The quest to free Lolita the orca from five decades in captivity

Lolita loves people, all her trainers agree.

Over the last five decades, the gentle southern resident killer whale – the last one still in captivity – has seen staff and audiences at the Miami Seaquarium come and go. She’s eaten rotten fish and been made to perform through injuries. There is no shade in her tank – the smallest built for orcas in the U.S. – so she bakes alone in the shallow water, under the relentless Miami sun.

And yet still, she glides toward humans when they come near, raising a pectoral fin in greeting. If it’s an old friend, she might stick out her pink tongue in a kind of impish, cetacean grin.

“She’s like a big, mellow Saint Bernard,” says former trainer, Mark Simmons.

We were not always attuned to the inner lives of orcas. Until recently, we knew virtually nothing about them. To whalers, they were bloodthirsty savages. Going back more than a century, fishermen cursed and shot at the salmon-stealing pests.

Then, in the 1960s, at the height of our assaults on sea creatures big and small, a couple orcas were captured in waters off B.C. The animals intrigued their human observers, who would never see the whales – or the ocean – in the same way again.

These were not indistinguishable killing machines, they realized, but docile individuals with their own personalities, their own quirks.

Scientists soon discovered that their bewildering range of clicks and whistles were dialects – languages distinct to each community, often to each pod. Biologists noted the profound, cradle-to-grave bond that weds an orca mother to her young.

The animals know joy, fear, frustration and anger, we learned. They dream. They teach. They grieve. Their gargantuan brains hold the same von Economo neurons that hardwire humans for empathy and love – but in even larger relative numbers.

In the aggregate, these discoveries suggested a discomfiting reality about our own nature – as if scientists were holding a mirror to the sea.

ALASKA

DETAIL

BRITISH

COLUMBIA

Penn

Cove

Haida

Gwaii

Whidbey

Island

WASH.

Pacific Ocean

Vancouver

Vancouver

Island

Critical

habitat:

Salish Sea

Their range extends

from southeastern

Alaska to central

California

Seattle

WASHINGTON

Portland

Southern resident

killer whale (SRKW)

OREGON

Name: Killer whale or orca

(Orcinus orca)

Social: The SRKW lives in

an extended family made up

of three pods

CALIFORNIA

Diet: Mostly chinook salmon

San Francisco

Key threats: Shipping; noise;

pollution; oil spills; declining

food

200 km

Orcas at a glance

Weight:

Males: up to 6,600kg

Females: up to 4,700kg

Rounded

dorsal fin

Lifespan: 30 to 90 years

Open saddle

patch marking

Fluke

Eye

Pectoral flipper

Length:

Males: up to 9m

Females: up to 8m

john sopinski/the globe and mail, SOURCE: openstreetmap;

noaa fisheries; wwf.ca

ALASKA

DETAIL

BRITISH

COLUMBIA

Penn

Cove

Haida

Gwaii

Whidbey

Island

WASH.

Pacific Ocean

Vancouver

Vancouver

Island

Critical

habitat:

Salish Sea

Their range extends

from southeastern

Alaska to central

California

Seattle

WASHINGTON

Portland

Southern resident

killer whale (SRKW)

OREGON

Name: Killer whale or orca

(Orcinus orca)

Social: The SRKW lives in

an extended family made up

of three pods

CALIFORNIA

Diet: Mostly chinook salmon

San Francisco

Key threats: Shipping; noise;

pollution; oil spills; declining

food

200 km

Orcas at a glance

Weight:

Males: up to 6,600kg

Females: up to 4,700kg

Rounded

dorsal fin

Lifespan: 30 to 90 years

Open saddle

patch marking

Fluke

Eye

Pectoral flipper

Length:

Males: up to 9m

Females: up to 8m

john sopinski/the globe and mail, SOURCE: openstreetmap;

noaa fisheries; wwf.ca

ALASKA

DETAIL

BRITISH

COLUMBIA

Southern resident

killer whale (SRKW)

Penn

Cove

Name: Killer whale or orca

(Orcinus orca)

Haida

Gwaii

Whidbey

Island

Social: The SRKW lives in

an extended family made up

of three pods

WASH.

