After 33Ìęyears of living captive in marine park pools, Tilikum, SeaWorld’s best-known killer whale, , January 6, in Orlando. His death follows SeaWorld’s Ìęlast year that it will stop captive breeding and that the 28Ìękiller whales at its three U.S. parks and at a park in the Canary Islands will be the last generation of killer whales at SeaWorld.

Tilikum’s death, probably due to a persistent bacterial lung infection, was not unexpected. He was an estimated 36Ìęyears old and had survived longer in captivity than any other male killer whale except one. (Ulises, who has been in captivity for 36 years,Ìęis kept at SeaWorld San Diego.) “Tilikum had, and will continue to have, a special place in the hearts of the SeaWorld family, as well as the millions of people all over the world that he inspired,” said SeaWorld President and CEO Joel Manby. “My heart goes out to our team who cared for him like family.”

Still, it was Tilikum’s February 2010 primal scream, when he pulled SeaWorld trainer Dawn Brancheau into his tank and , that forced the world to seriously question the wisdom and ethics of keeping killer whales in captivity. Afterward, on screens and in countless articles, on Facebook pages, and Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr accounts, the world got to know Tilikum. Despite the violence with which he emerged as a global figure—he was involved in the deaths of two other people during his years in captivity—the tragic details of his life earned him sympathy. He helped inspire and to take the public . He helped inspire grassroots activists to campaign for musicians andÌębusinesses to cut ties with SeaWorld. He became the public face of opposition to marine parks.

“He was such a game changer,” says Colleen Gorman, who co-founded , an activist non-profit followed by tens of thousands. “I cannot think of one other animal that's been held in captivity who has garnered so much worldwide attention. The world is watching this right now, and everybody's heart is breaking over this news.”

The details of Tilikum’s life were discomfiting to a public that thought of SeaWorld's Shamu shows and its whales as happy, fun-loving performers. In 1983, Tilikum was captured off Iceland as a two-year-old calf, taken from his mother and family pod, and sold into the thriving global killer whale entertainment business. At his first marine park, Sealand of the Pacific in Victoria, British Columbia, Tilikum was bullied by two older female orcas, who raked him with their teeth and battered him to establish dominance. Most nights, he was forced into a cramped holding module with them. In February 1991, he and the two other Sealand killer whales drowned assistant trainer Keltie Byrne after she slipped and fell part way into their pool. Byrne’s death led to the closure of Sealand, and Tilikum was purchased by SeaWorld. In 1992, Tilikum was shipped to SeaWorld’s Orlando park, where he continued to be picked on by other whales, and as a result spent a lot of time alone. Nevertheless, he became SeaWorld’s most prolific breeding male, siring 14 calves, ten of whom are still alive today. (Including grandchildren, 13 of SeaWorld’s current 29 killer whales have Tilikum’s DNA.)

In 1999, Tilikum killed again, , who somehow managed to get in to his SeaWorld Orlando pool after hours. Finally, in February 2010, Tilikum killed Brancheau, holding her underwater and ripping her body apart. The national scrutiny after Brancheau’s death forced SeaWorld to put an end to the most famous element of its Shamu shows: trainers performing in the water with killer whales. New protocols also limited close contact with Tilikum, further isolating him. He returned to show duties in 2011, using his massive 12,000-pound body to deliver his signature splash at the end of performances. But age and poor health crept up on him.

Because the details of Tilikum’s life were in such stark contrast to theÌęShamu narrative so carefully crafted by SeaWorld for decades, his story became one that the public cared deeply about. He changed the course of my life, too, and I spent four years writing about Tilikum and SeaWorld—first about Dawn Brancheau’s death in “The Killer In The Pool,” and then as an associate producer for the documentary .

Tilikum changed SeaWorld as well. In 2013, as Blackfish helped Tilikum's story reach millions of viewers, SeaWorld descended into an era of decline in annual visitors, revenue, and stock price. (Before the recent decision to end captive breeding, SeaWorld shares were down more than 55 percent from their pre-Blackfish highs.) Legislators in California, New York, Washington, and congress started promoting bills to put the brakes on killer whale captivity. SeaWorldÌęCEOÌęJoel Manby, who came on board in 2015 to turn the company around, concluded that a business model that had relied on captive killer whales for more than 50 years couldn’t succeed in a world where people cared so much about Tilikum and other whales. “As society's understanding of orcas continues to change, SeaWorld is changing with it,” Manby for the Los Angeles Times on March 17, 2016.

SeaWorld is not in the habit of commemorating its dead killer whales, though Tilikum may prove an exception. He willÌęundergo a necropsy to determine the exact cause of death—many would say the proximate cause was captivity—then his remains will be disposed of. (In the past, dead SeaWorld animals were usually taken to a rendering plant.) Many at SeaWorld, including close friends of Brancheau’s, will feel his loss.

“There are trainers who definitely love him. There are going to be people who are genuinely upset,” says John Hargrove, who was a senior trainer at SeaWorld Texas until 2012. Millions of “Tili” fans around the world will mourn his passing, too.

Tilikum’s real orca family in the North Atlantic will never know what happened to him. But their loss and his troubled life ultimately brought an end to killer whale captivity at SeaWorld, and may help bring an end to it worldwide. Perhaps that’s a fitting epitaph—Tilikum (1983-2017): he did not choose the world he lived in, but he survived long enough to change it.

