And we’ve known that the neocortex of a whale or dolphin brain has more folds than ours. All those folds mean that the surface area is greater and therefore may have more units to process information.

But recently, when we used a special imaging technique to study the brain of a dolphin (who had died naturally), we were astonished by what we learned.

Above: Beluga brain (left) and human brain. A beluga brain is just under twice the size of a human one and has more folds in its neocortex (surface area), indicating that the part of their brain that’s involved in problem solving and thinking is highly elaborated.

While we humans and most other animals have a single pathway from the inner ear up to the first “stopover” for auditory information coming into the brain, it turns out that dolphins have two! (And orcas, although we commonly refer to them as whales, are the largest species of dolphin.)

This could mean that they process echolocation echoes in one region of the brain and whistles and other sounds in another. But we’re still trying to understand how these two kinds of sound information come together.

Another research team has found that the part of the brain in orcas that’s involved in problem-solving and social- and self-awareness is proportionally larger than in humans. This could suggest they have a more complex sense of self than we do – so they may experience life both as an individual and as a member of their pod. And this kind of mental life might require a lot more processing of information than is the case with humans.

So, are we humans the most intelligent species on the planet? Clearly, evolution has found a way to create more than one kind of complex intelligence.

This post is excerpted from our Fall Newsletter. We send the complete newsletter to everyone who’s donated in the last year, so if you’d like to receive a copy, please make your donation now. Your gift, large or small, will be worth twice as much since our lead sponsor, Munchkin, Inc, is matching all donations this year up to a total of $300,000.  

The post The World’s Most Intelligent Species? appeared first on The Whale Sanctuary Project | Back to Nature.

• How will a whale who’s lived in a concrete tank adapt to the wide-open space of a sanctuary?
• Why can’t captive whales be released into the open ocean?
• Might some of them be suffering from PTSD, given that they already show signs, in their tanks, of stress and other mental disorders?

These were just a few of the questions posed by the hosts and the audience when Lori Marino, President of the Whale Sanctuary Project, was the guest on the People’s Environmental News Hour, a weekly TV show that’s broadcast from San Rafael, California.

It was a full hour of all the kinds of questions you might have posed if you’d been part of the studio audience, including:

• How do marine entertainment parks teach whales to do tricks?
• What’s the incentive for them to give up their whales? Won’t it put them out of business?
• What will you do if some of the whales don’t get along with each other?
• Will you allow them to breed? If not, how do you stop them?
• What might be the effect of a sanctuary on local wildlife?
• What do you think of ecotourism – swimming with dolphins in the ocean, etc.?

And lots more. Check out the video. And if you have questions that didn’t come up during the show, go ahead and ask them on our Facebook page.

Special thanks to Barbara McVeigh and Charlie Siler of the People’s Environmental News Hour for inviting us.

The post Q&A with Dr. Lori Marino appeared first on The Whale Sanctuary Project | Back to Nature.

What scientists call culture is not primarily about how to behave in polite society (although belugas certainly teach their children that, too); it’s about what you learn from your family and how you pass this knowledge down from generation to generation. We humans do this in spades, but we are by no means unique, and we’re learning more and more about the many other kinds of animals who have deeply rooted cultures based on social learning.

The new study focused on the migratory patterns of beluga whales in the Gulf of Alaska, the Bering, Chukchi and Beaufort Seas, and the Sea of Okhotsk from 1978 to 2010. The findings demonstrated that whales who were related to each other returned to the same locations year after year, and even generation after generation.

Beluga whales are denizens of Arctic and sub-Arctic waters, often traveling more than 3,500 miles each year and spending their winters and summers in different locations as they raise their young. During the summer, these highly sociable animals often have giant meet-ups, hanging out in the thousands close to the shore (as in the image above, taken in the Hudson Bay).

Highly sophisticated cognitive abilities

Their highly sophisticated vocal repertoires and acoustic systems, including echolocation, suggest that they can form very complex relationships and groups. But they’ve always been difficult to study in the wild. So, in 1978, scientists began a sophisticated analysis, including genetic samples, from year to year to track a total of 1,647 belugas.

“What intrigued us most was whether particular whales returned to where they were born or grew up, and if this was an inherited behavior,” writes Greg O’Corry-Crowe, Ph.D., lead author and a research professor at Florida Atlantic University’s Harbor Branch. “The only way that we could definitively answer these questions was to find and track close relatives from one year to the next and one decade to the next.”

O’Corry-Crowe and his team have concluded that from one generation to the next, the whales have been passing along the knowledge of their travels and their routes.

 
Video from National Geographic

Of course, many other species migrate over thousands of miles, back and forth, every year. So, what’s different about belugas?

“Many other animals do indeed migrate on an annual basis,” explains Lori Marino, President of the Whale Sanctuary Project. “Most of them do this by using environmental cues (day/night, chemicals, magnetism, etc.). But what makes the beluga migrations especially interesting is that they’re based on social learning from mothers to children. And that’s the basis of culture. Belugas aren’t just a migratory species; they’re a migratory culture.”

Learning their culture

The new study also sheds light on how come young belugas are sometimes observed alone and have been known to befriend humans. Such was the well-known case of a beluga known as Wilma, an orphan who befriended fishermen and tourists in Chedabucto Bay, Nova Scotia. Catherine Kinsman, President of the Whale Stewardship Project, was authorized by the government to watch over Wilma.

“They possess extraordinary echolocation abilities with great range.”

“People are always asking, ‘How did this little whale get here, and why doesn’t she just go home?’,” she says. “The most reasonable explanation is that these young belugas, often only about two years of age or so, become separated from their family, get lost, and don’t know where they are in relation to home and don’t know how to get back.”

Just like us humans, young belugas need to spend many years learning their culture. Very young whales may not yet know all the routes any more than a two-year-old human could walk herself from home to the store and back.

It might seem even more remarkable that any beluga could learn to navigate thousands of miles each year to and from their feeding, breeding and meet-up locations. But Kinsman (who was not involved in the study) says that that what appears to us humans as a largely homogeneous ocean environment may not be that at all to a beluga.

“They possess extraordinary echolocation abilities with great range and ability to detect and differentiate shape, size, texture,” she reminds us. “To a beluga, even the sands on the ocean floor in one place may “look” (or rather sound) different from the sandy bottom in another.”

Video from National Geographic

The new study has made a big difference to how scientists study them and how we can protect them in the wild. Does it also have any application to belugas in aquariums and marine entertainment parks?

“In the wild,” Kinsman says, “beluga culture enables individual baby whales to learn, grow and thrive as part of a very complex community.” But life in such a totally unnatural environment actually shuts down their ability to learn. “Barren concrete tanks force them to curtail or even mute their otherwise extraordinarily chatty voices. Instead, they learn to produce an appallingly degraded substitute for their vast range of normal beluga expressions.”

What, then, can these big-brained, intelligent, cultural beings learn when they’re growing up in concrete tanks? Basically, just whatever another captive beluga can show them, or what they can figure out for themselves, if they are to survive within these completely unnatural conditions.

The bottom line, when it comes to whales who have been co-opted into the entertainment industry, is always the same: The more we learn about them, the more we learn that they belong with their families in the wild, not in small pools doing circus tricks in exchange for sustenance.

The post Among Beluga Whales, Family and Culture Come First appeared first on The Whale Sanctuary Project | Back to Nature.

Christian missionaries also separated children from their families, so they could be indoctrinated into European culture.

This month, March 2018, leaders of the Lummi Nation held a ceremony in Miami, Florida – 3,000 miles away from their homeland – during which they performed a song from that painful time about a mother trying to find her baby. The song had a special resonance in that the Lummi people were in Miami to seek the return of another of their family, as they view her: the orca Tokitae (also known as Lolita). In 1970, Tokitae, meaning “nice day, pretty colors”, was taken from her family in the waters of the San Juan Islands and has been living in a concrete tank at the Miami Seaquarium for 47 years. (Six other baby orcas were also taken at that time. None of them are still living.)

Orcas being captured at Penn Cove in August 1970. Photo by Wallie Funk, Whidbey News-Times

Anger and pain have now turned to action as the Lummi people join forces with animal protection groups to demand the return of Tokitae, whose mother, a member of the L pod among the now-endangered Southern Resident Killer Whale group still swims the waters of the Salish Sea and is known to the Lummi as Ocean Sun.

“There’s no way they should be getting away with putting these mammals in captivity for a show,” Lummi natural resource commissioner Steve Solomon told reporters. “Those are our brothers and sisters that were taken.”

The Seaquarium argues that “Lolita,” as they call Tokitae, is loved and well cared for. (Just like the children 200 years ago.) And they call her an “ambassador” for her species. The Lummi vehemently disagree.

“She is not an ‘ambassador,’” says Jewell James, director of the Lummi Nation’s Sovereignty and Treaty Protection Office. “She is a captive and must be reunited with her family. It is our ‘xa xalh xechnging’ [sacred obligation] to do this.”

Lummi Nation members Jewell James (left) and Douglas James, Jr. speaking on the cultural significance of returning Tokitae to her ancestral home. Photo by Patricia Guthrie/Whidbey News-Times

The Lummi people are not about to submit to the Seaquarium. They have gone up against big business before – and won. In 2012 they took on shipping giant SSA Marine, which was preparing to build the Gateway Pacific Terminal, a $665 million project that would have been the largest coal export terminal in the country.

“She is not an ‘ambassador.’ She is a captive and must be reunited with her family.”
The Lummi argued that the terminal would violate their rights under the 1855 Treaty of Point Elliot, which gave them the right to take fish at “usual and accustomed grounds and stations.” The terminal, they said, would bring some of the world’s largest ships into these “usual and accustomed” fishing waters up to 487 times a year to load and unload bulk commodities, principally coal, bound for Asian ports.

Referring to coal as “black death,” the Lummi listed numerous ways that the enterprise would poison the ocean, saying that their legal right to fish demands an environment where the fish can thrive.

As they focus now on the matter of abducted whales, the Lummi are planning a 27-day, 13-stop tour of the country with a custom totem pole designed to honor Tokitae. The tour will end with a major event in Miami in May. Tokitae will also be the focus of a panel of experts at the 2018 Vine Deloria, Jr. Indigenous Studies Symposium at Northwest Indian College.

The Lummi Nation is committed to implementing a protocol for Tokitae, who is over 50 years old, to be transported back to her home waters in Washington State with every precaution being taken to ensure that her health is the highest priority, overseen by veterinarians every step of the way. (This will be standard for all whales who become candidates for retirement to a seaside sanctuary).

The Lummi are determined to have it recognized that members of their families, human or otherwise, are not the property of big business and entertainment, any more than their children, 150 years ago, were the property of an alien religion and culture.

The post The Lummi Nation of Washington State appeared first on The Whale Sanctuary Project | Back to Nature.

Chief Bob Chamberlin shows a traditional Kwikwasut’inuxw Haxwa’mis blanket depicting an orca totem.

The theme of the evening was “Reconciliation,” and it was introduced by Chief Bob Chamberlin of the Kwikwasut’inuxw Haxwa’mis First Nation. Chief Chamberlin talked about his work in helping to bring about reconciliation between his people and European immigrants. In the same way, he said, it’s time to bring about reconciliation with our fellow animals and the natural world.

Dr. Marino took up the theme of “Reconciliation,” discussing how a sanctuary can give back to whales something of the life they’ve lost by being taken from their homes and families in the wild.

While the Kwikwasut’inuxw Haxwa’mis are a small nation, Chief Chamberlin is increasingly hailed by the wider community of West Coast nations. Most recently, as vice-president of the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs, he has given voice to one of the most pressing causes of his people: their ongoing battle with the energy company Kinder Morgan. Kinder Morgan plans to build a 715-mile Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, which would allow them to send 890,000 barrels of diluted bitumen oil from Alberta’s tar sands, along inland waterways, through the suburbs of British Columbia, and out to the B.C. coasts.

As explained by the environmental news site Earther:

The pipeline expansion could create an environmental and economic disaster if [the diluted bitumen] spilled in any of the rivers or streams on the pipeline route. Because it’s heavier than conventional oil, it sinks rather than floats on the water’s surface.

… Once it reaches the terminal in Burnaby, the bitumen would be loaded on tankers and sent through the maze of islands and channels from the Fraser River to the Haro Strait that divides Canada and the U.S. before hitting the global market.

The pipeline and terminal expansion would allow tanker traffic to increase from five tankers per month to 35 per month, dramatically increasing the odds of an accident and clogging the already-busy waterways of Canada’s busiest port. (March 12^th, 2018)

“It’s at a point of exasperation of engaging in due diligence with government,” Chief Chamberlin told the CBC.

“We are constantly pointing to the government’s lack of embracing its very own laws.”

Another critically important cause for all the nations of the B.C. coast is fish farming. Chief Chamberlin is part of the leadership of an alliance of tribes that is strongly opposed to industrial fish farms that poison the waters and are devastating the marine life of the region, in particular the salmon, the herring and the whales, who now find themselves under increasing stress after having lived in harmony with the First Nations people for thousands of years.

The Coastal First Nations of British Columbia – an alliance of tribes – are also calling on senators to vote in favor of Bill S-203, which would permit no more whales or dolphins to be put on display in marine entertainment parks.

Next: The Lummi Nation: Committed to bring the orca Tokitae back home.

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In this talk to students at Franklin & Marshall College in November 2017, Dr. Lori Marino talks about whales and dolphins: “who” they are, their history as a species, and their intelligence and cognitive powers. Some things, for example, that you may not have known:

• The ancestors of whales, dolphins and porpoises (known overall as cetaceans) were land animals, known to scientists as archaeocetes, who went aquatic about 50 million years ago.

• The earliest archaeocete found, called Pakicetus, looked a bit like a dog, but was a hoofed animal. The closest living relative of modern cetaceans is the hippopotamus, another hoofed creature.
• Cetaceans haven’t changed very much in the past 15 million years. (We humans, by comparison, have only been around as a species for about 200,000 years and even our hominid ancestors go back only about 5-6 million years)
• Cetaceans are ridiculously smart and highly social. The brains of orcas are 2.5 times the size that’s typical for an animal of their size. And bottlenose dolphin brains are over four times the expected size.

Human brain (left) and orca brain. The cortex is basically a sheet, so the more actual surface area there is, the more cortical tissue can fit in the skull.

• The adult orca brain is the most convoluted brain on earth, and the orca forebrain comprises a greater proportion of the total brain volume than does the human forebrain. The neocortex is greatly expanded, particularly in areas of “integrative” higher-order processing of emotions and social cognition.
• Orcas can dive to depths of over 650 feet when foraging, and belugas can dive to 2,300 feet. A beluga pod (extended family) can travel up to 70 miles a day, and an orca pod more than 100 miles.
• Every pod is shaped by complex cultural traditions that include different dialects, ways of hunting and foraging, and social behaviors.
• Belugas are known as “canaries of the ocean” because of their remarkable ability to imitate sounds and behaviors. They have especially strong family bonds and babysit each other’s calves.