Diet: Mostly chinook salmon

Pacific Ocean

Vancouver

Key threats: Shipping; noise;

pollution; oil spills; declining

food

Vancouver

Island

Critical

habitat:

Salish Sea

Seattle

Their range extends

from southeastern

Alaska to central

California

WASHINGTON

Orcas at a glance

Rounded

dorsal fin

Portland

Open saddle

patch marking

Lifespan: 30 to 90 years

OREGON

Weight:

Males: up to 6,600kg

Females: up to 4,700kg

Fluke

CALIFORNIA

Eye

Pectoral flipper

San Francisco

Length:

Males: up to 9m

Females: up to 8m

200 km

john sopinski/the globe and mail, SOURCE: openstreetmap; noaa fisheries; wwf.ca

We were by then well aware that captivity had been a catastrophe, not just for those orcas we had squeezed into glass pools. It pushed the southern residents, who swim the Salish Sea – the slate grey Pacific waters off southern B.C. and northern Washington State – to the brink.

For years, animal rights activists have been demanding Lolita’s release, arguing that we owe a moral debt to these magnificent beings, and in particular to Lolita – who has been breaching for gawking tourists for the past 53 years.

But the quixotic proposal never went anywhere, even after Sir Elton John lent his name to the project. Lolita was meanwhile earning millions headlining Dade County’s top attraction.

Then, like the final pieces of a jigsaw puzzle clicking into place, three things happened, one after the other: the Lummi Nation, whose territories border Lolita’s home waters, took ownership of the project; the Seaquarium changed hands; and in March, a whale of a donor came aboard.

All of a sudden, the whimsical idea of shipping an elderly, two-tonne whale to the misty shores of rural Washington started to feel very real.

If things go according to plan, her flight north could depart in as few as six months. But while it may be easy to capture a whale, scientists are learning that returning one to the ocean is not – especially a creature as old and weak as Lolita.

The first of the two captures that lead to a shift in our attitude toward orcas came in 1964. The Vancouver Aquarium, a symbol of the city’s status as a west coast boomtown, was being renovated. Director Murray Newman wanted a model of an orca skeleton to hang from the new entry hall. But the sculptor needed a specimen to copy. The only way to get one, it seemed, was to kill one.

The men hired for the hit instead captured a live one, harpooning the blackfish off the Gulf Island of Saturna. Mr. Newman had them tow the wounded animal, tethered by a rope, to Vancouver, a puttering, 20-hour journey.

At Jericho Beach, a makeshift sea pen was built for the “monster,” as the CBC described him the night of his capture.

Moby Doll – the name was chosen in a radio contest, when the whale was still thought to be a she – was an immediate sensation. And when Moby didn’t behave as media expected, a new vision of the ocean’s greatest predator began to emerge.

Moby, who was likely no more than five at the time, revealed the remarkably tender and intelligent character of his kind. He liked to be rubbed with a broom, his handlers learned – like a “great, big cocker spaniel,” said Sam Burich, the sculptor hired by the aquarium. Soon, they were scratching his fins and belly with their bare hands.

In all, the juvenile whale lived 87 days in Vancouver before succumbing to an infection from the harpoon wound. The men hired to kill him were shattered. Terry McLeod, who fed Moby his final fish, felt “broken,” he said.

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A similar scenario played out the following summer, in Seattle. Mr. Newman’s puckish rival, Ted Griffin, who owned the Seattle Marine Aquarium, had snuck into Moby’s enclosure. What he saw so electrified him he considered stealing the whale, he told historian Jason Colby decades later.

When Mr. Griffin heard that a fisherman had an orca bull trapped behind nets off Namu, in northern B.C. in June, 1965, he gave the man $8,000 cash. Then he hauled the four-tonne orca in a floating pen 700 kilometres south, to Puget Sound – and named him for the tiny fishing port where he was captured. Several of Namu’s relatives, his mother and two siblings, followed most of the way.

