Voices in the Ocean Page 25

  “They’re flippy little bastards,” Rone said, smiling. Webster nodded, wiping sweat from his forehead. “There’ll be nothing, nothing, nothing,” he said, “and then—mass chaos!” One melon-head swam alongside the boat, right where I was standing, and opened his mouth as though he were laughing. They were jet-black, happy-faced little whales, and I imagined that they were talking and joking and messing around, socializing as merrily as people at an excellent cocktail party.

  One week later, a pilot whale stranded and died on Oahu. Five days after that, another pilot swam into the same bay, wobbled into the shallows, and died on the beach. “He looked confused,” said a paddler who had seen the whale. “He came right toward us and bumped into our canoe.” Two more large black dolphins, identified by onlookers as false killer whales (almost certainly incorrectly, according to Baird, who suspects these were pilot whales too), were also spotted in the vicinity, circling erratically as though in distress; tiger sharks had been sighted skulking nearby.

  Were these RIMPAC casualties? Not surprisingly, the Navy denied it. To speculate that sonar or missile tests had been to blame for the dolphin traumas would be “premature and irresponsible,” a Navy spokesman said. There was no proof either way, it was true, only ugly coincidence. But it was the same ugly coincidence that had happened so many times before.

  The definition of a very good day, for Robin Baird, is one on which somebody encounters false killer whales in Hawaii, and manages to take half-decent pictures of them. That person doesn’t even have to be him: it’s the sighting itself that is precious. Perhaps the best illustration of how dedicated a scientist must be to seriously study these dolphins is this inconvenient fact: in Baird’s eight weeks of boat work around Hawaii in 2014, he and his team crossed paths with pseudorcas on exactly one occasion. But thanks to a flood of photos received from other researchers, whale lovers, scuba divers, ocean aficionados, and sharp-eyed boaters toting Baird’s false killer whale field guides, the sum total of the year’s sightings was actually 17, with 119 whales captured on film, and 69 individuals identified. When you consider that there are fewer than two hundred pseudorcas left in Hawaiian waters, this was an extraordinary collective effort, a testament to Baird’s tireless campaign of public outreach.

  But if Baird popped the champagne cork on New Year’s Eve to celebrate, he would’ve been a day early. On January 1, 2015, not only was there a major false killer sighting two miles off the Big Island—a pod of twenty-five to thirty animals, including some calves—but the people who encountered them happened to be a group of professional underwater photographers. The resulting videos and pictures were so lovely, so crystal clear and mesmerizing, that they ended up on the Hawaiian evening news. Watching the footage, I could see why this was Baird’s favorite species. The whales whizzed around, below, above, and beside the divers, buzzing them joyfully. It was an astonishing scene: here were two dozen of the world’s rarest dolphins, swooping in for their close-ups with intent looks of curiosity and what almost appeared to be jesting smirks on their faces, their sonar clicking and creaking and their whistles ringing through a blue cathedral of sea. The false killers were swift and agile and alert, a breathtaking combination of elegance, power, and obvious intelligence. They were dolphin torpedoes—and, in a perfect world, the only type of underwater missile that we would ever find in the ocean.

  One blue-sky Saturday morning in May, I rented a car at the Toronto airport and drove south through eighty miles of thick traffic. I passed strip malls, big-box stores, fast-food outlets, office parks, tract housing, and chain motels on my way to one of nature’s grandest spectacles: Niagara Falls. I have seen the Falls in their thundering glory, and it is not a vision that ever grows old, but this time I would be stopping a mile short of them to visit another tourist site. Near the turnoff for Rainbow Bridge, the dramatic span that connects to the American border, I saw an SUV with a bumper sticker that said MARINELAND: LAND OF HORRORS, and I followed it. I knew we were going to the same place.

  So were hundreds of other people. It was the first day of a new season at Marineland Canada, which meant there would be a protest. On closing day next October, there would be another protest. It was a cycle that had continued for years. Among many people who cared about dolphins, Marineland had a bad reputation. Lately, the protests had grown louder, and the critics’ accusations had been echoed in the media, and the outcry appeared to be headed toward a crescendo. Change seemed imminent—but was it? Canada might sound like an unlikely place to ponder the past, present, and future of dolphins, but two spots on opposite sides of the country offered some startling, and highly unexpected, insights.