Dr. Marino then talks about how the life of a whale or dolphin in a concrete tank at a marine park or aquarium bears no relation to life in the ocean. Just for starters, an orca at SeaWorld would have to swim the circumference of the main pool 1,400 times to go the daily distance of her cousins in the wild.

Beyond that, they have no stimulation or challenges, and because they’re frequently moved from one park to another, their families are broken up, their social groups are artificial, and sometimes they live in complete solitude, which must be emotionally devastating.

Dr. Marino talks about the Whale Sanctuary Project and our aim to have the first sanctuary completed by the end of 2019.

And the question-and-answer period opens up some fascinating topics. For example, since orcas are often seen deliberately injuring themselves in their tanks, could this mean that they’re trying to end their own lives? And if so, what does this tell us about their level of metacognition – i.e. their ability to reflect upon their own lives?

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Filmmaker Gabriela Cowperthwaite was interviewing some of us for a movie she was making, Blackfish, about the orca Tilikum who had killed his trainer Dawn Brancheau the previous year. When it was released, Blackfish would capture public attention and shake the captivity industry to its roots. And author David Kirby was also interviewing members of the group for the book he was writing, Death at SeaWorld.

After dinner, one evening, neuroscientist Lori Marino gave a talk about her research on the brains and cognitive abilities of whales and dolphins, and the discussion then turned to how good it would be if all the whales at marine parks (or “sea circuses” as the former trainers called them) could be retired to sanctuaries. After all, zoos and circuses were under increasing pressure to send their elephants and other large land animals to sanctuaries. Why not the same for whales?

At the end of the week, we agreed to stay in touch and perhaps to meet up again in the years to come. We’d call these get-togethers “Superpods” – the word scientists use for when multiple pods of whales meet up for their own social gatherings.

In the summers that followed, some of the group continued to meet on San Juan Island. And in July 2016, when hundreds of people from around the world gathered for three days of talks, movies and presentations at the local theater, Dr. Lori Marino announced the formation of an organization, the Whale Sanctuary Project, that was setting out to create a seaside sanctuary for captive whales.

The following posts make up a blog that I wrote during our five days on the island at Superpod One back in July 2011.

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Page Seven of remarkable, inexplicable stories of killer whale behavior toward humans in the wild.

Bottlenose dolphins. Credit: Carl Safina

Me, I am most skeptical of those things I’d most like to believe, precisely because I’d like to believe them. Wanting to believe something can bias one’s view of facts and events.

But the whales leave us with questions so puzzling they are unsettling, unshakeable, at times even disturbing. Why would these beings declare unilateral peace with humans and not with dolphins and seals, whom they hunt and eat? Why would they single us out to give assistance? And why no grudge? Why, after the chronic harassment, capture, and disruption we’ve visited upon them, no learned and handed-down fears of humans such as wolves and ravens and even some dolphins seem to teach their young? The dolphins of the vast Pacific tuna grounds have such fears. Tuna nets used to kill them by the thousands; they still flee in panic from a ship several miles away if it pivots toward them, or if its engine merely changes pitch. I have seen that myself, in person. The dolphins’ hard-learned fear of ships makes sense.

The whales leave us with questions so puzzling they are unsettling, unshakeable, at times even disturbing.

What doesn’t make sense is: gigantic mega-brained predators color-patterned like pirate flags who eat everything from sea otters to whales and spend hours batting thousand-pound sea lions into the air specifically to beat them up before drowning and shredding them; who wash seals off ice and crush porpoises and slurp swimming deer and moose – indeed, seemingly any mammal they come across in the water; yet who have never so much as upended a single kayak and who appear – maybe – to bring lost dogs home.

On Argentina’s coast killer whales sometimes burst through the surf to drag sea lions right off the beaches. You see the video and you think it would be insanity to stroll near the shoreline. Yet when park ranger Roberto Bubas stepped into the water and played his harmonica, the same individual killer whales would ring around him like puppies. They’d rally playfully around his kayak, and come as, by names he gave them, he called to them.

Through the squishy anecdotes runs a hard fact: free-living killer whales treat humans with a strange lack of violence. It’s especially strange when compared with the rate at which humans continue hurting and killing other humans. How to explain either fact? What can explain the whales’ striking forbearance? For the sea’s present-day T. rex to stick their heads up alongside a tiny boat uncountable times, and never hurt a human even in play; that begs an explanation. More crucially, it demands that we find a way to understand. What, in the world, is going on? Is it simply outside our cognition; are their reasons beyond our ability to comprehend? Perhaps one day.

When breakthroughs happen, they don’t come as confirmation of what we already know. They come as something unexpected, hard to fathom, puzzling, demanding new explanations. They come as things that many people dismiss, or scorn. Until they turn out true. So, while I am wary of believing – I’m also wary of dismissing. These stories have pushed me into the “I just don’t know” category. And it’s pretty hard to get me there.

I feel shaken out of certainty. I’ve suspended disbelief. It’s an unexpected feeling for me. Uncomfortable. The stories have forced open doors I had shut, doors to that greatest of all mental feats: a simple sense of wonder.

Science fiction used to imagine wise visitors from outer space wielding huge heads housing vastly superior brainpower. The whales certainly have, at least, very big heads.

All posts in this series are excerpted from Beyond Words; What Animals Think and Feel by Carl Safina.

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Page Six of remarkable, inexplicable stories of killer whale behavior toward humans in the wild.

During several decades of research on free-living dolphins in the Bahamas, Denise Herzing, founder and Research Director of the Wild Dolphin Project, got familiar with particular individuals. Apparently, the feeling was mutual. After being gone for eight months each year, the researchers would return and all would reunite.

“Joyous is probably the word I would use to describe it,” wrote Herzing, “And even though I am committed to studying and understanding the dolphins scientifically, I have no problem also feeling like they are friends, of another species, but clearly aware, with feelings and memories, and this was a reunion of friends.”

Perhaps they were using another sensory system, one that we humans neither possess nor suspect.

At the end of multi-week research trips, she writes, “The dolphins seemed to know we were leaving and gave us a grand send-off. I have often wondered how they knew.”

Seemingly “telepathic” behavior occurred in a more somber incident. At the beginning of a research trip, as Herzing’s vessel approached the familiar dolphins that she’d been studying, they “greeted us but they acted very unusual,” not coming within 50 feet of the boat. They refused invitations to bow-ride, also odd. And when the captain slipped into the water, one came briefly nearer and then suddenly fled.

At that point, someone discovered that one of the people aboard had just died during a nap in his bunk. Spooky enough. But then, as the boat turned to head back to port, “the dolphins came to the side of our boat, not riding the bow as usual but instead flanking us fifty feet away in an aquatic escort… they paralleled us in an organized fashion.”

Bottlenose dolphins. Credit: Carl Safina

After attending to the sad necessities ashore, when the boat returned to the dolphin area, “The dolphins greeted us normally, rode the bow, and frolicked like they normally did.”

After 25 years with those dolphins, Herzing never again saw them behave the way they did when the boat had a dead man aboard. Perhaps, in a way we don’t understand, dolphin sonar lets them scan inside a boat and somehow realize and communicate among each other that a man in a bunk has a heart that is still. Perhaps they detected that a human had died using another sensory system, one that we humans neither possess nor suspect.

And what does it mean for dolphins to become solemn in response to a human death?

Next – Page Seven: Questions Unsettling, Unshakeable and Disturbing.

All posts in this series are excerpted from Beyond Words; What Animals Think and Feel by Carl Safina.

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Page Five of some remarkable, inexplicable stories of killer whale behavior toward humans in the wild.

In the early 1980s, a marine amusement park wanting whales to train for shows started asking for permission to resume captures of British Columbia killer whales. Captures had been banned in ’76, but talk turned to capturing a certain small family: the A-4 group. That family had already suffered. In 1983 someone – they were let off for lack of photographic proof – shot the whale A-10 and her youngster. Whale-watchers heard the shots and went right over. One of the witnesses said, “A-10 pushed her wounded calf to my side of the boat. We could see the wound oozing blood. It really seemed that she was showing us: Look what you humans have done.” Within a few months, both whales died.

The mere suggestion of capturing these whales she’d often seen – years after the capture ban – set Alexandra Morton’s blood boiling. At a meeting, even her own friends had to calm her down.

Were the whales trying to communicate something after she’d defended their family?

Over the years there was only one major waterway where Alexandra Morton had not seen killer whales: Cramer Passage, where Morton lived. Two days after the meeting where she’d spoken so passionately against their capture, Morton was following Yakat and Kelsey – who who were sisters of the dead whale A-10 – and a youngster called Sutlej. In front of the inlet to Cramer Passage the whales started milling around. Morton drifted with them. Then they “trapped” her, with the two sisters on either side and the youngster broadside at the front of the boat, all inches away. Each time she started the engine, they started buzzing around, keeping her trapped. They reminded her of whales hunting a sea lion and it unnerved her. But then they turned, leading her into Cramer Passage – the one place she’d never seen them go – and traveling up and down Cramer three times.

She allowed herself to wonder: were the whales trying to communicate something after she’d defended their family? She’d spoken at a meeting (not even out in a boat, where whales – if they were fluent in English – might have overheard her). “Sometimes I don’t know what to believe with whales,” Morton said. Reading her thoughts while she watched them would mean true telepathy. That, she knew, “flew in the face of reason.”

As Ken Balcomb might say, Alexandra Morton was deep into “woo-woo” territory.

She knew she was. She wrote, “I know this has no place in science (or even a sound mind perhaps), but could our parameters on reality be set just a little too tight?”

Decades earlier while watching two captive whales named Orky and Corky swim around their Marineland pool one day, Morton had asked a trainer to show her how one teaches a new idea to a whale. (Corky was the captured child of Stripe. Many years later Stripe would help lead Morton home in the fog, in the incident mentioned above.) Neither Morton nor the trainer had ever seen either captive whale slap its dorsal fin on the water. They decided they’d work on that trick the following week. “Then something happened,” Morton later wrote, “that has made me careful of my thoughts around whales ever since:” Corky rose and slapped her dorsal fin on the water’s surface. She did it several more times then charged around the tank, exuberantly smacking the water with her dorsal fin.

“That’s whales for you,” said the trainer, smiling. “They can read your mind. We trainers see this kind of stuff all the time.”

When a very young killer whale named Springer mysteriously showed up near Seattle, she had just recently been weaned and her mother had been missing. Ken found her playing with a small floating tree branch, pushing it around. “I picked it up and threw it and she’d go after it, very playful. I started slapping the water and she started slapping the water with her pec fin. Then I looked at her and for some reason I just made a circular motion with my finger, like a ‘roll over’ signal = and she rolled over! I just went, ‘Wow!’ To get a dog to do all that, you have to work on training them to do that trick. I mean; she knew what I had in mind, like her consciousness was just sort-of linked with mine. There are no words for something like that.”

Rolling when he moved his finger in a circle required an understanding that his finger represented a generalized geometric concept of ‘motion around an axis.’ Plus it required an ability to apply to her body the concept she understood in the motion of his finger. It required an innate desire to engage with another life form, a capacity for play and, it would seem, a sense of fun. And, she couldn’t do what he had in mind unless she indeed inferred that he had something in mind.

It was astonishing behavior.

Killer whales simply seem to specialize in acute consciousness.

In other words, Springer was just being a killer whale. Killer whales simply seem to specialize in acute consciousness. They don’t seem to be astonished by us; they take us matter-of-factly. We don’t need to continue being astonished at their behavior. Instead, we might simply fully accept them – and be astonished by one thing about ourselves: how long it’s taken us.

In the 1960s, Karen Pryor discovered that rough-toothed dolphins could understand the concept, ‘Do something new.’ She rewarded them only if they did something they’d never been taught and had never done. Then at a specific signal they, “thought of things to do spontaneously that we could never have imagined, and that we would have found very difficult to arrive at.”

When the Hawaiian bottlenose dolphins Phoenix and Akeakamai got the signal to “do something new,” they would swim to the center of the pool and circle underwater for a few seconds, then would do something like: both shooting straight up through the surface in perfect unison and spinning clockwise while squirting water from their mouths. None of that performance was trained.

“It looks to us absolutely mysterious,” researcher Lou Herman emphasized. “We don’t know how they do it.” It seems as if they confer using some form of language to plan and execute a complex new stunt. If there’s another way of doing it, or what that might be, or whether there’s some other way to communicate that humans can’t quite imagine – dolphin telepathy? – no human knows. Whatever it is, for the dolphins it’s apparently as routine and natural as human kids saying, “Hey let’s do this…”

Next – Page Six: “Did They Know What Had Happened on Our Boat?”

All posts in this series are excerpted from Beyond Words; What Animals Think and Feel by Carl Safina.

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Page Four of some remarkable, inexplicable stories of killer whale behavior toward humans in the wild.

A small party of scientific people left shore to go whale-watching in a small boat. When they returned, their German shepherd, Phoenix, was not on the island. He’d apparently tried to follow them out into the big water and powerful tides of Johnstone Strait.

The people searched the Strait until 11 p.m. No dog. The dog’s owner was sitting on a log, crying, when he heard the blows of killer whales. He was suddenly horrified at the thought that they might have eaten his beloved dog. He could see the whales coming closer because the turbulence of their swimming caused the sea’s phosphorescent creatures to glow.

Just after the whales passed, he heard splashing. Suddenly, there stood his sodden dog, weakened and vomiting saltwater.

“I don’t care what people say,” he declared. “Those whales saved my dog.”

Not an isolated case. At a different research camp, a person went kayaking and when he returned, his dog, named Karma, was missing. Similarly, she’d probably tried to follow. The researcher was mourning the loss of his faithful companion late in the night when some whales passed. The dog appeared on the beach, soaked and trembling and near collapse.

“I was there,” said the person who related the story. “There’s no doubt in my mind; those whales had pushed Karma ashore.”

Next – Page Five: “She Pushed Her Wounded Calf to My Side of the Boat.”

All posts in this series are excerpted from Beyond Words; What Animals Think and Feel by Carl Safina.

The post Tales from the Whale Side – Four appeared first on The Whale Sanctuary Project | Back to Nature.

Page Three of some remarkable, inexplicable stories of killer whale behavior toward humans in the wild.

Male killer whale. Credit: Carl Safina

My friend Maria Bowling was snorkeling in Hawaii when – freak coincidence – several killer whales suddenly showed up.

She wrote to me, “I heard a very strong clinking sound, like metal on metal, like two scuba tanks hitting one another. It was a very high vibrating sound that did not feel uncomfortable but it did feel incredibly strong!!! It went right through me. It was the strongest energy that I have ever felt. A wave of energy, like transmitting.