Mr. Griffin, who learned to ride on Namu’s wide back – sometimes falling asleep up there – formed a profound, almost mystical bond with the whale, who used to hug the captor he had come to trust using his pectoral fins. Their friendship was documented in the 1966 film, Namu, the Killer Whale.

Like Moby, Namu died from an infection, less than a year after his capture – but the pair of orcas stoked a global craze to exhibit killer whales. Croppers, as orca hunters came to be known, targeted the young, as they were cheapest and easiest to ship. The Salish Sea was their primary source of supply. Mr. Griffin became the best in the business.

It was an ugly line of work. Orcas were buzzed by low-flying planes, and scared into traps by deafening seal bombs. Captured calves keened and howled for their mothers. At least 12 drowned in capture attempts.

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One of B.C.’s biggest hauls occurred near Pender Harbour, where six orcas were plucked from the sea in July, 1968. Anne Clemence had alerted a local fisherman to the whales’ presence after hearing the telltale “slap, slap, slap” of their tails from her seaside cottage in Garden Bay. Any excitement the London-trained nurse felt over their capture quickly vanished.

After the whales selected for sale to marine parks had been culled, their stricken pod mates remained near, she told The Globe. Ms. Clemence, now 90, says she can still hear their plaintive cries: “It was awful. They were calling all night long – in quite extraordinary high moans. It made you sick. I would never, ever do it again.”

At least 270 killer whales were captured in the Salish Sea this way, some multiple times, according to Mr. Colby, a history professor at the University of Victoria who wrote about this dark chapter of West Coast history in Orca: How We Came to Know and Love the Ocean’s Greatest Predator. More than 50 whales were sold to marine parks as far off as Japan and Australia – and the southern resident population, icons of the Pacific Northwest, was slashed by more than a third. That reduction would eventually help land them on the endangered species list.

Just 73 remain today, with every last one fighting courageously – possibly futilely – against the dying of the light. The curtain of extinction is falling fast on the Salish Sea’s tenderhearted apex predators.

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One of the last big hauls netted Lolita. It was August, 1970. Mr. Griffin’s company, Namu Inc., herded more than 100 orcas into Penn Cove off Whidbey Island, 50 km south of Victoria. Croppers surprised the animals during their joyful annual greeting, known as a superpod, when the three southern resident pods – known as J, K and L – rush gleefully together, cartwheeling, fin slapping, playing, calling and mating. The hunters didn’t know it at the time, but they had netted almost every last remaining southern resident. Unable to handle so many whales, Mr. Griffin quickly released several dozen, who remained just outside his nets. The younglings were lassoed, then lifted from the water, belly-down, in hammock-like nets, says marine biologist Terry Newby.

Mr. Newby, a graduate student at the time, convinced Mr. Griffin to allow him to observe their operation. “It took a week to separate eight sucklings from their mothers and load them in trucks,” he told The Globe, his voice thick with emotion. “It’s painful to think about – they were panicked. The calves were murring and crying for their mothers. The cows were spy hopping and squealing – it went on all night long.”

Four calves died after activists cut holes in the nets to attempt to free them late one night; the frantic whelps instead tangled themselves in the netting and drowned.

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Mr. Newby was no stranger to violence. He fought in the Mekong Delta during a tour in Vietnam, and fished commercially as a younger man, but the experience destroyed him. To this day, the sound of whales leaves him flattened.

He remembers trying to calm Lolita after she was loaded onto a truck, whispering gently to her. “She looked me right in the eye. I thought: My God, what have we done?”

The orcas’ visible grief and distress also had a profound impact on the residents and tourists who watched it unfold. We knew by then that whale populations were crashing worldwide – and events at Penn Cove helped usher in the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972, which imposed federal regulations on the capture of marine mammals from U.S. waters.