  When Marineland opened for business in 1961, its owner, a Slovenian man named John Holer, had begun by exhibiting a trio of sea lions in two steel tanks. Now, Marineland’s holdings had grown to a thousand acres and the park housed a profusion of animals, including a handful of bottlenoses, about forty beluga whales, and an orca, along with seals, sea lions, walruses, and several forests’ worth of bears and deer. Its grounds were dotted by rides with names like Space Avenger, Sky Hawk, and Dragon Mountain. There was also a ride called Orca Screamer, an unintentionally ironic name given the park’s history: since the seventies, at least sixteen orcas had presumably died in its care. And the orcas were not alone.

  The previous year, the Toronto Star newspaper had launched a series of investigative articles about Marineland, prompted by the death of a beluga calf named Skoot. Against all animal husbandry logic, Skoot and her mother, Skyla, had been placed into close quarters with two adult male belugas. At six p.m. one night, while Skyla and a park guide watched in panic—no trainers or veterinarians were on site, and apparently none responded to calls—the males bit and bludgeoned Skoot, killing her. Though the guide chronicled the mauling and his account later became public, Marineland’s official stance was that Skoot had “passed away after a sudden onset of illness.” Holer acknowledged the attack, but chalked it up to nature’s cruel caprices. It was the calf’s diseased condition, he claimed, that had provoked the aggression. “You have to understand…for people and all living things, there is a time to live and a time to die,” he advised the press.

  When two Star reporters, Linda Diebel and Liam Casey, began to dig, they found a nightmarish trove of stories about Marineland. They were aided by animal activists—who had been pointing their fingers since the seventies—and by numerous whistleblowers, Marineland employees who had decided to step forward in an attempt to help the creatures they’d cared for. The ex-employees told of an occasionally malfunctioning water-quality system that had seared marine mammals with chemicals, among other troubles. Holer repeatedly denied that there had ever been any problems with the water in Marineland’s tanks: “We take care of the animals,” he told reporters, “better than I would take care of myself.”

  Some dolphins were housed in a windowless concrete building that was backed by a video arcade; other dolphins had been confiscated by the U.S. Department of Fisheries after Marineland illegally captured them in the Gulf of Mexico. Keiko, the orca in the movie Free Willy who had withered in a shabby Mexican marine park, ended up there after Marineland sold him to its owners. In 2011, SeaWorld actually repossessed one of its orcas from Marineland, a male named Ikaika, whom it had swapped for four beluga whales on a breeding loan. Although at least thirty-seven orcas have perished at their own properties, SeaWorld executives were alarmed by Ikaika’s living conditions in Niagara Falls. When Holer refused to return the orca, the dispute landed in court, with SeaWorld eventually prevailing.

  Marineland’s animals didn’t fare any better outside the tanks. Bears and deer were spotted with open sores, mangy fur, and ripped ears. In the past, contagious bovine tuberculosis had infected the park’s deer; on two occasions, spectators had looked on, horrified, as a gang of bears ripped another bear apart. “Once an animal turns on another, there’s not much you can do,” Holer lamented after the second fatal bear brawl. “Nature can be awful cruel.
” One whistleblower, a former maintenance supervisor, revealed the existence of four mass graves on the property, unpermitted pits that were estimated to hold more than a thousand carcasses.

  Before I saw Marineland, I heard the protesters. They lined the road in front of the property, waving signs. HONK IF YOU LOVE DOLPHINS, read one banner, and the passing cars leaned on their horns in solidarity. The crowd—later estimated to be a thousand strong—was vocal and impassioned. I found a parking spot and pulled in, next to a woman and her nine-year-old son. The boy carried a sign that said WELCOME TO SLAVELAND. “I feel bad about the deer,” he told me.