“It was like a portal opened, or an introduction to another possibility of communication. After the encounter I was so elevated and activated by the power of the event that for days I was a bit dazed. I felt lighter, more integrated, very hopeful, light-hearted and full of joy.

“This is not very scientific I know, but it’s more of a somatic experience than that of the mind or intellect.”

Next – Page Four: “They Saved My Dog.”

All posts in this series are excerpted from Beyond Words; What Animals Think and Feel by Carl Safina.

The post Tales from the Whale Side – Three appeared first on The Whale Sanctuary Project | Back to Nature.

Page Two of some remarkable, inexplicable stories of killer whale behavior toward humans in the wild.

It gets, if anything, more touching. And much stranger. The fact is, killer whales seem capable of random acts of kindness. Acts that defy explanation. Acts that make scientists consider some pretty far-out possibilities. It can seem that killer whale behavior falls into two categories: amazing behavior and inexplicable behavior.

Researchers hoping to attach satellite tag to killer whale. Credit: Carl Safina.

Fog-guidance can seem like an exclusive service that killer whales feel inclined to provide – to people who work to protect them. Once, biologist and explorer Alexandra Morton and an assistant were out in the open water of Queen Charlotte Strait in her inflatable boat when she was enveloped by fog so thick she felt like she was, “in a glass of milk.” No compass. No view of the sun. Flat calm; no wave pattern to inform a guess. A wrong guess about the direction home would have brought them out into open ocean. Worse, a giant cruise ship was moving closer in fog so reflective Morton could not tell where its sound was approaching from. She imagined it suddenly splitting the fog before it crushed them.

“There are times when I am confronted with something beyond our ability to scientifically quantify.”

Then as if from nowhere, a smooth black fin popped up. Top Notch. Then Saddle. And then, Eve, the usually aloof matriarch. Sharky was suddenly peeking at her. Then Stripe. As they clumped close around her tiny boat, Alexandra followed in the fog like a blind person with a hand on their shoulder.

“I never worried,” she recalled. “I trusted them with our lives.”

Twenty minutes later they saw a materializing outline of their island’s massive cedars and rocky shoreline. The fog opened up. The whales left them. Earlier in the day the whales had been unusually difficult to follow, and had been traveling west toward open ocean. The whales had taken Morton south, home. When the whales left they changed direction toward where they’d just come from, where they had been headed.

Morton felt changed. “For more than twenty years, I have fought to keep the mythology of the orcas out of my work. When others would regale a group with stories of an orca’s sense of humor or music appreciation, I’d hold my tongue.

“Yet there are times when I am confronted with profound evidence of something beyond our ability to scientifically quantify. Call them amazing coincidences if you like; for me they keep adding up.

“I can’t say that whales are telepathic – I can barely say the word – but… I have no explanation for that day’s events. I have only gratitude and a deep sense of mystery that continues to grow.”

Next – Page Three: “The Strongest Energy I’ve Ever Felt.”

All posts in this series are excerpted from Beyond Words; What Animals Think and Feel by Carl Safina.

The post Tales from the Whale Side – Two appeared first on The Whale Sanctuary Project | Back to Nature.

“They Guided Us Through the Fog.”

Killer whales in British Columbia. Credit: Carl Safina

“When you lock eyes with them,” Ken Balcomb says, “you get the sense that they’re looking at you. It’s a steady gaze. And you feel it. Much more powerful than a dog looking at you. A dog might want your attention. The whales, it’s a different feeling. It’s more like they’re searching inside you. There’s a personal relationship that they set up with eye contact. A lot transmits in a very brief time about the intent of both sides. I’ve sometimes come away with a real ‘Wow!’ feeling. Like I’d just seen something above and beyond.”

Like what?

“In those looks I’ve felt,” he hesitates to say, “appreciated. But of course,” the scientist quickly adds, “that’s subjective.”

Appreciated?

Ken started the research that became the Center for Whale Research, his life’s work, way back in the 1970s. It was right after the courts ordered SeaWorld to stop catching baby killer whales.

“Within a year or so,” Ken says, “If someone in another boat started chasing the whales each time they surfaced, or began aggressively circling them, they would often come over and just stay around our boat. The whales understood that we weren’t going to be involved in high-speed chases. We weren’t going to be shooting any darts and tags. They saw,” says Ken, “that we were cool around them. Which implies, y’know, a consciousness of what’s going on.”

Could that consciousness encompass a sense of Ken’s good will? After everything they’d been through with the captures, could they have appreciated Ken? Enough to return a favor?

“As far as I can tell, they were guiding us. It was very touching.”

Ken has stories like this one: “For days we’d been following all three pods. They’d come in the Strait of Juan de Fuca, up the west side of San Juan Island, through Boundary Pass to the Fraser River, gone back down to Rosario, into Puget Sound, around Vashon Island, then back up here. One morning they were headed into a dense fog bank. We followed them. This was in the 1970s. No GPS or anything, just a compass.

We got lost down near the entrance to Admiralty Inlet; socked-in fog, about 25 miles from home. I knew the approximate compass bearing. We put away all the cameras and prepared to run. I started to head along that compass bearing at about 15 knots. We’d only gone for about 5 minutes when whales just came porpoising in from all directions until they were right in front of the boat. So I just slowed down and followed wherever they went. I had about half a dozen of them right in front of our bow at all times.”

Ken followed them 15 miles. When the fog opened, he could see his home island up ahead. “Well,” he says, “I do have the feeling that they knew absolutely that we had zero visibility. They knew exactly where they were. It was the year after the captures ended. They’d seen lots of boats and been subject to a lot of aggressive behavior. But there they were, and as far as I can tell, they were guiding us. It was very touching.”

Next – Page Two: It gets more touching. And much stranger.

All posts in this series are excerpted from Beyond Words; What Animals Think and Feel by Carl Safina. 

The post Tales from the Whale Side – One appeared first on The Whale Sanctuary Project | Back to Nature.

An interview with Charles Vinick, Executive Director of the Whale Sanctuary Project

In this video, Charles Vinick, our Executive Director, talks about how attitudes are changing toward keeping whales and dolphins in captivity.

Charles brings a wealth of experience to the Whale Sanctuary Project. He worked closely with Jean-Michel and Jacques Cousteau; he served as director of the Keiko Project to reintroduce to the wild the captive orca who was made famous through the Free Willy films; and he has extensive experience in ocean and environmental policy. (You can read more about him here.)

Charles addresses the charge, often voiced by marine parks, that whales and dolphins won’t be able to get the same standard of health care at a sanctuary that they receive in their concrete tanks:

“Why wouldn’t they be able to have the same level of care that they receive in a marine park while receiving it in a natural environment where their sounds aren’t reverberating back to them as they ricochet off the concrete walls, but rather are absorbed into nature?”

So, will they receive absolutely the best care possible?

“Of course. They’ll be under human care 24/7/365 for all of their lives.”

As to whether the Whale Sanctuary Project might ever partner with one of the marine park companies to care for the animals at a seaside sanctuary, he says “Absolutely, yes.”

“There could be nothing better than for the parks who hold orca and belugas now to decide that they want to create true sanctuaries and move all of their animals from concrete tanks to netted enclosures in habitats that are natural. We would applaud them, we would welcome them to work together, and we have already reached out to many of them.”

“The people who work at marine parks want what’s best for the whales. But they’re conflicted by the need for commercial gain.”

Charles talks about Corky and Lolita – the only two orcas captured from the Pacific Northwest who are still alive at marine parks in the United States – and whether they could be released back to the wild.

It’s certainly a possibility since we know the whereabouts of both of their families, but he notes that Corky and Lolita are quite old and have been in captivity for more than 49 years. So we need to consider what is best for their health first, and evaluate whether potential release into the wild is in their best interests.

He also talks about his experience as director of the Keiko Project: building the infrastructure, keeping the team together over many years of hard work, and creating a suitable environment for Keiko in a natural habitat before he was able to swim freely in the ocean:

“All of that is applicable to what we’ll do going forward. It is, of course, 20 years later, so, along with that prior experience, we’ll have the benefit of the best advice and knowledge and experience we can bring to bear on the new sanctuary.”

Finally, he talks about how he sees the captivity industry changing over the coming years:

“I think that the people who work at the marine parks sincerely love these animals, they care about them deeply, and they also want what’s best for them. But they are conflicted by the need for commercial gain.”

Change is already happening, however. One example of this is that the National Aquarium at Baltimore is creating a warm-water sanctuary in Florida or the Bahamas, and will be moving all their dolphins there.

“That’s terrific news that we should all applaud. That’s what we want to see other institutions doing, as well. And I believe we’ll continue to see that as the industry responds to public pressure and to how our relationship to these animals is changing.”

The video is also available on YouTube here.

The post Caring for Orcas at a Sanctuary appeared first on The Whale Sanctuary Project | Back to Nature.

So, Catherine Kinsman, an expert in whale and dolphin behavior, was given approval from the Canadian government to watch over Wilma and other orphan belugas, and to research and minimize the dangers they were facing. Michael Mountain talked with her about her work with Wilma and other solitary belugas.

Michael Mountain: Tell us about Wilma.

Catherine Kinsman: Wilma was an orphan beluga whale who had been in the bay trying to make friends with fishermen and tourist boats for five years. And for all kinds of reasons, this really wasn’t a great situation. It was bad enough that she’d been injured several times by the propellers on the boats. But the other thing was that the whole nature of the relationship did not serve her psychological and emotional well-being, either.

MM: You mean how she was interacting with the people.

CK: Yes, belugas are highly social and cultural beings. There can be hundreds of them in their big extended families, and just like human children, they learn from their mothers and other pod mates how to communicate with each other and with their families and how to live as a beluga.

MM: And so, what Wilma was learning was how to live among a group of boats instead of belugas.

CK: Exactly. We would see people exploiting the deep need these animals have for social interaction and for acoustic stimulation. As solitary orphans, they’re missing all the sounds of their families and all the socialization and communication with other beluga whales. And they find themselves in the relative silence of the waters. They are very chatty animals, and in their families there can be constant chatter. And with their big brains that are designed for communication, taking in acoustic information and making sense of it, and then interacting with their environment, they begin to seek out anything that will fill that emptiness – that void.

Wilma was injured by being attracted to the sound of propellers.

Alone in the ocean, Wilma had no beluga friends whistling or responding to her calls, and so she gravitated to the sound of boats and propellers and people calling out to her. The trouble was that some people were exploiting her needs by using their boat motors to attract her. Solitary beluga whales like her will come right up to the boat motors and place their rostrums – their noses – just within inches of a propeller. And then they’ll follow the boat, so obviously if there’s any abrupt change in direction or speed, the whale can get injured.

Since I started working with these solitary whales, back in 1998, there have been at least 25 individual belugas who have become stray for whatever reason and are separated far from their natal group.

MM: What other problems were you seeing?

CK: People often misunderstood her behavior. They got in the water to swim with her, even trying to ride her. And they were offering her food.

Alone in the ocean, she gravitated to the sound of boats and propellers and people calling out to her.

But one thing we learned was that Wilma wasn’t the slightest bit interested in the food. What she wanted was the interaction and companionship – like she’d have had with her family. She wanted the eye contact and the physical contact. She liked being touched, and even let people put their hands in her mouth. And people took advantage of this and actually started to alter her behavior.

These are free-ranging wild animals, but the human activity they encountered was confusingly chaotic and inconsistent, often creating frustration for the whale. Too often, well-intentioned but misinformed people treated orphan belugas with the same kind of circus mindset that you see in captivity, which is totally inappropriate for wild whales. Instead of what these belugas would be learning from their real families, they learned behaviors in response to these surrogate human families.

Tourists were jumping in the water to swim with belugas like Lenni.

We met people who would be talking about them in trainer-speak and behaving that way as well. They’d been trying to control the whales and manipulate their behavior for their own entertainment. Wilma was inundated by thousands of tourists. She was just this one little whale out there by herself with people vying for her attention. Another sad thing was that people would think Wilma was playing when sometimes she was really warning them she wasn’t pleased with what was happening.

The years she spent in close contact with people had another unusual effect. She seemed to be mimicking the sounds of the boats. She was making two vocalizations that sounded like propellers: first the “vroom” of a motor, and then the high-pitched hydraulic whine of an engine being lifted out of the water or being lowered into it. And then there were so many people, especially children, calling out “Wilma” in a sing-song voice that she appeared to develop a vocalization that was like the vowel sounds of “Wilma” – a kind of “iii-aaa.”

MM: How do these orphans get separated from their families in the first place?

CK: We don’t know the exact reasons, but it’s usually when they’re two years old or less and still very much in their development stages. Maybe they were traveling with their mother or another adult in winter when they need to move further out to find food. And then through the movement of ice, they can get separated and they’re too far away to travel under the ice to the next breathing space.

People would think Wilma was playing when sometimes she actually was warning them she wasn’t pleased with what was happening.

Another possibility could be the noise of ships. The youngsters might get out of acoustic range because there’s a curtain of sound from the ships between them and the adults. And then maybe they find themselves on the other side of a peninsula and then they’re completely out of range. They travel in the wrong direction and aren’t experienced enough yet to know their way home.

MM: How many of these orphans have you been involved with?

CK: We and other researchers have documented 25 individuals who became sociable and all of them were young, which is a consistent trend. The solitary belugas we used to see were almost always adults, who would know how to get home. The mature whales don’t tend to approach boats so much, but nearly all the lost juveniles that are reported develop some degree of attraction to human activity.

MM: Is Wilma still around?

CK: No. When we came back after one winter, she was no longer there. During the winter, there’s far less boat activity, and belugas have to spend more time foraging. So, typically in the winter months they are less sociable and we often lose track of them for a few months. And one year when we lost track of her, we never saw her again. It was the same with several of the others.

MM: How would you recognize her?

CK: Unfortunately, it’s mostly from the scars from their injuries. Some organizations are doing biopsies, and we’ve occasionally helped them with that. But we don’t know where Wilma is now. We would of course like to think she found her own family, but even though she bears some unmistakable scars, she has not been seen.

She was the first orphan in that whole area, and we thought, when she disappeared, that this kind of thing wouldn’t happen again – at least not for several years. But every year since then there have been between one and four orphan belugas on the east coast of Canada.

MM: Have any of them been able to connect again with their own family?

CK: Last year there was a pair of very young belugas, two-year-olds, who’d gone astray togethet and had become sociable with people and were following boats, including a ferry boat. But they eventually disappeared from where the St. Lawrence researchers were observing them, and one of them was seen a few weeks later back in the company of a normal pod of females and juveniles. That was very exciting for us.

MM: There are people in the captivity industry who might say that orphan belugas would be safer in captivity and that they’d have a better chance there.

