Voices in the Ocean Page 26

  Depending on where he lives, an orca might learn to blow intricate bubble curtains that herd herring, or pop his head above water to identify a delectable species of seal. He may need to understand fast-moving formations that would humble the Hogwarts Quidditch team, working with his pod in a three-dimensional life-or-death match against sperm whales. He might practice the deft extraction of stingrays from a muddy seafloor (without getting stung), or be shown how to immobilize a great white shark, restraining it until it drowns. None of these are moves for the uninitiated.

  The matriarch also knows where to hunt, and when. As the climate swoons and soars, as our tinkering becomes increasingly apparent beneath the waves, the ocean can tilt radically. In an El Niño or a La Niña, for instance, or when cycles like the Pacific Decadal Oscillation leave one year’s flush hunting grounds barren the next, or when an orca clan that survived for centuries on Patagonian toothfish suddenly finds longlines raking the waters instead, the matriarch is the key navigator. Using everything she knows, she’ll figure out Plan B.

  When describing the many sublime characteristics of orcas, even the most empirical scientists can become emotional. Marine ecologist Robert Pitman summarized the feelings of many of his colleagues when he appointed orcas “the most amazing animals that currently live on our planet.” Another scientist appointed them “the unchallenged sovereigns of the world’s oceans.” Academic writing isn’t known for its exuberant use of exclamation points, but reading orca research papers, I came across more than a few. Among marine cognoscenti this kind of enthusiasm is expressed often for killer whales, in language usually reserved for five-star movie reviews.

  After mingling among the protesters for a few hours, I decided to venture to the other side of the fence. Marineland’s parking lot seemed to go on forever, a desultory hike across a vast expanse of blacktop. I walked in behind a family of five, parents with two young boys and a toddler. They glared at the crowd outside the gates. “Get a job!” the father yelled at the protesters. “Take your Ritalin!” one of the boys chimed in. The other boy busied himself by sighting his fingers like a rifle and aiming at songbirds flying overhead.

  The cementscape continued inside the park, done up in an appropriately medieval theme. Marineland sprawled for acres: to find out firsthand how forty beluga whales could possibly be jammed into one man’s tanks, I would have to wind my way through many other exhibits.

  “Deer Park” and “Bear Country” were equally grim, the animals massed in dirt courtyards or on scrub lawns. A tired-looking senior citizen with some missing teeth stood in a nearby kiosk, selling sugar cones full of honey-coated corn puffs for $2.75 to people who wanted to feed the bears. “Give them the cone, too,” she advised patrons. “They like the honey.” As the cereal rained down on them, a dozen bears sat around a concrete moat, looking defeated.

  Then, the belugas. The many, many belugas. I have never seen these animals in the wild, but I think it is a safe assumption that out there they spend at least some of their time swimming underwater. Here, they hung like buoys, in a vertical position—the better to fit them all in, I supposed—hugging the perimeter of their tank, their heads out of the water and mouths agape, begging for little fish ($8.75 a bucket) tossed to them by children. Every so often a trainer would clamp a beluga’s mouth shut for a moment so a kid could fondle his head. This may have been a newly adopted precaution: in the past, the beluga-feeding public had been bitten. And as recently as 2006—after Tilikum had well established the worst-case scenario—Marineland had encouraged visitors to touch and hand-feed its orcas.

  I stood back and took in the scene. Belugas are lumpen in the most adorable way. When you see them, you just want to cuddle them. Their bodies are long, tapered at both ends but concave in the middle. Their heads are bubble-shaped with short, triangular beaks and jellybean eyes. They lack dorsal fins, which is ideal for slipping under ice: most belugas live in arctic waters. They are especially expressive whales, known for their chattering chorus of chirps and creaks and buzzes and songs. Belugas are also accomplished mimics. They have been known to playfully imitate the noise of passing motorboats; one captive group that could hear a nearby subway began to make subway sounds. Their faces wrinkle and emote in ways that seem delightfully familiar to us—they remind us of more innocent versions of ourselves. (Their closest relatives, however, are the exotic narwhals, toothed whales whose single, skewer-like tusks bring to mind unicorns.) In the dark northern waters where belugas romp, their spectral white bodies stand out like a visitation. Only the hardest heart would fail to be charmed by them.