  Almost immediately I spotted Ric O’Barry, wearing his trademark baseball cap and Ray-Bans, surrounded by people. We greeted one another, and he spelled out the problem: Canada had approximately zero regulations to protect captive marine mammals. “You could literally dig a hole in your backyard, fill it with your garden hose, and put a dolphin in there,” O’Barry said. “It’s completely legal in Ontario.”

  Absurdly, this was true. O’Barry’s assessment was, if anything, understated. Here, you could have a beluga whale and a tiger in your backyard too, should you happen to want them. Countries like Bolivia, Chile, Costa Rica, Croatia, Cyprus, Hungary, India, Slovenia, and Switzerland had ended dolphin captivity on moral grounds; others, including the U.K., Luxembourg, Nicaragua, and Norway had curtailed the practice to the point of oblivion, and the U.S. had its venerable Marine Mammal Protection Act. But Canada offered nothing, despite its progressive record on so many other issues. Marineland’s regulators were so toothless as to be pathetic.

  With the government idle, the public had taken up the cause with a grassroots fervor. As we stood next to a wire fence separating protesters from the patrons who were buying tickets to Marineland that day, O’Barry introduced me to Cara Sands, a documentary filmmaker from Toronto who had been trumpeting the park’s inhumane practices since 1990. Sands, a raven-haired, doe-eyed woman in her forties, had crawled through a boiler room and shot clandestine video of Marineland’s holding facility, an off-limits bunker known to trainers as “the Barn.” “I found this warehouse full of dolphins,” Sands recalled, “and one killer whale named Junior. I tracked the situation for five years.” She pointed over the fence to a long, slablike building. “It’s right there. That’s where Junior was held.”

  Like Keiko, Junior was an Icelandic whale, taken from his pod in 1984. His exact age at capture was unknown, but he was so young that the first time Sands saw him he still had vestigial hairs on his face, a feature orcas lose early in life. On two other occasions Sands returned to the Barn; both times Junior floated in residence, visibly fading. “Was he ever brought outside?” Sands said. “Not that I’m aware. Not that I’ve ever seen. I can’t prove it, but I think it is possible he was in that building for four years.” Junior died in 1994. Marineland has never commented on Junior’s life in the warehouse or confirmed his death.

  Having lasted a brief, miserable decade, Junior was an elder compared to many of Marineland’s deceased orcas. Kandu II, a male snatched from Washington State, died at age eight. Hudson, a captive-born orca, reached six; Nova, Kanuck, Malik, and Athena were all around four. Algonquin survived for two years and eight months. Two unnamed calves died at three months old. April was gone in a month. Another anonymous calf lived for eleven days.

  Over the years, twenty-nine orcas had ended up at Marineland, and now only one remained. This was Kiska, who swam alone in her pool. During her years of captive breeding she had delivered four calves here, and lost them all. In 2008 she also lost Nootka V, an Icelandic matriarch who had been her closest companion. Nootka V herself had lost eight calves, and she and Kiska had supported one another through their multiple births.

  Wandering through the gathering, I met Christine Santos, Kiska’s former head trainer. Santos, a slender thirty-four-year-old with a pensive air, had been fired after her boyfriend, Phil Demers, another senior trainer, resigned to become a whistleblower. When Santos was let go, she expressed concern to the Star reporters that Kiska’s tail had been bleeding profusely. Diebel and Casey found a video showing exactly this. Now, both Santos and Demers were being sued by Holer—who made a practice of serving SLAPP suits on anyone who spoke out forcefully against Marineland—and in turn they were countersuing, claiming Holer’s lawsuits were an abuse of process. “I have to worry about all this legal stuff,” Santos said. “But I can tell you how I feel about Kiska.”

  Santos had looked after the orca for the past twelve years. “It’s kind of surreal for me to be on this side of the fence, and not with her,” she said, her voice shaky. Santos described Kiska as the “sweetest girl ever,” an inquisitive orca who liked to play hide and seek, and have her tongue rubbed. In the past, Santos had lugged a television down to the underwater viewing window; during winter she built snowmen around Kiska’s tank, while the whale spy-hopped to watch. “Anything to keep her stimulated,” Santos said. “Anything.” She began to cry.