CK: A better chance at what? The Georgia Aquarium is* (see note at bottom) looking to bring in 18 healthy, wild-caught beluga whales. The likelihood of them living and breeding successfully and contributing to a wild population is a plan that is just full of holes. By their own admission, long-term captive breeding of belugas is a failed experiment.

Every one of them is a conscious, aware individual, worthy of respect.

In any case, I have a lot of trouble accepting the captivity industry has or will contribute in a meaningful way, to actual conservation. Has there been one beluga whale returned to the wild? They’ve spent years preparing for this capture and more than $2 million. Imagine if that kind of money were to be spent on research efforts to learn from and support the survival and thriving of solitary belugas who are wild and healthy but simply out of their normal range. Imagine the inroads we could make into conservation, supporting the lives of free-roaming populations in the wild.

It’s really time for us to move into a new paradigm in our relationship with wildlife, including solitary beluga whales. We should be letting go of what doesn’t work and exploring what we’re actually being shown by these whales in terms of their intelligence, sociability and what they need and what we can learn from them in the wild so we can support them there.

MM: What have you learned the most from your work in the ocean?

CK: I’ve learned to have some humility in the presence of these amazing animals. I don’t know everything about them, and there’s so much we humans don’t know. We make far too many assumptions. What I do understand is that the whales have shown me that every one of them is a conscious, aware individual, worthy of respect. We need to start looking at every animal who exists with that level of appreciation for what they’re contributing to the world as a whole.

Catherine Kinsman is the Director of the Whale Stewardship Project and the producer of the award-winning documentary “Where Whales and Humans Meet.”

* Note: This interview was conducted in 2012, when the Georgia Aquarium was seeking a permit to import beluga whales who had been captured off the coast of Russia.

Photo at top by A.Lyskin – IFAW.

The post When Belugas Learn to Say “Vrooom” appeared first on The Whale Sanctuary Project | Back to Nature.

Lori Marino, President of the Whale Sanctuary Project, is a neuroscientist who specializes in the cognitive abilities of whales and dolphins, elephants, primates and other animals. Michael Mountain talked with her about belugas.

Michael Mountain: We’ve heard scientists talking about belugas as the canaries of the cetacean world.

Dr. Lori Marino: They’re always chatting, and they’re always singing. They make beautiful sounds, and they’re very sophisticated when it comes to their communication channels among one another. They have this incredibly sophisticated, sound-producing communication system.

You can compare them to other marine mammals in this video:

MM: What makes them so chatty and chirpy?

LM: Most likely it has something to do with the fact that they have such busy social lives in their large groups. They mainly live in areas where there’s pack ice and where one or more of the group can sometimes get trapped. So, they’d need to be able to communicate with each other about all the features of the ice that they’re dealing with.

The fact is we know very little about their whole communication system, but it seems to be very elaborate.

MM: How smart is a beluga?

LM: Very smart. When I studied the brain of a beluga whale who had died of natural causes, I found that the brain is just as complex as other cetacean brains. They have a highly convoluted neocortex – the part of the brain that’s involved in the brain’s higher cognitive functions. It’s an evolutionarily recent part of the brain. It’s what you see when you look at the outside of the brain – that whole outer wrinkly layer. If you were to unfold it, it would be a long thin sheet. The more folds there are, the more surface area there is for the brain to work with.

One way we measure the intelligence of animals is by the ratio of their brain size to their body size. We call that the EQ or encephalization quotient. The EQ of a beluga is roughly 2.5, which means that their brain is two and a half times as big as is normal for an animal of their body size. It’s about the same as you find with a chimpanzee. Bottlenose dolphins have an EQ above 3 but belugas are quite large, so that doesn’t necessarily reflect how elaborated the brain is. Overall, they just have very large brains for their body size.

MM: What else is distinguishing about them?

LM: As well as being intelligent, they have a very sweet nature. That’s probably because they’re so social and they have to look out for each other. They’re not top predators like orcas. They’re more laid back. They’re very alert and playful, but they’re not as “zippy” as dolphins. Dolphins are kind of over-the-top. Belugas are thoughtful. They have a good attention span and they’re very engaging.

“They’re very alert and playful, but they’re not as “zippy” as dolphins. Dolphins are kind of over-the-top. Belugas are thoughtful.”

MM: All of which makes them prime targets for the captivity industry.

LM: Yes. When they’re in marine parks and aquariums, they come up to the underwater windows and are interested in what’s on the other side of the glass. And their faces are so full of expression that people become mesmerized by them. Belugas can captivate people in a unique way. But this is very unfortunate because it’s how they evolved to be able to communicate with each other in the wild, not with humans when they’re in captivity.

MM: There’s an orphan beluga off the coast of Nova Scotia, whom people called Wilma and who’d learned to mimic the sounds of boat propellers and people calling out her name.

LM: Whales can’t do consonants, but they understand rhythm and emphasis and cadence. So, if I say “Wi-i-lma-a-a” in a sing-song voice, she’s going to come back with “iii-aaa” in a sing-song voice. They’ll mimic every element of the sound except the consonants.

There’s another well-known example from the New York Aquarium on Coney Island. The belugas there were held in a tank that was very close to the elevated subway. And some of them would make the sounds of the elevated train.

MM: Why do they do that?

LM: It’s play, it’s something interesting, it’s part of their way of communicating and engaging with their environment. It’s no different really from what humans do – how we learn language. They’re vocal learners, just like humans. When they’re learning to communicate within their own species, they use mimicry. Dolphins go through a period of babbling, just like human babies, so I wouldn’t be surprised if belugas do that too.

MM: What else do we know about them?

LM: The important thing is that there’s an awful lot we don’t know about them. So, when you take animals we just don’t know and put them in an unnatural setting, that puts them at the mercy of everything we do to them. At least with lions or giraffes, we know quite a lot about them from seeing them in the wild. But with belugas we know practically nothing.

Just for starters, the captivity industry is always trying to breed more belugas for their collections, but it doesn’t have a clue how to keep the babies alive. I saw photos of a baby who’d been born at the Georgia Aquarium, and the staff there had all just jumped in the tank, about a dozen of them. I’m convinced that that was a huge mistake. They wanted to help but it’s all so artificial. The mother was probably freaking out. And the baby died a few days later.

MM: And there was the baby at Marineland who was killed by two adult males.

LM: That’s another case of the people not knowing what they’re doing. I mean you just don’t put two males in with a baby. You don’t do that with any species. Young males are rough, they want to assert themselves, and babies are vulnerable and the mother couldn’t protect her.

In the wild that would never happen. The babies would be embedded in a social network with mothers, aunts, sisters, all watching out for her. But in this situation, you have two males who are already very frustrated because they’re in a tank with lots of pent-up energy, and suddenly they have the ability to take it out on this little baby, and it’s obvious what’s going to happen.

MM: You wouldn’t put a bunch of angry unsocialized boys in a room with an infant human, either.

LM: Exactly. And the same thing would happen with elephants, chimpanzees, so many.

MM: Why would people do something that’s so obviously wrong?

LM: They really don’t know anything about the animals they’re keeping, and they don’t bother to learn anything about them in the wild. And they have this attitude that they’re all interchangeable, and they have no appreciation of their social relationships. It’s a profound lack of interest in who these animals really are and what they need in order to thrive.

Photo in header by Sue Flood – WWF

The post Smart, Chatty and Chirpy – and That’s Their Problem appeared first on The Whale Sanctuary Project | Back to Nature.

Samantha Berg worked with the belugas at SeaWorld in the 1990s. Today, she is an outspoken critic of the captivity industry and a frequent expert guest on radio and TV shows.

Whale Sanctuary Project: You worked at SeaWorld Orlando for three-and-a-half years, and much of that time was with belugas.

Samantha Berg: Yes, I was there from 1990 to 1993, and about half of that was working with the belugas. They are very gentle, very playful. They were my favorite animals. I thought of them as big Pillsbury Dough Boys.

My favorite was Shadow. I didn’t know until later that he’d been captured from his family in July 1987, less than three years before I started working with him. And he died after just 11 years in captivity. He lived a mere fraction of the time he could have lived in the wild.

WSP: How long do they live in the wild?

SB: In the wild they routinely make it into their 60s or older. Most captive belugas barely live half that. SeaWorld and the other aquariums and sea circuses try to breed them in captivity, but it’s rare for their offspring to survive.

All four of the belugas I worked with in the early 90s – Shadow, Spooky, AJ and Bandit – are dead now. Spooky gave birth to one stillborn calf and Bandit’s calf lived less than four years.

WSP: What’s it like for them at a place like SeaWorld or the Georgia Aquarium?

SB: Like all the other animals, belugas’ lives are severely deprived in captivity. They have a tiny fraction of the space they’d be used to in the wild; they have to eat dead fish which is limited in nutrients; and they have to perform as many as seven shows per day.

And because they’re so gentle, they’re very popular for guest interactions where you can “meet a beluga.” They’re often used for swim programs, too, and it’s highly stressful for them to have all those people getting in the water with them. They can’t get away if they don’t want the contact.

I didn’t realize how bad it was until years after I’d left SeaWorld. So, all my memories now of working with Shadow are bittersweet. In this photo, I’m leaning over to kiss him on his melon – that’s the top of his head, which all kinds of whales use for their echolocation. That photo used to make me smile, but now it just makes me sad.

“When they’d swim by you, you’d feel this overall buzzy feeling all over your body. It’s like they’re sorting out what you look like. It’s unique to belugas.”
WSP: What was it like being in the water with belugas?

SB: We used to call them buzzers, because you could actually feel the sensation of the belugas echolocating on you underwater. When they’d swim by you, you’d feel this overall buzzy feeling all over your body. It’s like they’re sorting out what you look like. It’s unique to belugas and quite a different experience from being in the water with other whales and dolphins.

WSP: Why so different?

SB: I don’t know exactly. But they’re arctic and sub-arctic animals, and they have this pretty amazing ability to find pockets of air under the sea ice using their powerful echolocation abilities. In an area that’s 96 percent covered in ice, they can find that one place where they can come up and take a breath.

WSP: You live in Alaska now, so you see them in the wild.

SB: I’ve seen pods of wild belugas in the Cook Inlet and in the Turnagain Arm just south of Anchorage. The Cook Inlet belugas are in decline. In 1970 there were about 1,300 whales there. Today there are only 280. The Cook Inlet belugas are a threatened species under the protection of the Endangered Species Act.

WSP: When did you become more aware of the plight of these animals in captivity?

SB: When I was working at SeaWorld, I saw a lot of things that I questioned. But it wasn’t until almost 18 years after I’d left that I really began to understand it all. It was when Dawn Brancheau was killed by Tilikum the orca.

Dawn had had 16 years of experience, and I realized at that moment that what happened to her could have happened to any of us. My first wake-up call was seeing what this was doing to the trainers. I saw that SeaWorld had lied to the public about Dawn, saying at first that she fell in the water. And only then did I really start thinking about the animals.

When I was still working there, I never even thought about how the animals had come to be there in the first place. I somehow thought that Shadow, for example, had always been there at SeaWorld. But now I started to realize that less than three years before I’d started working with him, he’d been swimming in the wild.

And it sounds strange, but I’d never really known that belugas don’t do well in captivity. I was always told they do really well.

“People are afraid that if they say something they’re going to lose their job.”
There’s this thing we talk about called cognitive dissonance. You see a lot of things that are disturbing to you, but you don’t talk about it and you try not to think about it because you still think you have the greatest job in the world and you want to keep doing it.

I’d seen bad things. I’d seen a dolphin starve to death because she had a behavioral problem and I was very upset by that, but I managed to put it out of my mind. And I’d seen a false killer whale die a horrible death. And I didn’t know that all the false killer whales came from the drive fisheries like the Taiji massacre in Japan. I didn’t even know what a drive hunt was. I was 22 years old when I got hired. I was busy making sure that I did my job well and that supervisors liked me. I was a good employee and I followed the rules so that I could do what I wanted to do, which was swim with the whales. And we all knew that we were expendable and that there were plenty of other people ready and eager to take our job at any time.

And for someone who’s been there a long time, they have a secure job and probably a mortgage to pay, and it’s not worth it to them to start making trouble. So, if you don’t want to talk about it, it’s best not even to think about it. People are afraid that if they say something they’re going to lose their job.

You know, it’s still hard for me, 20 years later, to use the word “trick” to describe the things the whales are taught to do. We were trained to use the word “behavior.” Or to call it a sea circus, which is what it is, rather than a “marine park,” which is the word these places all use.

It’s like brainwashing. I know this is silly, but the first time I spoke out, after Dawn had been killed, was when I went on Fox News, and I was really nervous. I was afraid I might get sued, or even that a van from SeaWorld would come to pick me up and whisk me away!

WSP: Some people say that these marine parks and aquariums are a good way of teaching people about conservation. Like you see the whales close up and have a real experience of them.

“It’s just a tank with glass and concrete walls and a painted-blue bottom, and that’s all. It’s just flat and bland. I mean there’s nothing. Nothing.”
SB: It’s not a real experience. In the wild, these animals can swim 60 or 70 miles a day. Belugas live in pods of hundreds, even up to a thousand at breeding times. They’re incredibly social animals, so when there are only four of them together they must be incredibly lonely.

And a tank is so stark, so utterly different from anything an animal would be familiar with in the wild. They’ve got to be bored out of their minds.

And there’s no way even to have the kind of enrichment programs you do for land animals in some of the bigger zoos – like having a habitat that looks a bit like the wild. For the belugas and dolphins and orcas, it’s just a tank with glass and concrete walls and a painted-blue bottom, and that’s all. It’s just flat and bland. I mean there’s nothing. Nothing.

And then there’s the booming music. These animals use sound to navigate their world and to understand their environment. And here you have music and people banging on the glass windows or just the fact that in these small enclosures, sound is just going to bounce off the walls of the tank. It’s like if you were living in a small room that’s just made of mirrors.

They don’t ever get any peace, even if there isn’t a show going on. It’s a completely alien environment.

Unless the people who come to these shows are being told this, they’re not being educated. They’re just getting lies and propaganda.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A certified acupuncturist, Samantha Berg runs the Alaska Center for Acupuncture with her husband, Kevin Meddleton.

Coming Next: Visiting with Belugas in the Wild.

The post My Life with the Belugas appeared first on The Whale Sanctuary Project | Back to Nature.

One day in 1861, 11-year-old Sarah Putnam wrote in her diary:

“I went again to the Aquarial Gardens and there we saw the Whale being driven by a girl. She was in a boat and the Whale was fastened to the boat by a pair of rains [sic], and a collar, which was fastened round his neck. The men had to chase him before they could put on the collar.” (the Massachusetts Historical Society)

What Sarah had seen that day was one of the first beluga whales to be captured and put on display in the United States.

Drawing of a performance at the Aquarial Gardens, 1861.