  Marine park owners know this. The belugas’ charisma has made them the hot new draw in captivity. But the demand for belugas far exceeds the supply. For years they were hunted relentlessly, and they are still being plucked from the waters around Russia, but the planet’s remaining belugas grapple with an even more widespread threat—pollution. They are somewhat fragile animals, prone to illness and cancers, extra susceptible to the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, organochlorines, PCBs, dioxins, lead, and mercury swirling in their waters. Scientists studying belugas in the mightily contaminated St. Lawrence River have seen evidence of widespread miscarriages, stillbirths, and calf mortality: In 2013, a record seventeen dead calves were found drifting in the currents. One recent study of twenty-four St. Lawrence belugas turned up twenty-one tumors.

  Belugas aren’t robust captives, either. In the wild, a healthy animal might live to sixty; in the tanks, it’s the rare beluga who makes it past twenty. It is impossible to establish a firm number of how many belugas Marineland has kept or lost—there have been so many of them, the record is fuzzy, Marineland hasn’t commented and Canada has no official registry—but one source, Ceta-Base, which monitors marine parks worldwide with a heroic level of detail, tallies the park’s total population (since 1999) at seventy. This is some ugly math. According to Ceta-Base, Holer has taken delivery of thirty-five wild-caught Russian belugas. On top of that, the site also lists thirty captive births and four stillbirths, which, if accurate, meant that some twenty-nine belugas have ended their lives in Niagara Falls. But there was a note at the bottom of Ceta-Base’s roster, written in bright red letters: This list may be incomplete.

  “Why doesn’t he splash more?”

  The child was whining, bored by Kiska, who swam by so slowly it was as though she were conserving energy. “This is boring,” the boy said, tugging at his mother’s fanny pack. “Let’s go.”

  I suppose the good news about Kiska was that on this day she didn’t appear to be bleeding. Her dorsal fin drooped like a deflated balloon and she showed no interest in her surroundings—not the people, or the beluga-palooza going on next door to her, or the three rocks scattered on the bottom of her tank. There was nothing else. The orca circuited on autopilot, making no sounds, her dirigible of a body suffused with a quiet grace.

  To me, Kiska looked like depression in motion, but Marineland claimed that she was the luckiest of creatures. “Kiska is now quite elderly,” the park’s public relations stated, “and like all elderly animals or people, choses [sic] to do things at her own pace, in her own time, and as she pleases.” No one should think this whale was anything but pampered, Marineland asserted. “Kiska receives continuous care and treatment, if necessary [sic] that your average person could only dream of.” At thirty-eight, Kiska was only middle-aged, but the life she led now would make anyone old.

  On a cruelty scale, keeping an orca in isolation ranks near the top, right up with the solitary confinement of a person. Prisoners quickly implode when locked up alone: it’s a fast path to complete mental meltdown. Humans are fundamentally, biologically, evolutionarily social creatures—and so are killer whales. If anything, they’re more social than we are. The world’s only other lone captive orca, a female from Washington State named Lolita, lived at the Miami Seaquarium, where, for the past forty-three years, she had circled her tiny pool like a goldfish in a shot glass. To view aerial footage of 18-foot Lolit
a looping endlessly in her 35-foot-wide tank is to despair on a cellular level. Like Marineland, Seaquarium was the site of loud and frequent protests.

  I went below to watch Kiska through the underwater window. The viewing area was low-lit like a grotto, the tank casting a cool blue gloom. The space was packed with people, stuffed with strollers. Kiska glided by regally, but there was no joy in her movements. She was simply adrift in a lonely ether. I looked on for a few more moments, snapped some photos, and left, feeling low. Later that afternoon I had a plane to catch; I was flying to Vancouver, spending the night, then continuing on to Victoria. From there I would catch a ferry to Pender Island, in the home range of Lolita’s clan, the Southern Residents. These days, it was also the home of Chris Porter.