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There’s no way to come away from the story of Harambe with any feeling other than deep sadness. Harambe, of course, was the western lowland gorilla who was Ìęemployee this past weekend after a four-year old boy managed to get into his enclosure. Zoo director Thane Maynard acknowledged that Harambe showed no acute signs of aggression toward the child. However, he did drag the boy around,Ìęperhaps to get away from a screaming panicked crowd above.

The zoo considered trying to tranquilize Harambe with a dart, but concluded that the moments after the dart would have hit—before the tranquilizer would haveÌętaken full effect—would be risky for the child. Instead, to minimize risk to the boy, the zoo decided to “put the gorilla down.” In other words, a zoo sniper shot him. “We are heartbroken about losing Harambe, but a child’s life was in danger and a quick decision had to be made by our Dangerous Animal Response Team,” Maynard .

It is easy to blame the child's mother—and many did. But any parent can tell you that it is near-impossible to keepÌętrack of a young child everyÌęinstant you're with them (I lost my son in an airport once). It is easy to blame the zoo for its decision to kill Harambe and for its poorly designed enclosure—and many did. But this was the first time that anyone had jumped into Gorilla World in the almost 40 years that it'sÌębeen open, and it is hard to fault the zoo for an agonizing choice that offered maximum protection to a young boy.

If I have any blame to cast, I reserve it for the crowd, which shrieked and panicked, seemingly agitatingÌęHarambe and making it all the more difficult for zoo employees to see aÌęway to a peaceful recovery of the boy. “[Harambe] showed a combination of protection and confusion. He stood over the child, held him up, moved/dragged him through the water (at least once very roughly), stood over him again,” primate expert Frans De Waal . “Much of his reaction may have been triggered by public noise and yelling.” Note to future zoo crowds: when a child ends up in an animal enclosure, back away and stay quiet so the animals at least have a chance to remain calm.

Of course, the zoo will redesign the leaky barrier. But the reality is that when you put animals on display for human entertainment the unexpected will happen. kept by Born Free USA, there have been 33 human deaths andÌę224 injuries at zoos and aquariums in the U.S. since 1990. (The vast majority were staff, but nineÌęof the deaths were visitors.)ÌęTheÌęCincinnati incident is, in fact,Ìęat least the third timeÌęthat a child has ended up in a gorilla enclosure. In the , at the Jersey Zoo in the UK and the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago, the gorillas stayed mostly calm and even helped and the children (though some cries from the child and crowd at the Jersey Zoo also seemed to agitate a young gorilla). Happily, both children were recovered without harm to the animals.

In another example late last month, a man jumped into the lion enclosure at the Santiago Metropolitan Zoo in ChileÌęand started stripping and provoking the lions. The zoo shot to save him, then later found a suicide note in the man's clothing. The degree to which human safety and agendas trumpÌęthe well-being of zoo animals is perfectly illustrated by the fact that, last Friday, the Cincinnati Zoo celebrated Harambe's 17th birthday. On Saturday, it shot him. And after doing that, zoo workers took the supremely utilitarian step of .

It is also worth noting that even when humans aren’t jumping intoÌęenclosures and putting animals at risk, zoos are a pretty bad bargain for Harambe and other . There are about 765 western lowland gorillas in . Many exhibit stereotypical behaviors—like regurgitating food, pacing, andÌę—that indicate stress or boredom. Many are on as a result. And that gorillas are particularly ill-suited to be on exhibit because crowds agitate and stress them.

All this, and Harambe’s dismal end, would be easier to accept if the Species Survival Program of which Harambe was a part, was actually doing a better job of helping his species to survive. But western lowland gorillas—thanks to habitat destruction, hunting, and poaching (some of it for zoos)—have been on a steady downward trajectory that currently has them by the International Union For Conservation of Nature. By that measure, weÌęare utterly failing Harambe, and failing his species. Which makes his short captive life, and his death by zoo, all the more tragic.

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Early this morning, in that shocked both its staunchest critics and fans, SeaWorld said that it would bring an immediate end to its killer whale breeding program, and that the 30 killer whales it currently owns at marine parks in Florida, California, and Texas, and at a park in the Canary Islands, would be the last generation of killer whales at SeaWorld. In addition, SeaWorld said it would end its theatrical killer whale shows, double-down on environmental and conservation messaging, and partner with the Humane Society Of the United States to .

SeaWorld’s abrupt change in direction follows years of criticism that keeping killer whales—which are large, highly-intelligent, and socially-complex apex predators—in concrete pools for the purposes of entertainment and profit is unethical and inhumane. That criticism gained worldwide momentum after SeaWorld’s largest killer whale, Tilikum, killed popular SeaWorld trainer Dawn Brancheau in Orlando, in February 2010. Brancheau’s death, and Tilikum’s troubled life in captivity, was at the center of șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű’s “The Killer In The Pool,” which inspired the critically-acclaimed and widely viewed 2013 documentary .

After the release of Blackfish, SeaWorld suffered declines in attendance, revenues, and stock price, and a new CEO, Joel Manby, was brought in last year to try and turn the company’s business model around. To do that, Manby announced today that SeaWorld has to move on from killer whales. “As society's understanding of orcas continues to change, SeaWorld is changing with it. By making this the last generation of orcas in our care and reimagining how guests will encounter these beautiful animals, we are fulfilling our mission of providing visitors to our parks with experiences that matter,” Manby .