For several years, entrepreneurs and adventurers, including the infamous P.T. Barnum, had been scrambling to be the first to exhibit whales. Sarah had seen this beluga at the Boston Aquarial Gardens, which had opened in 1859. William E. Damon’s 1879 book Ocean Wonders: A Companion for the Seaside describes the same thing:

The first [whale] ever captured for such a purpose was secured by Prof. H. D. Butler, who brought it in perfect health to Boston, Massachusetts, where it was kept in an immense glass reservoir.

… It continued in good condition for more than a year, and became so perfectly acclimated to its new home that it actually showed some signs of intelligence. There was a nautilus shaped boat made, to which he was occasionally tackled and taught to draw. I fancy he was not very fond of being treated like a draught-horse; for when we wanted him to “hold up” to be harnessed, he just put on speed and went all the faster around his glass-walled circle.

He would, however, sometimes condescend to take a live herring or a squirming eel from my hand, and then, turning on one side, sail around and look for more of the same sort; and in other ways he would show that he was really becoming an intelligent Americanized citizen.

If the whale Damon wrote about really survived a year, that would have been a major success for the industry. Some of the belugas didn’t even survive a few hours. This one would probably have lived a few weeks or months, and would have been replaced by another, probably several others, as the year went on.

P.T. Barnum exhibited the first two belugas he’d captured in Boston 1861, and then drove them to the American Museum in New York where they died a day or two later. Barnum didn’t need to worry about the belugas dying; after all, there were thousands more to be found where these had come from in the St. Lawrence Seaway. He wrote:

Even in this brief period, thousands availed themselves of the opportunity of witnessing this rare sight. Since August I have brought two more whales to New-York, at an enormous expense, but both died before I could get them into the Museum.

A fifth living whale has now arrived here, and will remain in the Museum as long as he lives. Perhaps this will be but a few hours, but in order to prolong his life as long as possible, I have, at an expense of $7,000, laid a six-inch cast-iron pipe from the river to the Museum, through Fulton-street and Broadway, and by means of a powerful steam-engine working night and day, the whale is constantly supplied with pure salt water at the rate of three hundred gallons per minute.

This whale (some fifteen feet long) is undoubtedly the greatest “blower” in New York. I leave this monster leviathan to do his own “spouting,” not doubting that the public will embrace the earliest moment (before it is forever too late) to witness the most novel and extraordinary exhibition ever offered them in this City.

Over the next four years, at least nine whales were displayed at the museum. None of them survived long, and in 1865 the two remaining belugas died when the entire museum went up in flames.

More aquariums were now springing up, along with businesses that made their money by keeping belugas in holding areas in Canada so they could be quickly shipped down to the new marine zoos whenever one who was on display died.

In Appleton’s Popular Science Monthly (July 1899), Fred Mather writes about belugas at the Coney Island aquarium that he managed:

The management would keep whales penned up in the St. Lawrence River to replace those which died, and would never show more than two at a time, claiming that they were rare animals and only to be had at an “enormous expense.”

… It would never do to have the public know that they were common in the St. Lawrence in the summer, and when one was getting weak, another would be sent down, and the public supposed the same pair was on exhibition all the time.

Of one of the belugas who had died less than a month after arriving, Mather wrote that he sounded hoarse and had a kind of cough, and that his female companion “slackened her pace day by day to accommodate it to that of her constantly weakening companion, and as the end neared she put her broad traverse tail under his and propelled him along.” As soon as he died, his companion was sent across the Atlantic to the Royal Aquarium in London, where she died four days later.

A few years later, in June 1903, a beluga was taken captive off the northeast coast of England was taken captive after who having been caught in the nets of fishermen. The 14-foot whale put up quite a fight, towing two boats four miles out to sea before succumbing to exhaustion. Back on shore, the dead beluga was purchased by two people, who, in turn donated the skeleton to the Hancock museum in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, but not before taking this photo of the dead beluga whale on a large metal-wheeled trolley with his head propped up on an upturned crate and his tail on a barrel.

Photo courtesy of @nee_naturalist, @gnm_hancock.

By this time, however, at the turn of the century, many of the aquariums were closing. Barnum and several of his competitors had died, and the novelty of seeing belugas in a tank was waning. And then came the Great Depression and the war years.

But in the late 1950s, the beluga industry began to pick up again. This time, Alaska became the favored place to capture belugas from their families, and in June 1958 two belugas, Louey and Bertha, were captured off the Alaska coast and put on a plane to New York. They died on the plane about an hour before landing.

But the captivity industry persisted, and a new generation of marine zoos and circuses, including SeaWorld and the Georgia, Shedd and Mystic aquariums in the United States, and Marineland and the Vancouver Aquarium in Canada, found more successful ways to capture belugas, ship them to their display tanks, and keep them alive longer than P.T. Barnum had been able.

Regardless of the industry’s new techniques, however, today’s aquariums and marine parks continue to have serious problems keeping belugas alive and healthy. While a beluga in the wild can expect to live up to 60 years or more, few adults in captivity live beyond the age of 25, and baby belugas born in captivity often don’t survive beyond a few months.

– – – – – – – – –

For more history:

• Barnum’s Whales: The Showman and the Forging of Modern Animal Captivity an article by Amanda Bosworth that adds much fascinating detail to this post
• Captive Belugas: A Historical Record & Inventory, published by CETA Base, an online database of captive marine mammals.
• The Forgotten Aquariums of Boston by Jerry Ryan. Available free here as a pdf.

The post How the Beluga Business Began appeared first on The Whale Sanctuary Project | Back to Nature.

The plan was to keep some of the whales for themselves and distribute the rest among various other marine parks and aquariums in the U.S. With only 31 belugas (also known as white whales) still alive in captivity in the U.S. at that time, the display facilities were anxious to replenish their stocks of these gentle creatures.

Animal protection groups were equally anxious to stop them.

The Georgia Aquarium had arranged to have the whales captured from the Sea of Okhotsk on Russia’s west coast, and have them shipped to the Utrish Marine Mammal Research Station, four thousand miles away, on the Russian Black Sea coast. While the belugas were being held there, the aquarium would seek a permit to bring them to the United States.

Beluga whales are sweet-natured mammals. They also look cute, largely because of their widely spaced eyes and the bump on their forehead.

Thanks to the efforts of the animal protection community and the testimony of scientists, the permit was eventually denied. But while this was certainly good news in that it closed one door to importing whales for display, for the belugas themselves, once they’d been captured, there was never going to be a good outcome. Their actual fate was never made public, but most likely the contractors who had procured them for the Georgia Aquarium ended up selling the ones who didn’t die at the research station to marine circuses in China or some other country.

Beluga whales are sweet-natured mammals. They also look cute, largely because of their widely spaced eyes and the bump on their forehead, known as the melon, a bioacoustic “lens” that helps them to focus the sounds they use in echolocation.

Their natural homes are the oceans of the Arctic and sub-Arctic, where they travel in extended families of hundreds, sometimes up to a thousand. Much of the time, these travels take place under the ice. (Their amazing echolocation enables them to locate pockets of air and holes in the ice so they can come to the surface to breathe.)

Although there are beluga populations in U.S. waters, from whom aquariums and marine parks could theoretically capture individuals, many of these populations are now listed as endangered and are therefore protected from capture. Regardless, the captivity industry is leery of a potential public relations nightmare if people were to see video of these gentle creatures being wrestled from their families. As you can see, it’s not a pretty picture:

Better, then, as the captivity industry concluded in 2012, to get them from some faraway land where regulations and media interest are largely nonexistent.

Today, there are 28 belugas still on display in concrete tanks at aquariums and marine parks in the United States. And since the door is still closed to importing more, these facilities have been doing all they can to breed the belugas they still have. The results have been mixed. Infant mortality rate is high, largely due to the stress and inexperience of beluga mothers. (In the wild, newborns are surrounded by their families, and aunts and grandmothers play an active role in raising the young.)

But while belugas are in short supply at U.S. aquariums, their tanks can barely contain them in Canada. Marineland has 52 belugas, many of whom were captured in Russia and came through the same channels that the Georgia Aquarium was pursuing. Many are in declining health and there have been many deaths.

(Header photo: Delphinapterus_leucas_Bubble_Ring By Pagemoral – Wikimedia commons)

The post Beluga Whales – Cute, Curvy and Exploited appeared first on The Whale Sanctuary Project | Back to Nature.

What’s the difference between a sanctuary and a zoo?

In this short video, excerpted from a talk she gave in Atlanta about the Whale Sanctuary Project, Dr. Lori Marino, President of the Whale Sanctuary Project, defines a sanctuary as “a place of refuge” and highlights two key differences between sanctuaries and zoos.

Sanctuaries exist primarily for the benefit of the animals who live there, while zoos exist primarily for the entertainment of the people who visit them.

And sanctuaries never engage in captive breeding, since the last thing they want is to add to the number of animals in captivity.

Dr. Marino highlights the work of the Performing Animal Welfare Society as a model sanctuary for animals who have retired from captivity in zoos and circuses.

The post What Is a Sanctuary? appeared first on The Whale Sanctuary Project | Back to Nature.

Rather than fulfilling the “rehabilitation and release” part of the permit, the dolphinarium named her Morgan and put her on public display just weeks after her rescue.

Working with experts from around the world, a coalition of Dutch non-profit groups formed the Free Morgan Group and put together a plan to gradually reintroduce her back into the ocean.

They located an ideal situation for Morgan: a cove in the Norwegian fishing village of Stø. “I am very positive about Morgan coming to our community,” the Mayor of Stø said. “I will personally look forward to helping on her road to freedom.”

And villagers expressed delight about hosting Morgan and helping to provide for her.

The sea pen in Norway that was offered by the Mayor of Stø and the Free Morgan Support Group.

The cove would have a net across its opening to the ocean, and there was a good possibility that Morgan’s family would pass by there, enabling her to communicate with her pod. As part of her rehab, she would be electronically tagged and trained to follow a boat and to return to the boat when called so that she could get used to being in the open sea again. And if she linked up with her own pod or another, her caregivers would leave her to go with the pod while continuing to monitor her movements.

Meanwhile, the captivity industry had other plans for Morgan, pressing for her to go to Loro Parque, a Spanish amusement park in the Canary Islands. Loro Parque had four other orcas and was associated with SeaWorld. They argued that Loro Parque was best equipped to give her the care she needs. The Free Morgan Group argued that once the industry had Morgan their grasp, they would never let her go. Rather, she would simply be kept on permanent display.

At first, things looked good for Morgan. The Amsterdam District Court ruled that she should remain at the Harderwijk Dolphinarium while more research was being conducted to determine a long-term solution. Orca protection groups were delighted.

“This is the first time in history that the export of an orca has been blocked by a judge,” said Wietse van der Werf of the Orca Coalition of Holland. “It exposes the international trade among dolphinariums as a very lucrative industry.”

But two months later, a higher court ruled that Morgan should be taken to Loro Parque.

Hopes had been high that the judge would rule in her favor. For starters, European regulations prohibit the use of orcas for commercial purposes, the only exemptions being for captive breeding for conservation, scientific and educational purposes. And no independent evidence was offered that Loro Parque provides any education beyond a few handouts and posters. Nor did Loro Parque have a conservation program.

The sea pen in Norway that was offered by the Mayor of Stø and the Free Morgan Support Group.

But attorneys for the captivity industry argued that their interest was to give the whale a better chance, as well as for “educational” purposes. Their arguments prevailed, and Morgan was promptly flown to Loro Parque.

Morgan at Loro Parque

So, how’s Morgan doing since she arrived at Loro Parque in November 2011? Officials there say she’s integrated into their orca ‘family’ group. That would be hard at best, since her family is from Norwegian waters and the other whales are not related to her.

But it’s worse than that: Observers have repeated noted that Morgan is being bullied and attacked by the other orcas, who bite and hit her on a regular basis, and she has the scars to show for it. This is not normal orca behavior, and it is unnatural in the wild for males to attack a young female.

She has also been observed banging her head repeatedly into a metal grate.

The park’s owner commented that Morgan has been sent to them as a “donation from nature” and a “new blood line” for breeding. And Loro Parque started putting her into a tank with an adult male at an age, five-to-seven years old, that’s far too young for breeding. (Typically, in the wild, orcas become mothers for the first time at around 14 years of age.)

Perhaps most disturbingly, Morgan has been videoed beaching herself during a performance. In the video, you see her on the far side of the smaller pool. Eventually, one of the trainers coaxes her back into the water (at 9:15), but less than a minute later she beaches again.

It’s reasonable to wonder how often she does this, and why. The visitor who captured the footage comments:

Morgan hauls herself out onto the ledge of the tank. Her skin dries out while she remains in the sun. After being commanded to return to the water, she once again hauls herself out at the same location.

Morgan remains there until the end of the video. Loro Parque has stated on their blog that this type of behavior is “natural,” but anyone can see this is unnatural …

The video presented here clearly shows Morgan out of the water for at least nine minutes, followed by another bout of unknown duration.

There’s more information about Morgan at the Free Morgan Foundation.

The post Morgan: When Rescue Becomes Capture appeared first on The Whale Sanctuary Project | Back to Nature.

Video from the 1999 special “Baby Wild Films Presents: The Killer Whale People.”

People who saw the video on the news were appalled, and the outrage that followed led to the passing of the Marine Mammal Protection Act in 1972, banning the capture of marine mammals in U.S. waters. But SeaWorld continued to get “exemptions” for another four years until the company was caught in yet another scandal after they’d bought orcas who’d been driven into nets by having explosives dropped into the ocean all around them.

(And since SeaWorld and other circuses have agreements with marine entertainment facilities overseas, trading of wild-caught orcas and dolphins never stopped, including from the infamous Taiji massacres in Japan which continue to this day.)

Lolita during one of her performances at the Miami Seaquarium.

One of the orcas captured in that roundup was Lolita, who has been held ever since in a small pool at the Miami Seaquarium. Today, 42 years later, she is still performing tricks for tourists, and her only orca companion is is a plastic blow-up orca doll. Every day, when she’s left alone, she calls out to the family from whom she was taken and who live off the coast of Seattle.

During the 1970 Penn Cove roundup, four orcas drowned in the nets, and diver John Crowe describes how he was in charge of secretly disposing of the dead orcas to avoid them being counted in the “take.”

The man organizing the hunt was Don Goldsberry, whom you can see in the video saying how much he “loves” the animals he captures. In a 2010 article “The Killer in the Pool” in Outside magazine, Tim Zimmerman writes about how Goldsberry and Ted Griffin had started capturing orcas five years earlier, which led to the birth of orca entertainment industry.

In October 1965, Goldsberry and Griffin trapped 15 killer whales in Carr Inlet, near Tacoma. One died during the hunt. Another – a 14-foot female that weighed 2,000 pounds – was captured and named Shamu. In December, a fast-growing marine park in San Diego, called SeaWorld, acquired Shamu and flew her to California. Goldsberry says he and Griffin were paid $70,000. It was the start of a billion-dollar franchise.