  Pender Island is the land of rain and giant trees, of water and wood and mildew. Slipped between Vancouver Island and British Columbia’s Pacific coast, this fourteen-square-mile island is a mere punctuation mark. But for Chris Porter, Pender was something far bigger: it was a staging ground, the place where he would plot his redemption.

  Having seen the results of interviews Porter had given during his Solomon Islands years, I had wondered if he would even agree to talk to me. How many times, after all, can a person be referred to as “the Darth Vader of Dolphins” and still want to continue the conversation? But when I contacted him, Porter was not only willing but eager to meet. In fact, the openness of his response startled me. Even people with routine secrets tend to be cagey, but here was Porter, freighted with controversy, with years of dolphin trafficking he seemed happy to discuss.

  But there was a likely motivation behind Porter’s availability. In e-mails we’d exchanged and articles I’d read, he’d described some heavy soul-searching that had led to a surprising decision: he had renounced the captivity trade. “I’m disillusioned with the industry,” he’d said. “I’m just tired of it. I have realized there are other ways to educate people about the importance and intelligence of whales and dolphins without separating them from their family groups.” This was a 180-degree twist, of course, coming from a man who had sold eighty-three dolphins into captivity in recent years. Porter acknowledged his past—“To be sure, I have a bad name”—but pledged to now shift his attentions from selling dolphins to saving them.

  When giving reasons for his about-face, Porter cited a number of sorrowful stories. He had been moved by certain dolphins in the Solomons, he said, and he’d felt that what he was doing to them was wrong. But the animal who had affected him most, the one he returned to again and again, was Tilikum. It was Dawn Brancheau’s death that had jolted him, Porter claimed. This was the final straw for a personal reason: twenty years ago, at Victoria’s Sealand of the Pacific, during Tilikum’s early years as a captive, Porter had been one of his trainers. When SeaWorld bought the orca in 1999, in the wake of Keltie Byrne’s death, Porter was among those who had helped transfer him to Orlando. He knew Tilikum, he knew him well, and now this whale had proven emphatically that the system was broken. To hear Porter tell it, whatever he did next, he was doing it for Tilikum.

  Was his conversion genuine? Perhaps. At the moment, Porter was still in exile, still mopping up his past. These days he worked as a night auditor at Poets Cove, a resort and marina on South Pender’s peaceful, picturesque coastline, and that is where we would meet.

  “I never knew it would get as big and complicated as it got. Yeah…I was surprised at how complicated it got. At the end, I was just…feeling like I was drowning.”

  Porter took a sip of his lager. He looked drained, and somewhat morose, but his blue eyes were sharp and wary. His brow, fully revealed by a receding hairline, furrowed when he spoke. We were three hours into an interview that couldn’t have been much fun for him, but I kept asking questions and he kept answering them. I wanted to know what had propelled him to the Solomons in the first place, why he made the choices he did, and if he regretted them. I wanted to understand how a person who claimed to love marine life could become a dolphin trafficker in the first place.

  “I did it to challenge the industry,” Porter told me. “Like, let’s be honest about where we’re getting these animals. If we can’t even do that, then how can we say we’re educating the public and making them aware? If we’re doing something really good, then why do we have to hide where this dolphin is coming from? Why can’t we celebrate where it comes from?”

  I listened, though it struck me as unlikely that the more details the public learned about the highly profitable dolphin trade, the more they would embrace it. In my experience, marine park–goers were willfully oblivious to the animals’ provenance, and the marine parks encouraged this. The entire industry, in fact, was built on the illusion that the dolphins had somehow dropped from the sky. But I suppose this was Porter’s point: if you can’t be transparent about what you’re doing, then perhaps you shouldn’t be doing it. His goal in the Solomons, he said, had been to create a paradigm where everyone—dolphin-hunting tribesmen and dolphin-loving tourists and the dolphins themselves, and of course, Porter and his investors—would have benefited. Though, as he knew, it hadn’t exactly worked out that way.