As someone who has been reporting on SeaWorld and the debate about killer whale captivity since writing “The Killer In The Pool,” I’m not surprised that SeaWorld has decided that its killer-whale-centric business model is increasingly anachronistic and unprofitable. Because it is. I am surprised, however, after years of against critics, serial , and with spies, at how quickly Manby has thrown out SeaWorld’s old game plan and is making a decisive break with the marine park’s past. So kudos to Manby for seeing where his business was headed and understanding that it needed reinvention.

But before everyone gets together in a big group hug, let’s pause to consider the realities of how this might play out.

The first and most important point is that even with an immediate end to captive breeding, killer whales are long-lived, and SeaWorld could have some of its younger killer whales in its pools for 30 or more years. (One SeaWorld female, Takara, at SeaWorld Texas, .) That gives SeaWorld decades to make the transition from featuring killer whales to whatever entertainment or educational model it is moving toward. It also means that SeaWorld will continue to keep killer whales in concrete pools for a long time, no matter what their plans are to upgrade pool designs.

SeaWorld no doubt is hoping that today’s announcement will mollify critics, stabilize its business, and bring more visitors to its parks. But the criticism of SeaWorld all along has been that killer whales don’t belong in small tanks, confined to an unnatural and stressful environment. So I’d expect critics to applaud SeaWorld’s announcement and immediately call upon SeaWorld to retire its killer whale collection to natural, sea-based sanctuaries where they will have more space and stimulation.

Of SeaWorld’s current 29 killer whales, six were born in the wild (five of those six have lived in captivity for more than 30 years), and 23Ìęwere born in captivity.ÌęIn a , SeaWorld CEO Manby pre-empts any calls that they be set free, writing “If we release them into the ocean, they will likely die.” Sanctuaries could be a viable option, however building and maintaining sea-based sanctuaries for killer whales would be a complex and expensive undertaking. From a hard-nosed business standpoint, sanctuaries, where it’s harder to see the animals, don’t seem very attractive. SeaWorld says that its killer whales will remain at its marine parks and won’t be sold abroad to unrelated parks in Asia, Russia, and the Middle East, where public opinion is more amenable to killer whale entertainment. That leaves SeaWorld with two costly choices: weathering ongoing criticism for keeping killer whales in its existing pools or investing in developing sea-based sanctuaries. Ìę

The last big question I am left with is: having announced that this will be the last generation of killer whales at SeaWorld, what changes might SeaWorld be pressured to make to its treatment and use of dolphins? Killer whales, after all, are simply the largest species of dolphin. If it isn’t right or good business to keep them in concrete pools, breed them, and put them in shows, how will it be possible for SeaWorld to justify continuing to do all those things with its dozens of bottlenose dolphins? And what about its beluga and pilot whales? And its sea lions? Captivity is not very kind to those intelligent marine mammal species either. Setting killer whales apart and drawing the line there might not be so easy. Ìę

For now, however, it is enough to say that these are good questions to have, and that they flow directly from SeaWorld’s surprising and welcome decision to declare openly that it is moving toward a future without captive killer whales. How this will play out and what it might mean for all marine mammals in captivity will be the next chapter. But credit SeaWorld and the millions of grassroots activists who pushed for change for turning the page today.

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“Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are.” That’s what the French lawyer Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, who happened to have a deep love of gastronomy, wrote in 1825. A century later, a diet-hawking American nutritionist named Victor Lindlahr rendered it as: “You are what you eat.” I propose revising it further: Tell me what you eat and I will tell you how you impact the planet.

Most of us are aware that our food choices have environmental consequences. (Who hasn’t heard about the methane back draft from cows?) But when it comes to the specifics of why our decisions matter, we’re at a loss, bombarded with confusing choices in the grocery-store aisles about what to buy if we care about planetary health. Are organic fruits and vegetables really worth the higher prices, and are they better for the environment? If I’m a meat eater, should I opt for free-range, grass-fed beef? Is it OK to buy a pineapple flown in from Costa Rica, or should I eat only locally grown apples?

The science of food’s ecological footprint can be overwhelming, yet it’s important to understand it. For starters, in wealthy societies food consumption is estimated to account for 20 to 30 percent of the total footprint of a household. Feeding ourselves dominates our landscapes, using about half the ice-free land on earth. It sends us into the oceans, where we have fished nearly 90 percent of species to the brink or beyond. It affects all the planet’s natural systems, producing more than 30 percent of global greenhouse gases. Farming uses about 70 percent of our water and pollutes rivers with fertilizer and waste that in turn create vast coastal dead zones. The food on your plate touches everything.

“If you look at the heavy-hitter list of global-scale changes that are human induced, how we feed ourselves is invariably near the top,” says , a professor at Dalhousie University’s School for Resource and Environmental Studies (SRES) in Halifax, Nova Scotia, who has been studying the world’s food systems for 15 years. “But the great thing about food is that we have choices, and we have the opportunity to effect change three times a day.”

So what does a sustainable diet actually look like? I’ve thought a lot about my food choices and became a vegan a few years ago, but I still don’t know all the answers. So I set out to find them.

I didn’t go hunting for a crazed notion of perfection. I was simply looking for an attainable way to eat—whether you’re a vegan, a vegetarian, or an omnivore. Here’s what I discovered.