Today, the main threat to the southern residents isn’t SeaWorld, says Mr. Colby: “It’s us – the growing region that loves them.”

The Salish Sea is becoming an urban saltwater lake, “increasingly loud, empty and polluted,” says Mr. Colby. Vessel traffic often makes it so noisy southern residents cannot find prey, according to new science from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans.

Southern residents, who are among the most endangered whale populations in the country, have grown so stressed, so starved, so riddled with toxins, that their guts are damaged in a way similar to humans with Chrohn’s disease, says marine biologist Sheila Thornton. She leads a team tasked by Ottawa with trying to save the southern residents from extinction. Their decline – hastened and aggravated by the captures – may be too steep, some fear, and the waters they share with us too depleted.

After her capture at Penn Cove, Lolita – who was estimated to be between four and six years old at the time – was shipped to Key Biscayne, an island just south of Miami, to join an older male named Hugo. The age gap between the pairing inspired her new owners to name the adolescent orca Lolita.

Like the Nabokov novel, this was not quite a love story. The whales got along, performing together for 10 years, but poor Hugo had a habit of ramming his head into the tank walls, a symptom of psychosis in captive whales. He died from a brain aneurysm in 1980, after repeated self harm.

Lolita, who used to chatter with her tank mate all day long, fell quiet after that. She might vocalize a little when staff arrived in the morning, says Shanna Simpson – her head trainer for six years, until 2009 – but she was otherwise silent.

In the two decades Ms. Simpson has spent working with animals, none stole her heart quite the way Lolita did. Between shows, she would lie on a rubber mat, whispering to the whale, who liked to nudge her around the ice cold waters.

“You’re such a good girl,” Ms. Simpson would tell her. “You’re so pretty.” Lolita, she adds, has “a huge piece of my heart – she always will.”

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The Coast Salish peoples are perhaps the only ones who never feared the killer whale, and consider the southern residents as their kin beneath the waves. “We have shared the waters with them since the beginning, and have a deep understanding and love for them,” says Jay Julius, the Lummi’s former chairman.

In 2017, the Lummi Nation’s governing body passed a motion to bring home Lolita, whom they have since named Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut, which means “daughter of the southern residents.”

“She’s family, says Mr. Julius. “We have rights to her.” Momentum built when the Miami Beach Commission voted unanimously for a symbolic resolution to release the whale to her home waters that year.

An appalling September, 2021, inspection report by the U.S. Department of Agriculture breathed new life into their bid. The report outlined a litany of problems: Lolita’s pool was so cloudy inspectors could not see the bottom. Chlorine had burned her eyes. She was fed “poor quality, soft-bellied capelin that smelled bad” over the concerns of trainers and veterinarians, causing an inflammation. Because her pool has no shade, she had developed lesions in one eye from direct sunlight. Her food intake had been abruptly cut by 20 per cent over the objection of her vet. And on it went.

In August, 2021, just prior to the report’s release, the Florida businessman who had long refused to liberate his prized whale “to appease a fringe group,” sold the Seaquarium’s lease to the Cancun-based Dolphin Company.

Lolita’s concrete tank was so decayed, the USDA ultimately yanked its license, the reason for Lolita’s abrupt retirement last year.

Around that time, CEO Eduardo Albor, a Yucatan-trained lawyer, agreed to sit down with Friends of Toki, a non-profit launched by Florida developer Pritam Singh. (Lolita is also known as Tokitae, or Toki). His daughter talked him into it, Mr. Albor later told reporters.

Although Mr. Albor didn’t put forward the money to plan and execute her release, he allowed Friends of Toki to pay to upgrade Lolita’s pool’s water filtration system and install two 20-tonne chillers to better cool the water. New medical specialists and trainers were added to her care team, including Charles Vinick and Jeff Foster, who worked to rewild Keiko, the titular orca from Free Willy, who was released off the coast of Iceland in 1998. In preparation for a day when a move might be possible, Mr. Foster and his wife Katy, a marine mammal researcher, have begun to teach the orca – who is said to deeply dislike change – to forage and eat live fish.