  Orcas are not casual animals. At a glance they all look alike, but there is nothing homogenous about them. In many cases, orca clans are so distinct from one another that scientists suspect they are actually separate species. In the Pacific Northwest alone, there are three types of orcas, commonly referred to as residents, transients, and off-shores. Killer whales from each of these groups have about as much in common as investment bankers, rock stars, and nomadic herdsmen. The residents prefer Chinook salmon, choosing to go hungry rather than settle for, say, sockeye. The transients hunt seals and sea lions and won’t touch salmon of any kind. Offshore orcas like to dine on sharks, expertly filleting the liver. There is no overlap between these tribes, and they actively avoid one another. If they do make contact, there can be scuffles. When two pods from the same clan meet up, however, they may greet each other in an elaborate ceremony.

  To our ears, orca vocalizations sound like a keening ghost choir, unearthly cries that all meld together, but scientists analyzing their calls have discovered that each resident pod has its own dialect. (Likely this is important for mate selection: in the wild, orcas are careful not to inbreed.) They also have unique styles of communication. Residents vocalize loudly while they hunt; transients are stealthily silent, busting out gleefully only after they’ve fed. Offshore orcas slap their tails while they are swimming, for reasons nobody knows. All three groups wield their echolocation with individual flair. Even their striking markings are not a one-size-fits-all orca uniform: across the oceans, the details of killer whales’ body sizes, fin shapes, and white patches vary widely.

  As recently as the sixties, orcas were viewed as bloodthirsty marauders—thus, their intimidating name: killer whales. The larger males were dominant, people believed, and kept their females in a harem. Surely these monsters would attack if given the chance; clearly they posed a lethal threat to any person—or even boat—that crossed their paths. They were, in the popular mind, “the biggest confirmed man-eaters in the ocean.” Those who encountered orcas often expressed their fear with bullets: whalers, fishermen, naval officers, and air force pilots used them for target practice. At the time, of course, absolutely nothing was known about these animals, aside from the observable fact that they were good at catching their food. But soon, as marine scientists began to study them, they began to realize how wrong the orcas’ menacing image was.

  Despite ample opportunity and provocation, orcas have never killed a single person anywhere in the world’s seas. (By comparison, in 2014 dogs killed forty-two people in America alone.) They are apex predators who show gentle curiosity toward us, expert communicators who demonstrate complex wisdom. Far from being stuck in a harem, female orcas control their pods—especially the oldest grannies. These four-ton ladies are the suns around which all other killer whales orbit: throughout most of their lives, orcas stick close to their mommas. An orca’s pod is his immediate family, a group that might contain four generations. Each pod, in turn, is part of a bigger clan, also comprised of close relation
s, and at the top of the orca organizational chart are the broader communities, made up of clans. In our terrestrial world, we call them nations.

  A killer whale’s cultural education unfurls at a pace that is similar to ours. They develop socially, like we do, and nothing happens instantly: maturity comes over time. At twenty, orcas are still learning and growing. Matriarchs have been known to approach the century mark, often outliving their offspring; they can spend more than thirty years in menopause. As with all of nature’s successful adaptations there is a reason for this, and we’ve learned some eye-opening things about the matriarchs’ role. They babysit, for one thing. They share food. And they teach: killer whale mothers, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers pass on so much essential knowledge that calves removed from their influence are as ill-equipped for wild orca life as children raised by wolves would be in our society, if dropped into Midtown Manhattan.

  This blue orb we live on? It’s had oceans for 3.8 billion years. In a realm where history isn’t written, it is the matriarch who carries the past, everything her pod needs to survive into the future. She is the keeper of the dialect; she teaches her descendants their very identity. She shows everyone how to hunt, no minor task when you consider the tricky and specialized techniques orcas deploy. In Argentina, one group uses the high-stakes tactic of intentionally stranding themselves—rocketing onto the beach, grabbing a seal, and then hopefully propelling themselves back into the water. Scientists have watched young orcas being tutored for six years before they even attempt this.