Paleo Is Stupid

One of my first stops is with Tyedmers. On a surprisingly warm evening for September in Halifax, he and dozens of SRES students are gathered on the back deck of a modest clapboard house to celebrate the start of the term. The only strange thing is what I see on many plates: hamburgers.

Admittedly, chicken and veggie burgers are also available. But the fact that an environmental-studies cookout features beef—perhaps the most vilified of all foods in terms of planetary impact—reminds me of the deep tension that exists between the urgency of what we know and the inertia of how we live. We love our meat. And any conversation about food and sustainability has to start with it.

Before I arrived, Tyedmers pointed me to a few landmark studies, the results of which are hard to ignore. Eighty percent of the world’s agricultural lands are allocated to animals, either for pasture or to produce food for them. More than 20 percent of all water consumed is used to grow grain to feed livestock. A estimated that livestock accounted for 15 percent of greenhouse-gas emissions, about the same as the entire global transport sector. Other analyses, which argue that the UN estimate doesn’t adequately account for things like the CO2 produced by the respiration of tens of billions of farm animals, estimate that livestock might be responsible for up to 51 percent of global emissions. “Meat is heat,” environmentalists like to say.

The type of meat you eat matters, too. A , a Washington, D.C., nonprofit, ranked the climate impact of various meats. Lamb was the worst offender: for every one kilogram (or 2.2 pounds) consumed, the EWG estimates that 86.6 pounds of greenhouse gases are produced. Beef was next, at 59.5 pounds of greenhouse gases. Then pork, at about 26.5 pounds. Chicken, at 15.4 pounds, is the most climate-efficient farmed meat.

Meat is equally disproportionate in its thirst for water. Beans and lentils require five gallons of water per gram of protein produced, chicken nine gallons, and beef 29.6.

Reductions in meat consumption can deliver outsize benefits to anyone trying to eat more sustainably. “The question isn’t beef or no beef,” says Tyedmers, who eats it about five times a year. “It’s the right quantities of it. There are grasslands on the planet that can support beef, but we need to focus on portions and frequency.”

The average American currently packs away a staggering 185 pounds of meat a year, the equivalent of more than eight ounces a day. Yet the USDA’s 2010 dietary guidelines recommend just 3.7 ounces of meat per day—about a palm-size burger—which comes out to around 84 pounds per year. Eating the recommended amount would mean a 55 percent cut in meat consumption.

Here’s a sense of what the planet might reap in return. A concluded that a diet that is vegetarian five days a week and includes meat just two days a week would reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and water and land use by about 45 percent.

Does eating grass-fed, free-range meat let you off the hook? Not really, because meat takes a toll no matter how it’s raised. Studies actually show that a factory-farm animal emits fewer greenhouse gases than a free-range one, because it lives a shorter life. But Greg Fogel, a senior policy specialist at the , points out that factory farms in the U.S. produce 13 times as much sewage as the entire human population and that environmental impact is about more than greenhouse gases. “The meat you do eat should be grass-fed meat from managed grazing operations,” he says. “Rotational grazing systems recycle manure as fertilizer, improve wildlife habitat, and enhance plant root systems, increasing soil quality, water infiltration and flood control, and carbon sequestration.”

Right about now you might be thinking, Mmmmm, bacon. You might also be thinking, If I don’t eat much meat, how will I get enough protein? Not to worry. “We don’t need nearly as much animal protein in our diets as we currently enjoy,” Tyedmers says.

He’s right. The average American should consume about 0.36 grams of protein per pound of body weight per day, which works out to 70 grams of protein a day for a man. Recommendations for athletes range from 98 grams of protein a day for a weekend warrior to as much as 176 grams for competitive endurance athletes.

These aren’t difficult targets to hit. In the U.S., even vegetarians get about 27 percent more protein than the recommended daily allowance. Omnivores really pack it in, eating 60 percent more protein than a body needs. The extra protein is simply excreted, which Tyedmers derisively refers to as “pissing sustainability away.” The planetary implications of the protein-obsessed paleo diet, in particular, produces an ire rarely seen in professors of the environment—or Canadians.

“That’s an insane way to eat,” Tyedmers scoffs. “They should be clubbed.”

Get Smart About Seafood

Tyedmers and I move on to the topic of seafood. He stands and starts rummaging through a box of old fishing gear he has accumulated over the years while studying fisheries. “When it comes to nitrogen and phosphorous, greenhouse gases, and other global-scale phenomena, absolutely most seafood is much better than most terrestrial animal production,” he says.

Any assessment of seafood sustainability has to involve a careful look at stock management and how much bycatch is involved in the fishing method. Sorting through all the data is hugely complicated. I wrote about sustainable seafood for this magazine in June 2015, and I recommended using the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s when considering what’s on offer at the fish counter or when dining out. The app uses a clear rating system to rank sustainability and does the hard work for you.

But Seafood Watch’s ratings don’t yet include climate impact, which adds up. Seafood caught by bottom trawling or from pots and traps, for example, burns a lot of diesel as the boats work back and forth over a fishing ground. (Bottom trawlers also tear up the seabed.) So if you’re a fan of trawled Norwegian lobster, sold as scampi, you’re tucking into a hard-shelled climate bomb that exceeds most beef in terms of greenhouse-gas emissions.