  “I thought, ‘Why not make a resort?’ ” he explained, in a torrent of words. “And you could have a big bay and you could have guests coming down at midnight because dolphins are more active at night—it’s artificial that we make them do shows during the day, because that’s when the people are there—and so you get shows at night, even just watching them at night’s better because they’re active, they’re playing, they’re mating, you know. It’s a fun time.” He paused for breath. “So I thought, wow. I’ve done a lot of open-ocean work in my life. I know how to…You could have the dolphins going and coming back—at breakfast, you could open up the blinds and there’s a dolphin meeting you.”

  In Porter’s scenario, the dolphins would stay only as long as they pleased. They would be fed regularly, but not enough to let their hunting skills grow rusty. Ideally, the dolphins would come and get their fish snack, then play with some guests in the lagoon, becoming regulars even in the absence of nets. “Some of the animals I’ve worked with open-ocean, they leave,” Porter elaborated. “They’re just like—‘Bye! I’m outta here.’ Others are happy to stay for a bit.”

  This plan began to percolate in 2000, when Porter left his job as head trainer at the Vancouver Aquarium and moved to Genoa, Italy, to work with the dolphins at that city’s facility. His wife and three kids had adored Italy, but Porter was itching to go bigger. Though he’d never heard of the Solomon Islands, when someone mentioned its dolphin-hunting tradition to him, Porter was intrigued. “I figured, ‘Hey, if they’re willing to kill them, then they’re probably willing to let me keep some alive. So I went down there and started meeting the locals and found a cool spot to set it up: Gavutu. But as soon as I came back all the investors said, ‘No way! That place is crazy!’ ” He chuckled at the memory. “That’s when I approached the government to export a few—so I could self-fund the resort.”

  I reached for my beer. Porter’s interpretation of events was highly debatable, including the fact that eighty-three dolphins were more than “a few.” How did he feel, I asked, when his plans for Gavutu failed? “It’s taken me a while to get to grips with it,” Porter admitted. “I went through a rough time. For the past two years I was off the rails, and I was probably off the rails in the Solomons, too, trying to deal. You know, it was an intense situation.” He paused, and stared into the middle distance. A long moment ticked by, as he gathered himself. Then he continued: “I’m at the point now where I say okay, if one individual caused that much damage, then one individual can cause that much good.”

  “What damage do you regret most?”

  Porter stopped short, as though startled by the directness of the question. He paused again, but this time the tears overwhelmed him. After a moment, he exhaled. “To individual animals,” he said, almost sobbing. “Yeah, it’s the individuals. Free the Pod died, they all fucking
died, right down to the last baby, and you know…it hits me now.” He cried some more. “Sorry,” he said, wiping his eyes. “Whew. I knew this was gonna be…” His words trailed off.

  Ultimately, the sincerity of Porter’s remorse will be evident by his actions, not his tears—but when he outlined his new project, everything about it sounded positive. Using new technologies, he wanted to immerse viewers in ocean simulations; to let people virtually ride along with a pod of orcas, for instance. As he spoke, Porter became animated, rattling off his plans with entrepreneurial zeal. Maybe the simulator would become a ride. Or maybe it would consist of a module that people could drive around below the sea surface. “Like a diver bike,” he said. “Have you ever seen those diver bikes? They’re from Germany. They can do eight knots underwater!”

  These ideas were already in play, Porter told me, elsewhere around the globe. “I’ve heard Richard Branson is talking about doing simulators now. Good! And then there’s James Cameron. Good! I really believe we’re in a moment when innovators getting together on behalf of the ocean—we’ll be able to make marine parks archaic.” If this vision were realized, then one day soon we would look up and no kid would even want to go to a Marineland or a SeaWorld or a Shenzhen Ocean Safari Park or a Janohire Dolphin Farm or a Yaroslavsky Dolphinarium, unless these places had evolved into something completely different: businesses that truly benefited the natural world.

  Porter had indicated that he would be shooting the simulator footage himself, swimming first with sea lions, to experiment. “How will you film the orcas?” I asked. “Will they let you get that close to them?”

  “Well, I’ll be honest,” Porter replied, with a sly smile. “Because I know how to catch them, I know how to get them on camera.”