Over the next decade, around 300 killer whales were netted off the Pacific Northwest coast, and 51 were sold to marine parks across the globe, in Japan, Australia, the Netherlands, France, and elsewhere. Goldsberry, who became SeaWorld’s lead “collector” until he retired in the late 1980s, caught 252 of them, sold 29, and inadvertently killed nine with his nets.

In August 1970, concerned about backlash, Goldsberry weighted some dead orcas down with anchors and dumped them in deep water. When they were dragged up on a Whidbey Island beach by a trawling fisherman, the public started to understand the sometimes-brutal reality of the “orca gold rush.”

Goldsberry went on to capture two-year-old orca Tilikum from waters off the coast of Iceland in 1983. Tilikum killed three people while in captivity, the last of whom was his trainer, Dawn Brancheau, at SeaWorld Orlando in 2010. Goldsberry died in 2014. Tilikum died in 2017.

The post How the First Orcas Were Captured and Sold to Marine Parks appeared first on The Whale Sanctuary Project | Back to Nature.

Depending on the particular area, the question goes something like:

• “Why are you spending so much money looking after a few dozen elephants/ chimpanzees/ whales when there’s a more urgent need to protect their habitats in the wild?”
• “Why are you spending so much on these chickens/ cows/ pigs when we should be working to shut down the factory farms?”
• “Why are you spending so much to take care of a few hundred dogs and cats when we need that money for spay/neuter programs?”

As if, in each case it’s an either/or.

It isn’t. It’s not a zero-sum game in which the benefit to one group of animals means a loss to another group. Nor an argument over a finite sum of money and where it can result in the greatest apparent benefit. There’s a need for both approaches, and a win for one can be a win for the other.

As regards wildlife, the two approaches can be described as conservation and reparation.

Broadly speaking, conservation is about stopping things from getting worse: like protecting elephants and chimps in their native lands.

Reparation – as in caring for elephants from circuses or chimpanzees from laboratories – is about giving something back to these animals whose lives have been destroyed.

Conservation

Daphne Sheldrick at the David Sheldrick Elephant Orphanage, which combines a sanctuary with a conservation program by caring for orphan elephants and then returning them to their ancestral homes.

At its best, conservation helps protect our fellow animals from some of the worst atrocities that we humans are wreaking upon them.

But conservation is also often described as “management of natural resources.” And this kind of language that’s often used betrays how human-centered it can become.

Living creatures aren’t “resources” that need to be “managed.”

Living creatures aren’t “resources” that need to be “managed.” They don’t exist for human benefit; they exist for their own benefit. And euphemisms like “stewardship” (increasingly popular in the religious community as an alternative to “dominion”) carry the same arrogant belief that the rest of nature exists primarily for our benefit, while tempering this claim with the notion that we should treating the rest of creation “responsibly”.

Worse yet is when this attitude is used as a rationale for institutionalized abuse. Classic examples would be that sport hunting promotes conservation, and that circuses and “Shamu” shows are educational.

By contrast, many of the best conservation organizations now use the term “compassionate conservation” to emphasize that their work is not about, for example, “conservation of fish stocks,” but is about protecting the individuals who make up these populations.

Reparation

Reparation is a somewhat different concept: It’s about giving back to individual animals what’s been taken away, and thus making up, as best we can, for the damage and abuse we’ve inflicted.

One of the best ways of doing that is by providing them with a sanctuary where they can live in an environment that maximizes well-being and autonomy and is as close as possible to their natural habitat.

Lions rescued from circuses in Peru, now at the Emoya Big Cat Sanctuary in South Africa.

Reparation can go hand-in-hand with conservation, like when you restore a damaged wetland in order to conserve a natural ecology and protect its inhabitants. But it begins with the recognition that nature and our fellow animals aren’t “resources” in the first place. As Henry Beston famously wrote:

“They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.”

Reparation is about doing what’s right for the animals themselves. We do it to make up for the wrongs we’ve committed against them; we do it because we can; and we do it regardless of the cost or the inconvenience to ourselves.

If there are additional benefits that serve a wider, perhaps conservation-oriented, purpose, that’s good, too. But the act of giving back is ultimately its own purpose – a true act of altruism.

Giving them their own sanctuary can help to heal the deep wounds we have inflicted upon the fabric of nature itself.

In the case of the Whale Sanctuary Project, we’re talking about animals most of whom were born into captivity and have never even seen beyond the concrete walls and squealing audiences that make up the only world they’ve ever known. They have never experienced the close family relationships that are the bedrock of life in the ocean; never eaten the food that’s natural to them; and never lived the life for which 50 million years of evolution had prepared them.

By any definition and by any standard, keeping these apex predators of the ocean in small, shallow tanks for the amusement of small, shallow people is more than just wrong; it’s a crime against each of them individually, a sin against nature, and a wrong that cannot be righted simply by conservation efforts toward others of their kind, fueled by notions of “better stewardship.”

Rather, it is a gesture, born of the recognition of human error, and an attempt to make up, if only in a small way, for the deep wrong that our own species has committed.

In creating sanctuaries that can make up for some of what went before, we offer the best we can by way of restitution. And even though we can never fully recompense them for what they’ve lost, giving them their own sanctuary can help to heal the deep wounds we have inflicted upon the fabric of nature itself.

(Photo at top courtesy of Farm Sanctuary.)

The post Sanctuaries, Conservation and Reparation appeared first on The Whale Sanctuary Project | Back to Nature.

She explains that opinions and feelings are no longer relevant since the scientific findings are overwhelming that cetaceans cannot thrive in concrete tanks. There is no longer a debate about whether dolphins and whales do well at theme parks and aquariums. The fact is they don’t.

The National Aquarium has realized this, and now it is up to the rest of the industry to do the same.

The post NPR Interview with Dr. Lori Marino appeared first on The Whale Sanctuary Project | Back to Nature.

Right now, the site selection team is poring over satellite maps of Washington State and British Columbia on the West Coast, and Maine, Newfoundland and Nova Scotia on the East Coast. If you look at any map of these coastlines, you’ll see that there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of coves and inlets and bays, any one of which might be the perfect location for a sanctuary.

The geographical and engineering analysis is led by team member Michael Parks, who engineered the building, installation and operation of a sea pen for the orca Keiko prior to his return to the wild in 1998.

Things we have to consider

Good satellite maps don’t just show you the surface of the water; they give you lots of critical information like depth, tidal flows and temperature. We need to know things like:

• Whether the water is deep enough for the new residents to be able to dive comfortably. Killer whales in the wild routinely dive to depths of more than 300 feet. The sanctuary doesn’t need to be that deep, but certainly a lot more than the 35 feet or less that they have at a marine park.
• Winter water temperature. While the residents will be cold-water animals, we need to be sure the water won’t ice over (which would prevent the residents from coming to the surface to breathe).
• What kind of tidal flow there is. It needs to be strong enough to keep the water healthy, but not so strong during a storm that it could break the nets that separate the sanctuary from the open ocean.
• Proximity to human civilization. We need to be reasonably close to human habitation so we’re not having to put in roads and power and other infrastructure from far away. And there needs to be an airport nearby to fly in new arrivals.

And beyond the mapping side of things, there are other considerations like the need to meet all relevant local and governmental rules and regulations.

So we begin with desktop research using a computer platform called Smart Sheets (a kind of souped-up version of Excel), where our marine engineering and data analysis experts gather data from Google Earth and Geographic Information Systems to compile and analyze maps of the hundreds of possible locations.

They’re aiming to have all of the data inputted and weighted for importance by the end of the year, so they can produce a short list of three to five sites. Then, early in 2017, we’ll start the on-the-ground stage of things: visiting each site, putting boats on the water (and maybe planes in the air), doing environmental tests, and meeting with local people and governments to ensure they’re on board and enthusiastic about the project.

Only then are we ready to choose the “winning” site … and to start building the sanctuary itself.

UPDATE: More details on choosing the right place for a sanctuary are in the post Location, Location, Location.

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Whales and dolphins are perfectly adapted to life in the ocean. Orcas, for example, are far-ranging apex-predators, with incredible intelligence and complex emotional lives. The enriching ocean environment provides variability and presents physical and cognitive challenges that promote psychological and physical health. When whales are confined to barren, concrete tanks that are a fraction of the size of their natural range, they are deprived of the ability to engage in their most fundamental behavior needs. Captive orcas cannot dive, hunt, navigate the open ocean, or coordinate and bond with their pod. All of these characteristics are ingrained in their basic biology and are essential for wild orca survival.

In captivity, whales and dolphins are frequently held in isolation or unnatural social groups with unrelated or genetically distinct subspecies. These stressful social circumstances lead to heightened aggression and even deadly attacks. Aggression and social alienation can have serious health consequences for cetaceans, from immune suppression and infectious disease to injury and death. Other aberrant, repetitive behaviors that develop as a result of chronic stress and deprivation are often self-injurious and can have serious health consequences. Thus, the psychological scars of captivity are not only indicative of suffering; they are also deadly.

Despite decades of so-called advances in veterinary and husbandry care for captive cetaceans, evidence demonstrates that we cannot keep these animals happy or healthy in marine parks. This is corroborated by that fact that captive orcas continue to succumb to premature death, often by infectious disease. All evidence suggests that seaside sanctuaries can provide a more spacious, enriching, dynamic environment to promote orca health and wellbeing. The seaside sanctuary model for cetaceans is not only feasible; it is also the only humane option and presents an exciting new opportunity to reform our educational system into one that promotes genuine awe and respect for the natural world.

As a veterinarian, I am acutely aware of the myriad of logistical and animal health challenges that await us on the path to forging a better future for captive cetaceans. The site must be chosen carefully, with considerations for a variety of agricultural, industrial, geographic, oceanographic and anthropogenic conditions to mitigate hazards to animal health and the environment. The site must have physical parameters that meet the unique needs of the resident species, accessibility to facilitate complex logistics and animal care, and be responsibly placed to mitigate the impact on local ecology.

In facing these challenges with optimism and collaboration, however, we have an opportunity to provide daily choice, physical fitness, longevity and enhanced wellbeing to captive whales. Undoubtedly, the psychological scars of captivity will remain and existing health problems will persist. Whales entering the sanctuary environment will require extensive rehabilitation and life-long enrichment, husbandry and veterinary care. Trainers, husbandry staff and veterinarians will be required on an equal, if not more rigorous, basis due to the unique opportunities and challenges of the ocean environment. Thus, the value of collaboration cannot be understated in this endeavor if the ultimate goal is to provide the best for these animals as is humanely possible.

In the interest of the health and wellbeing of the animals for whom we all care so deeply, it is imperative that the marine mammal scientific community collectively work towards a more humane world for captive cetaceans. A carefully managed seaside sanctuary can provide captive whales with the range of opportunities they need to thrive. My hope is that the world will join us in making this vision a reality.

Heather Rally is a wildlife veterinarian and a member of the Whale Sanctuary Project Advisory Board.

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The function of a seaside sanctuary is to provide an environment as natural and safe as possible for the marine animal residents and their caregivers.

In any engineering project, you first have to know what it is that needs engineering and the functions that it’s intended to provide. In the case of a seaside sanctuary, this means a marine mammal coastal containment system that uses large mesh nets as barrier boundaries.

The first, and most important, factor in engineering a seaside sanctuary is site location. This is done in two stages. The first involves compiling as much geographical data as possible to find potential sites that meet certain general criteria used to rule in and rule out various locations. Once we have a short list of potential sites, the next stage involves field surveys at each site in order to gather information about a number of critical environmental factors. The final decision is made after all available information is collected, with each factor weighted for significance and then analyzed altogether.

Here are some of the elements that a sanctuary facility would need to offer:

As much secured space for the residents as possible

• Safety and protection from natural and human-generated hazards
• Specialized areas that provide caregivers and other professionals with access to the residents for health care and feeding
• A food storage processing/wet area
• Staff and scientist housing
• Places for public viewing and education that don’t intrude on the residents
• 24/7 security

The most important aspect of a seaside sanctuary that directly affects how the engineering is done is protection from extreme surface winds, waves and currents. While this is of utmost importance, there is also a need to be near enough to consistent underwater currents so that the environment can be kept clean by natural flushing. Balancing these two factors is an important aspect of the site selection process.

Netting is also one of the first items on the engineering list. Nets are used to make boundary lines and create the enclosure needed. The nets need to be attached at calculated intervals to the sea floor and to the shore surface above the highest expected sea level. The nets have mesh sizes (diamond-shape openings) that affect the amount of force the currents and waves will exert on the net as a marine structure. Determining that force is an important factor required for engineering an adequate-sized stationary barrier net. The net has to be custom built to the profile of the sea floor, transitioning to the intertidal zones, and high tide attachment points. It will be manufactured to fit this custom section and will then be attached all along the seafloor and up each side, using suitable anchoring methods.

Engineers will need to know the type of material to which the anchor/attachments will be attaching. For example, dead weights can be used in mud and hard sand areas, while rock bolts would be drilled into bed rock areas, and concrete/steel posts might be used at intertidal or high tide lines.

The final component of the boundary net is the flotation/buoy line/surface line to hold the net vertical, attach to shore points, and provide a visual boundary for the residents. This buoy line works in harmony with lead lines, in the bottom sections of the net, to hold the net taut.

Another important issue is the relationship between the sanctuary and the land.  The facility will need access to utilities (unless it is fully self-sufficient), transportation and other amenities, all requiring different types of engineering. One way to minimize the impacts of land-based structures would be to use state-of-the-art engineered floating platforms. Floating and movable support platforms could provide solutions to many of the access issues and infrastructure needs of a sanctuary facility.

Finally, any seaside sanctuary facility will need the support of the nearby communities who understand and appreciate the importance and value of such a project.

Michael Parks is a staff consultant to The Whale Sanctuary Project.

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Virtually all of the larger captive cetaceans, particularly those from colder habitats (such as orcas and belugas), are held in concrete tanks, at least in North America. This type of wholly artificial enclosure appears to have significant negative impacts on the animals. For orcas, the impacts are especially overt and obvious: broken and worn teeth, diseases never found in free-ranging counterparts, shorter life spans, and most notably the collapsed dorsal fin seen in all males.

It’s very expensive to build a bigger tank, so ironically these largest of captive cetaceans are kept in comparatively tiny enclosures. And it should be intuitive to realize that these wide-ranging oceanic predators will suffer when confined in such small spaces. Aside from the physical and physiological damage noted above, captive orcas are also abnormal behaviorally and socially, in ways that are harmful to the animals in the long-term.