As it happens, the seafood with the smallest carbon footprint is frequently the seafood that’s best to eat if you’re looking to reduce pressure on wild fisheries. Mussels, the only animal protein I still eat, have more of a carbon “toeprint,” at one pound of greenhouse gases per pound of mussels. Clams and oysters are similar, and sardines are a climate-friendly superfood. Mackerel, herring, and anchovies are also relatively easy on the climate—if they aren’t caught by a trawler. If you can’t stand the smaller, oilier fishes, U.S.-caught Alaskan pollock, which comes from a reasonably managed fishery, has a modest climate impact, making it the real chicken of the sea.

Aquaculture, or fish farming, is equally method dependent. Aquaculture systems that don’t filter and recirculate the water, like net pens in the ocean, are on average comparable to poultry and pork in terms of greenhouse-gas emissions. Land-based recirculating aquaculture, with its climate-controlled facilities and electricity demands, can be more than twice as greenhouse-gas intensive as aquaculture that doesn’t recirculate. So catfish and tilapia farmed in ponds or net pens are more climate-friendly than the same fish from recirculating farms. How about consumer-favorite farmed salmon? According to EWG’s calculations, farmed salmon is comparable to pork’s somewhat hefty footprint.

Weighing all the nuances can make seafood selection a head-scratching process of trade-offs, even for an environmental-studies professor. “For every pound of Nova Scotia lobster I buy there was a pound of bait used, and that was mostly herring. And that herring was better food for me and would have fed more people,” Tyedmers tells me, noting that some lobster fisheries in the U.S. use three times as much bait. “Then you throw in the diesel fuel. Does that mean I don’t eat lobster? No, but I do it with consciousness and intent, and on a special occasion.”

Good advice. Or stick to mussels.

Vegans Aren’t Perfect, Either

Clearly, eating less meat has big environmental payoffs. But what about not eating it at all? I’d never crunched the numbers to find out how much more climate-friendly a plant-based diet really is. The results are telling.

For example, in the Frontiers in Nutrition study, researchers compared the greenhouse-gas, water, and land footprints of a balanced 2,000-calorie vegetarian diet, including eggs and dairy, with those of a balanced 2,000-calorie omnivore diet that included one serving of meat per day: a 5.3-ounce steak. The vegetarian diet reduced greenhouse-gas emissions by 63 percent and required 61 percent less land and 67 percent less water.

, in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, also compared an omnivorous diet to a vegetarian one. It considered a broad array of environmental impacts beyond climate change and land use—including cancer rates, effect on the ozone layer, and waterway pollution—to produce a more complete model. It concluded that the vegetarian diet had just 64 percent of the environmental impact of the omnivore diet.

How much of a bump can you get from giving up eggs and dairy and going vegan? Big enough to take seriously. The 2015 Frontiers in Nutrition study, for example, estimated that a vegan menu has a climate footprint 31 percent smaller than the vegetarian menu and 74 percent smaller than the omnivore menu, and a land footprint 7 percent smaller than the vegetarian and 64 percent less than the omnivore. It also reduces water demand by 9 percent over the vegetarian and 70 percent over the omnivore.

Vegetarians and vegans shouldn’t feel too righteous or complacent, however. When we stop eating meat, we turn to other forms of protein like nuts, legumes, and grains, and these have an environmental footprint worth considering, too.

Take the increasingly popular and thirsty almond. It notoriously takes a gallon of water to produce a single almond, and we’re eating seven times as many now as we did in 1972. Drought-plagued California produces 99 percent of American almonds, so bingeing on almonds and almond milk can be a water-intensive approach to fueling your body. (Good alternatives include coconut and hemp milk.) Nuts in general are an especially water-intensive way to get protein, requiring more than six times the water needed to produce equivalent protein from black beans, lentils, and chickpeas.

Still, perspective is important. Almonds require less than half the water per calorie of beef, and livestock feed and grazing in California sucks up more than twice the water used by almond and pistachio growers. Other healthy nonanimal calories, from cereals, legumes, roots, fruits, and vegetables, require about one-fifth the water used to produce the same number of animal calories.

Plant-based protein choices also carry different environmental costs. Wheat accounts for one-fifth the greenhouse-gas emissions of water-thirsty rice per gram of protein. Legumes are even better, at one-quarter the emissions of wheat. Being thoughtful about protein alternatives yields even more environmental payoff. Lentils and chickpeas, for example, are better than soybeans at fixing nitrogen in the soil and help you avoid soy’s GMO issues. And quinoa is packed with protein and grows well in a variety of soils.

Another fast-growing category of plant-based protein is meat substitutes—or meat methadone, as I think of them—often made of pea and soy proteins. I have tried most of them and tend to think that you can cook better food by delving into cuisines like Indian and Thai, which offer delicious recipes based on vegetables. But for anyone who simply can’t get beyond a craving for something meat-like, substitutes that contain no animal products produce about one-third the greenhouse gases of poultry.

While it’s clear that eating a more vegetarian or vegan diet takes pressure off the planet’s resources, former New York Times food columnist Mark Bittman doesn’t want conscientious eaters to feel it’s all or nothing. Bittman has long encouraged people to shift toward a more plant-based diet and is now partnered with a vegan-meal home-delivery service called the .

“I’m not a vegan,” he says. “I don’t think people need to be vegan. I don’t think that many people will become vegan. We could eat 90 percent less meat and be fine.”

