days a year from his deck. Inside there's gear all over the place—spotting scopes, cameras, tool kits—from a recent expedition to California. In the middle of it all, on a table, sits an enormous killer whale skull that he picked up in Japan in 1975, when he was a flier and oceanographic specialist for the U.S. Navy.

Balcomb, of medium build, with a ruddy, sun-baked face and a salt-and-pepper beard, has been carefully photographing, cataloging, and observing the Puget Sound orcas—also known as the Southern Residents—since he was contracted by the National Marine Fisheries Service in 1976 to assess the impact of the marine-park captures. Many people assumed there were hundreds of orcas around Puget Sound. After identifying each individual killer whale by its markings, Balcomb found that there were just seventy left.

Since then he's become the Southern Residents' scientific godfather, noting every birth and death and plotting family connections. The population, he says, is now at eighty-five orcas, but he won't know for sure until they show up this summer. Talking on his sun porch, Balcomb stresses that one of the most important things to know about killer whales like Tilikum is that in the wild they live in complex and highly social family pods of twenty to fifty animals. The pods are organized around the females. The matriarch is usually the oldest female (some live to eighty or more), who has a wealth of experience and knowledge about where food can be found. Within the pod, mothers are at the center of smaller family groups. Males, who can live to fifty or sixty years, stay with their mothers their entire lives and often die not long after she does. According to Balcomb, separation is not a minor issue.

The Southern Resident population is made up of three distinct pods. Each pod might travel some seventy-five miles a day, following the salmon and vocalizing almost constantly to keep the entire group updated on who's where and whether there are fish around. Killer whales are highly intelligent. They coordinate in the hunt, share food freely, and will help an injured or ill member of the pod stay on the surface to breathe. Most striking is the sophistication of their dialect. Each family group within a pod uses the same vocalizations, or vocabulary, and there are also shared vocalizations between pods. Balcomb says he can usually tell which pod is about to turn up simply by the sounds he hears through a hydrophone.

The social and genetic connections that bind orcas in the wild are intense. There is breeding between the Puget Sound pods. Sometimes they'll all come together at once and go through a distinctive greeting ceremony before mixing. But they will have absolutely nothing to do with the genetically distinct, transient killer whales that sometimes pass through their waters. (Transients travel in much smaller groups over vast distances and mostly feed on marine mammals instead of fish.) "When you get born into the family, you are always in the family. You don't have a house or a home that is your location," says Balcomb. "The group is your home, and your whole identity is with your group." Aggression between members of a pod almost never occurs in the wild, he adds.

Puget Sound is small enough that Balcomb used to run into Goldsberry from time to time. Despite their differences, the two men would talk killer whales, drink Crown Royal, and trade stories. Today Goldsberry, seventy-six, lives about one hundred miles away in a small, ground-level condo near Sea-Tac Airport. His only water view is of a man-made lake, and when I go to see him he's busy drilling a walrus tusk that's been made into a cribbage board. Goldsberry has a square head, with close-cropped white hair. His health is fragile, and he has an oxygen tube clipped to his nose. But he still has the beefy arms of a waterman, and he appears unmoved by the controversy of his hunting days. "We showed the world that killer whales were good animals and all of a sudden people said, 'Hey, leave these animals alone,'" he says, sipping a mug of vodka and ice. "I had to make a living."

Goldsberry has mostly kept his mouth shut about his work for SeaWorld and doesn't much like talking to reporters. "I'm only speaking with you because those idiots out there, mainly the politicians, want to release all the killer whales," he growls. "You might as well put a gun to the whales' heads." He spends the next couple of hours telling me about his cowboy days in the orca business: how he helped build the global trade, how he kept one step ahead of Greenpeace and activists, and how he battled the media, dropping one TV newsman's camera into the water, asking, "I wonder if this floats?"