A seaside sanctuary can be larger – almost all sea pen dolphinarium facilities are much larger than any tanks, and a sanctuary will be larger still. In addition, a seaside sanctuary will be more natural for the cetaceans in them in so many other ways: acoustically, water quality-wise, in terms of other species (plant and animal) sharing the enclosure with them. In a seaside sanctuary, cetaceans will be able to swim in a straight line for some reasonable distance before meeting a barrier. (Even in the largest known tank, an orca can swim only a few body lengths before having to bank and turn along the outer wall of the tank.)

Artist’s rendering of seaside sanctuary as planned by the Whale Sanctuary Project.

They will also be able to dive deeper than in any known tank, which may be among the most important differences for them in a sanctuary. All cetaceans routinely dive below 30 feet in the wild, and most species might dive to more than 200-300 feet a few times a day. Yet no known tank is deeper than 30-35 feet. Given all the special adaptations these species have to allow them to dive so deeply, it should again be intuitive that never being able to dive as deep as they can will have negative impacts on the animals over time.

By their very nature, seaside sanctuaries are going to offer more choices, more challenges, and more stimulation to captive cetaceans. While cetaceans in sanctuaries will continue to be provided care, their human caregivers would, ideally, become less essential to their daily activities, simply because a seaside sanctuary will be more interesting than a barren concrete tank. I think what people often forget when considering the welfare and future of captive cetaceans is that in nature they do not need us. They are supreme in their natural habitat – top predators. We humans damage this independence and competence by confining these oceanic predators in tanks. Seaside sanctuaries cannot return that competence to them in its entirety, but they can give cetaceans an opportunity to regain some independence – or at least give them more control over their daily lives.

If seaside sanctuaries function as intended, eventually they will no longer hold any retired captive cetaceans. However, they will also serve as rehabilitation centers for stranded cetaceans, even during the period when they have ‘retirees’ as residents. And they will be able to serve this purpose in perpetuity.

We can’t undo all the harm we’ve inflicted on cetaceans by keeping them in captivity, but by providing them with seaside sanctuaries, we can improve their quality of life. That is our goal.

Naomi Rose is a member of the Board of the Whale Sanctuary Project.

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Day One: From Seattle to San Juan Island

July 11, 2011:  It’s all aboard the Victoria Clipper for a 7.30 a.m. departure. My dinky camera doesn’t do the Seattle skyline justice on a dark cloudy morning, but we leave Pier 69 for the three-hour journey to San Juan Island.

We’ll be meeting about a dozen of the world’s most knowledgeable scientists and whale watchers for an informal get-together. We’ll be tracking some of the orca pods (killer whales live in extended families called pods), both from the shore and on boats, and meeting up in the evenings to exchange knowledge and experiences about the orcas who live just off the coast of the islands, and about what we can do to help the ones who are held in captivity at marine parks like SeaWorld.

The ferry is full of local people and tourists, who crowd up onto the top deck at various times along the way for glimpses of dolphins, harbor seals, eagles and other animals, and then as we approach Deception Pass, where two of the many islands meet and a bridge connects them. Beyond lies the Pacific.

One of the crew, a conservation biologist, explains how this huge system of waterways, estuaries and basins that leads out to the ocean was carved out by glaciers about 15,000 years ago. The islands are all volcanic, all part of the Ring of Fire. And the whole region, including Seattle, is subject to earthquakes and eruptions like the famous Mount St. Helens eruption of 1980.

Waiting for us at Friday Harbor on San Juan Island is Candace Calloway, a marine mammal biologist with a passion for rescuing horses. It’s a short ride across the island to Snug Harbor, a small inlet with a marina and cabins, where several of us will be staying.

After a quick lunch we head over to the Center for Whale Research, where Ken Balcomb and his team of interns have been tracking various orca pods from his home and offices on a cliff overlooking the ocean.

Journalists David Kirby and Tim Zimmerman, researcher Dr. Astrid Vanginneken, Ken Balcomb, and documentarian Gabriela Cowperthwaite.

“Here they come,” shouts one of the team as she scans the water below through binoculars.

We’re about to see some orcas.

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While some of us spend the morning catching up on e-mail etc., others need to head out early. Samantha Berg and Kevin Meddleton are going home to Alaska, where they have an acupuncture clinic.

Samantha is also a former SeaWorld trainer, who appeared on several TV news shows in the days following the death of Dawn Brancheau at SeaWorld Orlando last year. She and Kevin suggest we all meet again – perhaps next time in Alaska. We also talk about setting up an email group so we can stay in touch and share information. The group needs a name. I suggest “Superpod” in honor of what we’ve seen and shared over the week. It’s agreed.

Lori and head over to the Center for Whale Research, where I download some of the photos that ID the many orcas that are in Ken’s records. Then we collect David Kirby from Candace’s house, where he’s been out on the shore getting a final view of the orcas, and we drive over to Friday Harbor on the other side of the island.

Lori, David, and I meet Jeff Ventre and his wife, Michelle, on the Victoria Clipper for the two-hour voyage back to Seattle. Jeff and Michelle are headed home to New Orleans, David to New York, Lori to Atlanta, and me to Southern Utah.

As I wait to board my flight, I’m gazing out of the window at the giant planes coming and going from the gates.

But in my mind’s eye, I’m still seeing orcas.

Afterword: In the years that followed, some of the group would meet up again on San Juan Island. And in July 2016, when hundreds of people from around the world gathered for three days of talks, movies and presentations at the local theater, Dr. Lori Marino announced the formation of an organization, the Whale Sanctuary Project, that was setting out to create a seaside sanctuary for captive whales.

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Day Five: Jeff Ventre has just picked up a report from the Toronto Star about the very unseemly custody battle going on between SeaWorld and the Canadian circus Marineland over orca Ikaika.

Jeff, a physician, was once a SeaWorld trainer, so he knows a lot of what goes on behind the scenes, especially the cover-ups that these facilities engage in. The article in today’s Toronto Star explains how, 10 years ago, SeaWorld and Marineland set up a mutual breeding program. And it gives some insight into the grotesque wheeling and dealing with the lives of animals whom they each claim to “own”:

Holer (owner of Marineland) wanted a male killer whale. But how much was one worth? About four belugas, which Busch (owner of SeaWorld) wanted. According to court documents, a beluga is worth $50,000. Holer only wanted to give up three. Busch demanded four, but would later toss in two trained sea lions. And the deal was done.

Then Ikaika is flown from SeaWorld Orlando to Marineland in Niagara Falls. He already has dental problems, most likely from chewing on the metal bars of his pool, and he needs daily treatment along with ongoing antibiotics and pain medication. (Such problems don’t exist in the wild.) At Marineland, Ikaika’s teeth just get worse, and SeaWorld thinks they can give him better care, so they want him back. But now Marineland doesn’t want to give him up.

As part of the pressure SeaWorld is putting on Marineland, they offer some unusually candid remarks about the dangers of keeping these huge animals captive. As the Star describes it:

SeaWorld continues to fret about Ikaika’s mental health. The whale has had to be separated from his female companion, Kiska, 37, because he would bite her.

Ikaika has a history of aggression, often of a sexual nature, which began with an attempt to breed a young calf at SeaWorld shortly before his transfer to Canada. SeaWorld’s veterinarians then sedated Ikaika twice daily with Valium to “try to mellow him out.”

“We’ve already seen some of the precursors (of a human attack) up there, meaning he’s grabbed boots, he’s grabbed targets, he’s grabbed an arm before,” Chuck Tompkins, a senior executive at SeaWorld and head animal trainer, said in an affidavit.

Those are signs Ikaika is testing his environment and seeing what he can do, Tompkins told the court.

“And if you’re not aware of all the little things that killer whales do, you can get somebody really, really hurt,” Tompkins said in his affidavit. “I’ve got grave concerns on the safety of the staff and inevitably the safety of the animal because of the lack of change.”

In all its public statements and PR, SeaWorld goes out of its way to say how safe the marine parks are. But to get Ikaika back to Orlando, they need to change their tune and explain what the real problems are – including that someone could get seriously hurt by an angry, frustrated orca with dental pain, who needs a constant supply of antibiotics and pain medication, along with sedatives to keep him from going completely ballistic.

(Photo of Ikaika from Toronto Star)

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Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, Who’s the Brainiest of Them All?

Scientists have several ways of measuring the size and complexity of the brains of different animals. Whatever way you look at orca brains, you have to conclude that these guys are super-intelligent.

After dinner, Lori Marino gives us a general intro to the brains and intelligence of orcas. Lori is a neuroscientist and Professor of Psychology at Emory University, and the founder of The Kimmela Center for Animal Advocacy.

Pound for pound, she tells us, the orca brain greatly outsizes the human brain. It’s the fourth largest brain of all, while humans come in 23rd. Where humans score highest is in the ratio of brain size to body size, as you see on this chart:

Another way of measuring braininess is surface area, which is very important. We humans have to pack a lot of brain into a space that can’t grow any bigger (otherwise we’d get stuck while trying to be born). So, the way we’ve expand our brains is by having more surface area – i.e. more folds and wrinkles.

Relative size difference of post-mortem killer whale brain and human brain.

Orcas have done the same thing, as you can see from the photos. They seem to be packing even more brain surface than humans into the available space in their heads.

Lori explains how their brains are organized quite differently from ours. Audio and visual areas are closer together than in our case, and this makes for faster and more complex processing power.

So, who’s the brainiest of them all? We don’t know for sure, but a case could be made for saying that many dolphin species (of which orcas are one) outdo humans in terms of the processing power of their brains.

Lori is co-author of the famous Mirror Self-Recognition Study, that showed how dolphins are one of the few species who can recognize themselves in a mirror. That’s one of ways that shows an animal as having a sense of self, meaning that they know who they are and can think about themselves objectively. It was as a result of doing this study that she concluded that keeping dolphins in captivity is completely wrong, and she has been speaking out against it ever since.

You can read about the study here, and check out an interview with Lori here.

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Day Four: Further down the island, some of the J Pod are reportedly gathering for dinner. We’re all gathering for dinner, too, over at Candace’s house. But David Kirby can’t get enough of orcas and wants to go see them from the shore.

David Kirby (right) with Ken Balcomb

David is writing a book about orcas in captivity, SeaWorld, and the death of Dawn Brancheau. “They’re over at American Camp,” he tells me. “Want to come?”

American Camp is a grassy, mossy, rocky area of the island that looks out over several bays where orcas gather regularly to feed. In the 1850s, it was the site of a dispute that broke out between the Americans and the British, sparked by the shooting of a “British” pig by an American. The two countries almost ended up in yet another war before British Admiral Lambert Baynes advised the Governor of Vancouver Island that it would be unwise to “involve two great nations in a war over a squabble about a pig.”

American Camp on San Juan Island

Orcas, incidentally, seem to have learned to settle their disputes without fighting each other. That’s in part because modern orcas have been around for about 15 million years, while modern humans only appeared about 100 thousand years ago and our culture is still quite primitive.

It’s raining when we get to American Camp and walk a half mile or so down to the ocean where the J pod was last spotted by one of the boats. We immediately spot about a dozen of them, so close to the shore you could almost wade out and touch them.

It seems like they’ve found a shoal of salmon and are focused on getting the 200 pounds of food they each need every day. Salmon – specifically Chinook salmon – is the only food that the resident orcas will eat.

The orcas surface for a few seconds, then dive, then we see salmon flying in the air to avoid them, then the orcas surface again, then dive, and on it goes.

The orcas surface for a few seconds, then dive, then we see salmon flying in the air to avoid them, then the orcas surface again, then dive back down, and on it goes.

Then, after one of their dives, they don’t resurface. Nothing. They’ve just vanished. Most likely, Grandma J2 has called them all back together. “Time to move on, boys,” she’s told them.

Time for us to move on, too. Dinner is waiting at Candace’s house.

Plus it’s still raining, and we’re absolutely soaked.

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The largest populations of orcas in the world aren’t here off the coast of North America; they’re in the Antarctic.

We’ve all gathered for dinner again at Candace’s home for an evening that includes a presentation about orcas in the Antarctic.

Ecologist John Durbin has spent time in the Southern Ocean, studying the various subspecies of orcas, along with the cultures and hunting practices of each of the different groups.

An Antarctic orca spy-hopping dinner for the family. Photo by Robert Pitman.

John explains that killer whales around the western Antarctic Peninsula are very fussy diners. They’re renowned not just for their cooperative strategies and hunting tactics in catching Weddell seals, but also for the fact that they will barely ever eat anything else but this particular species of seal. They occasionally treat themselves to breast of penguin, but they won’t eat any other part of the penguin. And when you bear in mind that they don’t have hands or paws, eating only very precise parts of an animal takes some skill in itself.

John and his colleagues learned all this by making careful observations during the Antarctic summer of 2009. They discovered how the orcas avoid almost all other animals who would be easy catches, including other kinds of seals, in favor of what are for them the yummier Weddell species.

The team has documented how the orcas work together to snag their prey. They start by scouting out their victims in what’s called spy-hopping: surfacing for a quick reconnaissance to spot Weddell seals resting on ice floes.

The orcas set up a wave to tip the seal off the ice floe.

Then, rather than killing the seal directly, members of the pack will pull her underwater repeatedly by her hind flippers, until she’s too exhausted to swim. After the kill, the orcas work together to ensure that the carcass is divvied up properly amongst pod members under the waves.

You can see in this video how the orcas line up together (including with their calves to teach them how it all works) and then create a very precise wave that will lift one side of the ice floe where the seal is resting, and so tip her into the water.

John explains how, at least once a year, the orcas take a break from the icy waters of the Antarctic and head up the coast of South America to the tropics for their equivalent of a spa treatment. They won’t eat while they’re away, and it’s a long trip, more than a thousand miles each way. And the reason they go is to be somewhere nice and warm where they can slough off the top layers of their skin, which have become tough and discolored. Doing this in the frigid waters of the Antarctic would not be a fun experience, so it’s worth the long trip.

There’s so much to be learned about these animals whom John refers to not simply as top predators, but rather “top top predators.” There’s simply nothing on the planet that can touch them.

Except, of course, for humans.

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Day Three: It’s 11.30, and we’ve joined an expedition with Spencer, a young man with an engaging manner and a whale-watching boat. There are seven of us, and as we head out from the bay toward the open sound, Spencer is confident we’re going to see some orcas.

The whale-watching boats stay in touch with each other, sharing info on where the orcas are. I’m sitting up front next to Spencer, and soon I’m hearing crackling voices coming in on the radio saying that the K and L pods are heading south in our direction from Canada.

“That means we could be really lucky,” Spencer says. “The J pod is south of us near the point over there and heading up toward where the other pods are coming down. They may all be joining up for a superpod.”

Superpods are like orca conventions, with lots of excitement among the whales as they share information and learn about each other. Younger males and females get to meet their peers, and mothers encourage their sons to “go talk to that nice girl over there.”