You Should Go Organic

I live with a wife who’s a carnivore and two kids who are vegetarian, but the biggest debate in my household is over whether to buy organic or conventional fruits and produce. Based on vague notions that organic is better for the environment and aversions to the idea of herbicide- and pesticide-coated food, I am willing to pay the higher price for organic. My wife, Ilana, isn’t.

To find out if my organic preferences are worth it, I head to southern Pennsylvania, to the rolling 333-acre farmlands of the , home to the longest-running side-by-side, organic-versus-conventional-farming trial in the U.S., to meet with Kristine Nichols, a soil microbiologist and Rodale’s chief scientist.

Organic farming, Nichols tells me, is really about the health of the soil and the ecosystems producing our food. Nichols wants to show me the difference between soil from conventional agriculture, which uses chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and soil from what Rodale calls regenerative organic agriculture, which uses natural pest management, extensive cover crops, and natural fertilizer like manure.

Nichols is wearing jeans and a T-shirt, and her brown hair is pulled back in a loose ponytail. She ushers me into a nondescript cinderblock shed, where the air is pungent with the smell of dirt. Nichols rummages through a pile of clear three-foot-long tubes containing core samples from Rodale’s farming-systems trial, and she arranges two of them—one organic, the other conventional—next to one another. The tops of the tubes, where the soil comes from the surface, are dark and chocolatey in color. This is the topsoil, Nichols explains, the prime growing layer known to scientists and farmers as the A horizon. She points out that the A horizon in the organic soil extends significantly deeper than in the conventional-soil sample, adding that there is more earthworm and other biologic activity throughout most of the organic-soil tube.

It takes the planet about 1,000 years to build an inch of topsoil. Rodale’s organic methods are changing that equation. “The soil’s got more microbial activity, and we’re getting organic matter deeper down into it,” Nichols says. “We’re building our A horizon. We grew three inches in 35 years.”

This is an important achievement, given that an estimated 90 percent of U.S. cropland loses soil at a rate 13 times what’s sustainable. “Feed the soil, not the plant,” organic farmers like to say. Apparently, it works.

Nichols then takes me out to the farming-systems trial to see late-summer conventional corn next to late-summer organic corn. For the conventional side of the trial, Rodale uses the most up-to-date techniques, which include GMO varieties and the same carefully calculated quantities of fertilizer and herbicide that commercial farmers use. Still, the conventional corn is not looking so good. The leaves are yellowish, and the plant has reddish blotches, signs of phosphorous and nitrogen deficiency. Heavy spring rains washed a lot of the fertilizer away, followed by a hot and dry August.

The organic corn just a few plots away looks greener and more vibrant. Instead of synthetic fertilizer, cover crops have been used to feed the soil with carbon and nutrients and act as a weed-deterring mulch layer. The richer soil, and the more active relationship between the corn plant and the A-horizon microbial world, helped the corn weather the dry summer better. And Rodale’s data shows that its organic corn yields 31 percent more in drought conditions than its conventionally grown corn, which is important in a climate-changing world.

Rodale’s organic growing methods deliver other environmental benefits. They use 45 percent less energy and produce 40 percent fewer greenhouse-gas emissions than the conventional growing systems. Other studies confirm the good news. One concluded that an omnivore diet of organic meat and vegetables has an environmental footprint 41 percent smaller than that of a conventional omnivore diet, and an organic vegetarian or vegan diet gets roughly the same benefit. When you consider that the estimated environmental and health-care costs of pesticide use in the U.S. every year is in the billions, I start to feel pretty good about my side of the organic-versus-conventional marital debate.

Finding an abundance of organic options usually means shopping at a higher-end grocery store or a farmers’ market, or buying a CSA share from a farm that uses regenerative organic practices. Whole Foods is trying to make sustainably farmed products easier to identify by rolling out of Good, Better, and Best for fruits, flowers, and vegetables. Products that meet the Certified Organic standard of the USDA are automatically granted a Good rating but have to meet additional criteria to move up the scale.

“Responsibly Grown is designed to give our shoppers more information about the products they’re buying,” says Liz Burkhart, a spokeswoman at Whole Foods. “This includes areas like water conservation, energy use, and farmworker welfare.”

As for the higher prices of organic, I deal with the premium by buying smaller quantities and cooking moderate portions, which is beneficial to my wallet and to my family’s calorie count.

Buy Local

While what you eat is important, how it gets to your plate matters, too. One morning before dawn, I head into an industrial zone of Capitol Heights, Maryland, where I find Zeke Zechiel overseeing the morning deliveries for . Zechiel used to be a nightclub owner, but 21 years ago he and his wife, a chef, decided they wanted to offer their community a better way to buy quality produce. Washington’s Green Grocer delivers subscribers a weekly box of organic (or conventional) fruits and vegetables. I find it a convenient way to buy organic.

Zechiel is 51, wearing cargo shorts, a T-shirt, and Keen sandals. He tries to buy as much as he can from farms within a few hundred miles of him. I see lots of boxes from the Lancaster Farm Fresh Cooperative in Pennsylvania. But I also see Mexican avocados, California brussels sprouts and cauliflower, and organic bananas imported from Central and South America.

“To sustain the company, there are certain things people want to have,” he says. “If we don’t have them, they won’t use us.”