Friends of Toki estimates that they have spent US$750,000 upgrading her tank and care so far. To continue the work, they needed deeper pockets than Mr. Singh’s. Somehow, Jim Irsay, owner of the NFL’s Indianapolis Colts heard their pleas, and agreed to help bankroll not only the orca’s care, but her transfer to the northwest as well, which the Lummi estimate could top $15-million. The move would involve lifting Lolita into an enormous fibreglass tank, which would then be trucked to an airport.

“I know Lolita wants to get to free waters,” Mr. Irsay said in a brief statement, his only comment on the whale so far.

The Lummi hope to release Lolita to a sea pen the size of two football fields in their traditional territories, some 30 kilometres south of the Canadian border. Crucially, she would be in acoustic range of her family. DNA work is being done to prove what archival photos suggest: that Lolita is from L Pod, and her mother, Ocean Sun, now 93, is still living.

“The plan is to provide her with all of the veterinary and animal care staffing that she has today in a protected netted environment – where she’s in the ocean, where she can chase crabs and birds and feel the waves and the currents and the weather,” says Mr. Vinick. “Whether it can go beyond that is way too premature to tell. But we’re holding out a hope – we are all dreamers at heart.”

Ellie Tah-Mahs Kinley, a driving force behind Lummi efforts, favours a site on one of the San Juan Islands east of Victoria, partly because it is a 45-minute boat ride from mainland, which could limit the number of lookie loos: “After giving 53 years to providing entertainment and joy, and profit to a corporation, she deserves to be left alone.”

Ms. Simpson, who now works for the Topeka Zoo, is among several of Lolita’s former trainers who fear that sending the geriatric, Florida-raised whale on a 5,000 kilometre, cross continent journey to a dark, cold and wildly new environment could prove fatal.

She believes that a larger tank – with better water quality, a bigger habitat, a better diet – is a more humane solution, in part because it would allow Lolita to remain near her trainers and handlers, “the only family she knows.”

“This is a great Cinderella story – I get it,” says Mark Simmons, who worked to rehabilitate Keiko in Iceland after leaving SeaWorld, where he trained orcas. “But Lolita is not a wild whale. We have spent the last 53 years conditioning her to create human relationships. You can’t unshoot that gun.”

His experience with Keiko taught him as much: “Every opportunity we tried to introduce Keiko to wild whales, to get him in the open ocean, he always, without fail, returned seeking people.”

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Keiko never did join a wild pod, and died from pneumonia five years after his release.

In media, the story is invariably also described as a failure. His release into the wild was always the end game. But that is not the only valid takeaway from the orca’s last days.

When Keiko was removed from a Mexico City marine park, he was gaunt and diseased, covered in itchy white papilloma warts and lesions. He went on to spend the last five years of his life in the North Atlantic, cared for by humans from his massive sea pen ringed by tawny lava cliffs; there, his skin cleared, he gained 3,000 lbs, and he learned to catch fish – and the odd bird – and then swam alone to Norway, where he eventually died.

In the case of Lolita, what everyone agrees on is that something needs to change. “It’s hard. And it’s a little crazy. But it’s the right thing to do,” said Mr. Vinick, who, at 75, has become a giant in the world of whales.

Mr. Colby, a stoic former fisherman, visited Lolita in 2016. After leaving the Seaquarium, he walked back to his hotel room and wept. It was the deafening silence that broke him: “There are no more social animals out there than the southern residents. They virtually never stop vocalizing.”

Killer whales use sound the way we do sight, he added. He worried that Lolita feared the silence the way his young sons did the dark: “It must be terrifying.”

He is cautious but intrigued by plans to release her: “If you asked a prisoner on death row whether they wanted to spend their last five years in jail, or feel the sun on their face in the place where they grew up, if only for a few days, what do you think they would say? I know what my choice would be.”

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