We can make a few assumptions from all the splashing and frolicking we see in superpod meet-ups, but their cultures and customs have been developing for millions of years, and we have very little idea of what else they may be saying or doing..

The superpod meetup begins. Photo by the Center for Whale Research

Spencer shuts off the engine as the K and L pods draw close. About a half-dozen other boats have gathered nearby to watch them going by. “There’s one at 7 o’clock,” someone says as we start seeing the orcas surfacing, breathing, then diving again. … “Three o’clock.” … “Five o’clock.” We soon stop pointing them out … there are just so many of them … not crowded together … the expanse of water is huge and the orcas are dotted through it, a couple here, a threesome there. It’s a bit like when you’re watching a meteor shower and every few seconds another one flashes in the sky and disappears a moment later.

A photo ID of Mega (with notch on dorsal fin), L41, from one of the Center for Whale Research charts.

Scientists and orca protection people like Ken Balcomb, and whale watching pilots like Spencer, can spot many of the individual whales from the shape and markings of the dorsal fins.

“That was Mega,” Spencer says when an extra-large whale with a very large dorsal fin surfaces nearby. “He’s L 41.” He glances Spencer has a chart of orca fins compiled by Ken’s team at the Center for Whale Research, and he glances down at it to confirm what he’s saying.

A noisy nuisance

Noisy tugboat. Photo by Christina Becraft

About 10 minutes later, most of the K’s and L’s have gone by and are apparently now heading for a meet-up with the J’s. Spencer starts the engine and we follow the two pods from the north.

We slow down as a tugboat approaches, hauling an enormous container vessel. “These big boats are really hard on the whales,” Spencer says. “The noise of the engines is very deep and it travels for miles.”

The noise polluter chugs by and we’re on our way again. Soon we catch up with a half-dozen other boats who are gathering to see the superpod coming together, and just a few moments later we have J’s, K’s and L’s popping up all around us.

Coast Guard pulls up next to us to check our papers, which are all in order.

Among the boats is one from the Coast Guard, keeping an eye on the whale-watcher boats to be sure they’re all complying with regulations. They pull up next to us to check Spencer’s papers, which are all in order.

By law, all boats are required to stay at least 200 meters away from the whales, and the Coast Guard is often patrolling among the boats. But if an orca surfaces closer to the boat, that’s obviously up to them, and you get a lucky close-up. And that’s exactly what happens to us.

Meet Big Mama

Grandma J2 identifies herself with the small notch on her dorsal fin. Photo by the Center for Whale Research.

Suddenly, and completely out of the blue, an orca surfaces just a few meters from the port side of the boat. Spencer lights up.

“That looks like Granny!” he says, grabbing the dorsal fin chart to double-check. “Yes, it absolutely is.”

For those of us who’ve heard about Grandma J2, the matriarch of the J pod who’s estimated to be about 100 years old, this is the most exciting and memorable thing that could happen. For Grandma J2 to have surfaced just a few feet from our boat is like getting to meet your favorite celebrity on the red carpet at the Oscars. Priceless.

J2 pauses on the surface for a few moments more, as if to introduce herself, then dives and is gone. For our part, we’ve all gone silent, staring at the water where we saw her, and thinking of ourselves as the luckiest people alive. We’ve just met the most remarkable orca on record.

The missing family member

Lolita, kidnapped from the L pod, now at the Miami Seaquarium.

But the most poignant aspect of the trip is being among the L pod, and knowing that one of them is missing from the family group. Thousands of miles away, on the other side of the continent down at the Miami Seaquarium, Lolita has been held captive in a pool since she was abducted from her pod 40 years ago. While the rest of the L’s have each other for company, Lolita has simply a plastic blow-up whale toy in the pool with her.

Every day, she still calls out to her family, just as the other L’s do to each other as they migrate up and down the northwest coast. But instead of the great ocean with its rocky depths, tidal rips, and coastal shallows teeming with salmon and other animals, all she knows is the circular wall of the pool bouncing her echo-location calls back at her like a hall of mirrors.

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The story of Luna, the wayward orca, is well known. So, it’s not giving away the ending of this movie to say that his search for friendship among the humans he followed around came to a sad end one day, five years ago.

But the story of his life leading up to that fateful day is told poignantly by Mike Parfit and Suzanne Chisolm in their movie, The Whale, which opens on September 16. They showed us a preview this evening.

The story begins in Nootka Sound (pictured above), off the west coast of Canada, in 2001, when the young whale became separated from his family, the L pod.

Nootka Sound is a remote waterway that winds its way inland from the Pacific to one of the old logging towns up the river and the L pod often hangs out there on their salmon fishing expeditions.

When the pod returned to Puget Sound without Luna and his uncle, Ken Balcomb of the Center for Whale Research and other scientists speculated that the missing whales may have been fishing together when the uncle died. But no one really knows what happened.

Luna was only a year old, very young for animals who routinely live into their 60s or 70s and who don’t mature until they’re at least 20. What happened to him was like a human child finding himself alone and lost.

Fortunately for him, Luna had at least learned to catch his own food.

Orcas are social animals who need each other’s company. So, Luna did the next best thing to finding his own family: he started making friends with the humans who come and go on their boats in Nootka Sound.

Luna the celebrity

In the years that followed, the young whale attracted thousands of tourists who came to visit him. And he sparked a major dispute, involving the Canadian government, the whale protection groups and the marine circuses.

The government tried in vain to stop humans from accepting the friendship of Luna. The orca protection groups wanted to work with the young whale so that he would bond temporarily with them, enabling them to lead him back to his family.

And the marine parks came up with all manner of schemes to try to “save” Luna so they could put him on public display. As an already-friendly whale who would also have been good for breeding, he would have been a huge prize, and at a minimal price.

The dispute continued for about five years while Luna befriended different people and groups, only to be baffled when they would suddenly stop reciprocating his friendship because of orders from the government.

In the end, one day when Luna was frolicking around the back of a tugboat and trying to make friends with the people on board, he was injured by the propeller and did not survive.

An allegory of human behavior

It’s a story about a whale. But it’s also a powerful allegory about human behavior: the special interests with dollar signs flashing in their eyes; the government bureaucracies trying to protect their turf and play by their own rulebook; the orca groups and scientists who knew exactly what to do to get Luna back to his family but could never get the government cooperation they needed; the fishermen who were afraid that Luna would eat “their” fish; and all the tourists and other visitors who wanted to play with him and have their photo taken with him but who would then move on or be stopped by the government – all of them leaving one very confused young animal in their wake.

Mike and Suzanne are not simply the producers of the movie; they know the story intimately since they were also involved in trying to save Luna. But they don’t try to propagandize. They’re expert enough moviemakers to know that the story is far more powerful when just told straight. And the result is a movie that’s moving and memorable.

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As well as the “resident” pods – the J, K and L pods – who spend most of their time around the islands here, there are some “transient” pods, whose lifestyle is quite different from residents. They speak a different language from the resident families, eat different food, travel further afield, and have different family behaviors.

Transient killer whale pods generally consist of an adult female and two or three of her kids. And while resident orcas of both genders stay within shouting distance of their mothers their entire lives, only first-born male transients maintain such intense fidelity to their mothers. Optimum pod size for transients is three, so whenever a third calf is born, one of the siblings often leaves. The rule seems to be that the eldest son can stay, but all but one of the others, who are generally 5 to 12 years old, may have to go.

Residents and transients have figured out the best way to coexist, so they don’t fight when they meet each other. For example, while the residents only eat fish, the transients eat other marine mammals.

The team that was out in the morning happened upon a transient group that had just captured a porpoise. One of them was carrying the porpoise around on his nose and tossing him around — a bit like how your cat at home will play with a mouse. Why they play with their food is not entirely known, but these top predators of the ocean clearly love to play. They’re exuberant and fun-loving, and they love to hunt.

And if, understandably, you feel a bit sorry for the porpoise, bear in mind that the orcas will naturally go for the smaller and weaker animals, so the overall effect is to keep the porpoise population strong and healthy. It’s the role of the top predator in any natural system. The same goes for the resident orcas and the fish they catch. Residents prefer salmon, and on their long journey back from the ocean to the mountain streams where they were born and where they return to give birth to a new generation, the salmon have to endure a series of challenges – from the orcas in the ocean to the bears along the rivers to the rapids they have to leap over. Only the strongest and smartest will make it back, and their offspring will be strong and healthy, too. (That’s one reason why the modern factory fish farms, where the fish have no real life, are such an ecological disaster.)

Later in the afternoon, Mike Parfit and Suzanne Chisolm arrive at Snug Harbor in their boat from a nearby island where they live. It’s largely unpopulated by people there, so Mike and Suzanne’s boat is the equivalent of your car at home: They go shopping and do everything else by boat.

Tonight, Mike and Suzanne will be presenting a preview of their new movie The Whale, which will be premiered in New York and other cities on September 16. But we have a couple of hours to spare, and they invite me and Lori Marino for a quick spin to see if we can catch up with the transients.

We go out for about an hour, and Mike radios some of the other boats that are out to see who’s seeing what, but the orcas have moved on and are too far out of range. That’s the way it goes. You’re out in their territory, and there’s no guarantee they’re going to perform for you.

Back at Snug Harbor, Ken Balcomb gives us a lift to Candace’s home, where a couple of dozen people will be gathering to watch The Whale and for a talk by John Durbin about the orcas in the Antarctic.

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So, how do they know she’d just turned 100? That’s one of the questions on my list for Ken Balcomb. Ken is Founder and Principal Investigator at the Center for Whale Research and one of several orca experts who are getting together this week.

We’ll be learning as much as possible from these great folks, and hoping to see some of the orcas as they pass by the center on one of their fishing expeditions most afternoons. (Keep your fins crossed that they’re hanging out there this week. It all depends on where the fish are.)

One of the people locally who study orcas sent an e-mail last week with some of the latest news about the three Southern Resident pods:

L pod and the rest of K pod came in yesterday. Now all three pods are all here and the superpod antics have been amazing. Apparently all 88 are present and accounted for.

And there’s a new baby in the past few days, K44.

There should be some excellent orca action out there next week, unless they run out of Chinook salmon and have to head back out.

We had a great 100th birthday party for J2 at the lighthouse and at the Center last weekend. Actually played some volleyball for the first time there in over ten years. Are you all ready for some volleyball?

Yes, indeed! Tomorrow, we head out to the islands.

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A half-dozen kayaks are also in place, hoping to see some action. Ken Balcomb, who runs the center, passes around a few pairs of binoculars. The interns take up their cameras with long telephoto lenses. And almost immediately, dorsal fins are popping out of the water. You see them for just a second or two as the orcas come up to breathe.

“There’s one!” calls one of the interns, pointing.

“Another at 11 o’clock,” shouts another, pointing half left.

“Three o’clock,” says another, pointing right.

These students are not just tourists taking photos to send to their friends. This is serious business. They’ll be analyzing every photo to identify who the orcas are, which pod they belong to, and who they’re traveling with.

“That was J2 with one of the younger ones,” says Ken, as two orcas dive back underwater. J2 is the famous “Grandma” whose 100th birthday the team celebrated a few days ago.

“How do you know she’s 100 years old?” I ask.

Orca males are mama’s boys. They rarely leave the side of their mothers.

“It’s a rough guess,” Ken says, “but we learn a lot simply by watching who she’s with. She used to travel a lot with J1, who was in his 60s. And we know that because we know who his children are. So, we’re guesstimating that J2 was born around 1911. J1 rarely left her side, and he died recently.”

Orca males are mama’s boys. They rarely leave the side of their mothers. Their moms teach them everything, including pointing out nice potential girlfriends. But their sons always come back after mating.

I learn that not long ago, a mother whale beached herself, and her son was obviously distraught. He wouldn’t stay in the ocean. Some rescuers pulled him back out to sea, but he kept coming back and beached himself next to his mother, refusing to move for two days after she’d died. The rescuers were finally able to tow him back out to the ocean to save his life. And this time he went on his way. But we don’t know what happened after that. Some of the male orcas who lose their mothers become depressed and don’t live very long after.

Grandma J2. By the Center for Whale Research

Grandma J2 is the matriarch of the “J” pod. She’s considered to be a wonderful grandmother. She knows where the salmon are, where they hide in the ocean, and where the clan needs to be at any particular time of year.

What I’m hearing reminds me of the stories of elephant herds in Africa, where the matriarch holds all the knowledge and wisdom of the family. She knows the best watering holes, what trails to avoid, how to protect the calves from predators, and she guides the whole extended family.

She knows where the salmon are, where they hide in the ocean, and where the clan needs to be at any particular time of year.

All the orcas we’ve seen this afternoon are from the J pod. Two other pods, K and L, are in the vicinity, but they haven’t shown up today.

It’s now 5.30 p.m. and we’ve driven over to Candace’s home, a mile or two down the coast. One of the group is gazing out of the big window. “Well, we didn’t see any whales breaching today,” he says. Breaching is when a whale launches her whole body out of the water — for fun, for display, for whatever reason.

At that moment, and within a stone’s throw of the beach, an orca breaches.

Soon, about a dozen more people arrive for dinner — scientists and families and friends.

One of the group is Samantha Berg, who, when she was in her 20s, spent several years as a trainer at SeaWorld.

“It wasn’t until years later that I realized that it was like being part of a cult,” she says. “They persuaded us that everything we were doing was right — that it was good for the orcas. But it wasn’t. They told us how to think. It’s only now that I understand how wrong it is to take these animals away from their homes and families and use them to entertain people.”

In some ways, when you go to a marine park like SeaWorld, you see a lot more than what I saw today. You see orcas really close up and you can watch them twirling and slapping their tails and racing around the small pools they’re made to live in. Compared to that, I just saw a few glimpses of orcas as they surfaced for a second or two at a time in the distance. Often, it was nothing more than a fin.

But while you can see the body of a captive orca close up at a marine circus, you see nothing of the true life of an orca. You understand nothing of what it means to be an orca, or of who they really are.

And while what I saw today was just glimpses of orcas surfacing, I saw far more of their lives than I could ever imagine at one of those circus shows. With those brief sightings of orcas in their home, traveling together in pods led by a wise matriarch, comes a far deeper understanding of who and what they are: magnificent, intelligent creatures with rich lives, held together through deep emotional bonds.

Ken tells us about a young whale who recently gave birth to a son. He watched from his boat as she nursed the calf along, lifting him to the surface to teach him how to breathe and coaching him as the pod made its way through the waters. Then she suddenly changed course and steered the calf over to Ken’s boat. “She turned him on his back and lifted him out of the water so we could see his underside. She wanted to show him to us.”

Why did she want to introduce him to some humans?

“Perhaps because she was proud of him and was showing him off to us.”

Ken pauses, and adds as an afterthought: “Then again, maybe she was showing us to him to teach him about the kinds of animals that it’s good to avoid.”

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