Zechiel worries about the food miles required to give his subscribers the fruits and vegetables they expect. To address that concern, he launched a local-only box, which is now bought by about 20 percent of his 3,500 customers and is his fastest-growing offering. But he ruefully admits that he can’t make it both organic and local year-round, which he calls the holy grail, because it’s hard to get a wide selection of organic fruits from the wet, pest-prone mid-Atlantic region.

“If you want to eat local and organic year-round, you have to stock up and make jams and freeze or can stuff, which is an enormous effort,” he says. “It’s really hard to find someone so committed.”

Even his dedicated local-box customers often add on imported bananas. “People just gotta have their Saturday smoothies,” he says.

Food miles and the greenhouse-gas emissions they cause aren’t easy to understand. So much depends on the efficiency of the transport network. Anything flown in—say, fresh salmon from Alaska or cheese from Europe—arrives with a sizable climate footprint. But bananas or oranges packed tightly onto a container ship or a large truck do not. How do you compare a fully loaded semi driven cross-country from California with a local grower’s pickup truck that may have rolled only 100 miles to a farmers’ market with a few boxes in the bed?

Still, according to one analysis I found, buying local can reduce the impact of vegetable production by 10 to 30 percent. Other researchers have calculated that produce moving through the national transportation network that supplies large grocery stores travels an average of about 1,518 miles and emits five to seventeen times the greenhouse gases of regional and local food distribution. In contrast, locally sourced foods travel an average of just 45 miles.

So it makes sense to buy local whenever possible, another reason to spend time at the nearest farmers’ market. If you’re really dedicated to sustainable eating, that means eating seasonally as well. No more grapes and strawberries from Chile in February. I can only hope Zechiel will start selling local canned peaches to get me through winter.

You’re Throwing Away Too Much Food

No matter where you come down on meat, organic, and shopping locally, there are two powerful sustainability strategies you can put to work right now. The first is to eat less. If the average omnivore, who eats around 3,500 calories a day, instead ate a diet closer to his basic nutritional requirement of 2,500 calories, he would likely reduce his environmental footprint by about 30 percent. An active person who works out daily needs closer to 2,800 calories, yielding a roughly 20 percent cut.

The second strategy: waste less. In the U.S., 40 percent of food—worth an estimated $165 billion—is thrown out every year. It’s an environmental and social-policy tragedy. According to the USDA, which in September to try and cut American food waste in half, the average family of four trashes two million calories a year, worth nearly $1,500. As a result, 25 percent of America’s water is used to produce food that is never eaten, and an estimated 28 percent of the planet’s agricultural land is used to grow food that ends up in the garbage. Food is the single largest solid-waste component of America’s landfills—an estimated 80 billion pounds—and emissions from it are equivalent to the greenhouse-gas output of 33 million cars.

Wasting resource-intensive meat and seafood is particularly hard on the planet, yet consumers throw away an estimated 40 percent of the fresh and frozen fish they buy, 31 percent of the turkey, 25 percent of the pork, 16 percent of the beef, and 12 percent of the chicken. Peter Tyedmers says that consumer demand for fresh seafood leads to a lot of waste at the fish counter. There, if it isn’t sold by a certain date, it gets tossed.

“I have thrown out halibut steaks. They get lost in the fridge,” he says ruefully. “If you buy that halibut steak frozen, it just stays in the freezer.”

Restaurants and grocery stores are doing more to donate excess stock to food banks, and national food-service operators such as Aramark are discovering that innovations—like removing trays from cafeterias, which make it too easy to load up—can lead to dramatic reductions in waste. But how we personally shop and handle food at home is by far the biggest source of food waste, accounting for an estimated 47 percent. Restaurants are the next biggest, at 37 percent.

To combat this, I shop more often, buying for a day or two at a time instead of a week, so that less food gets lost in a packed refrigerator. I often ignore expiration dates, and I derive distinct pleasure from cooking up hashes, soups, and curries using all the leftovers I find on the edge of going bad. I have become the food-waste equivalent of the person who goes around turning everyone’s lights off. It can be annoying, but it works.

The Future Tastes Good

I know all this conjures an image of an enviro-scolding hippie living on lentils. But fear not: eating more sustainably can be delicious.

For reassurance, I check in with Dan Barber, a dynamo chef and a seriously deep food thinker. First at his restaurant in New York City, and then at , which he opened near Tarrytown, New York, in 2004, Barber has been on a quest to create a more sustainable menu and prove that it can be extraordinary. That led him to a profound appreciation for the natural productivity possible at his family’s 138-acre New England farm, called Blue Hill, using regenerative organic methods. Today the farm rotates and produces a variety of crops and vegetables and uses livestock like cows, chickens, and pigs to spread and work nutrients into the soil.

Barber sees eating and food production as a negotiation with the landscape. What can it reasonably provide? How does a chef make the best use of everything it offers? How can the foods we eat sustain and build its fertility? When he looked at his menus and his cooking through that lens, he realized that he needed to reinvent the architecture of the American plate. Instead of a massive chunk of animal protein at the center flanked by a few vegetables, Barber envisioned the reverse. Vegetables and legumes or grains would be the headliners at the center, and animal protein would be the judicious accompaniment. Imagine a carrot steak, Barber proposed, with a side of braised second cuts of beef. He calls this the “third plate,” which became the title of his excellent book about his journey. Diners and restaurant reviewers have been ecstatic.

“It’s not to say you can’t enjoy a steak, but we really need to think hard about meat,” Barber says. “You can take very small amounts of meat and get great satisfactory umami”—or savory flavor.

It’s a hopeful vision, and the rest of the world is trying to catch up. Near the end of my visit in Halifax, Tyedmers and I eat lunch at , an organic restaurant in the North End. I have an eggplant, tomato, and green onion curry wrap; Tyedmers orders the chili con carne. “I’m a sucker for good chili,” he sighs. I ask Tyedmers why, given how much he knows about the environmental impacts of meat, he continues to eat it.

“If every male on the planet ate the way I do, we would have less of a problem, but we would still have a problem,” he says. He pauses, then says that it doesn’t make sense to focus all your sustainability efforts on just one facet of life, like eating. What matters is the overall footprint of the choices you make. He tells me that when he got married, he was apprehensive about having children, because population is such an engine of environmental crisis. His wife wanted the experience of raising children. In the end, they settled on one child.

It’s a good point. Ilana and I have two children, and whatever choices I make with regard to the sustainability of my diet or lifestyle will likely pale next to that second child’s life of consumption. Tyedmers made a hard choice when it came to reproduction but still eats meat. I made a hard choice to stop eating meat but had two children. I can never regret having a beautiful second child in my life, but I have to confess that Tyedmers’s choices are probably of greater benefit to the planet than mine. I also consider the irony that I flew to Halifax to report a story on sustainability, the equivalent of eating roughly 40 pounds of steak.

Sustainability, it seems, is a little like religion: we’re all striving for an ideal, but it’s difficult, if not impossible, to achieve perfection. We sin a little here. We sin a little there. The omnivore who hunts for an elk each fall for his meat—or maybe even eats roadkill—and raises his own chickens for eggs, grows his own organic vegetables and fruit, and cans food for the winter is eating pretty damn sustainably. So is the backyard-gardening vegan. But that’s a degree of virtue many of us will never achieve.

Still, a few simple adjustments help a lot. Stop worrying so much about not getting enough protein, and remember that plant-based protein is a lot easier on the planet than animal protein. Buy organic food whenever you can. Source your food as locally as possible, and eat seasonally to avoid racking up major food miles. Eat less and waste less. Be open-minded and creative about new cuisines. Relax. Have fun. Sustainable eating isn’t synonymous with masochism.

“We think of everything related to the environment as something we are doing wrong or have to give up,” Dan Barber says. “But people can do something about it in a way that is pleasurable. We can actualize change through hedonism.”

Who can’t rally behind that?

Correspondent Tim Zimmermann wrote about sustainable seafood in June 2015.

The post Eating Right Can Save the World appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

I contemplated the simple sandwich on the plate in front of me: a beautiful slab of glistening rainbow trout, crisp lettuce, and a freshly baked French roll. The trout skin was lightly seared and seasoned. The pinkish meat was firm and toothsome. I genuflected briefly, then two-fisted the thing and took a big bite. A slightly smoky, sweet flavor gave my taste buds a sensation long denied. I chased it with a slug of Fort Point ale. Soon, both fish sandwich and beer were gone. I am a vegan, but I was untroubled. Eating the trout seemed like the right thing to do.Ìę

The journey to that sandwich began a few months earlier with a question from a friend who wants to eat sustainably: What fish can I eat? My response was the same one I have given for years: You should eat no fish at all.

I haven’t always felt this way. I grew up on the East Coast, spent a lot of time on the Atlantic Ocean, and ate more than my share of salmon, tuna, crabs, scallops, and whatever other seafood was on offer. But a few years ago, as I began to write extensively about the relationship between humans and animals, especially the lives of marine mammals in captivity, my thinking changed. What we eat affects the health of the planet as much, if not more, than what kind of car we drive or where we set the thermostat. The more I learned, the more I came to believe that the single most powerful choice an individual can make is to stop eating animal protein. So, in 2010, I became a vegetarian. After about a year, realizing I could manage without cream in my coffee and eggs for breakfast, I took the next step and went vegan.

I didn’t evangelize about it. I made my choice; others could make theirs. But I noticed that when I was asked about my reasons, there always seemed to be special interest in the question of fish, which even the vegetarian-inclined still want to eat. Setting aside my vegan concerns about fish welfare—laugh if you like, but then go watch a beautiful, fighting-mad bluefin tuna being gaffed on YouTube—anyone who has been paying attention knows a dispiriting truth: wild fish are being decimated by the world’s increasingly teched-out, 4.7-million-vessel fishing fleet. that 90 percent of marine fish stocks are either fully exploited or overexploited. Meanwhile, fish farming, with its reputation for overcrowding and antibiotic-laced, fecal-polluting practices, doesn’t sound like a very appealing solution. And there appears to be no shortage of crooks and liars, from fraudulent distributors to fact-twisting chefs and fishmongers, at just about every link in the distribution chain. , you can’t even be sure your supermarket isn’t stocking seafood caught by fish pirates in Indonesia, who kidnap and enslave impoverished Southeast Asians to work on their boats. The slaves work untenably long hours for little to no pay, are locked up at night, and are often beaten if they don’t perform as told. Where’s the argument for eating fish in all that?Ìę

But the questions kept coming, and I knew my personal position didn’t provide realistic or helpful advice. Seafood is an indispensable source of protein and omega-3 fatty acids—good for the heart and brain—on a planet whose population will need a lot of protein as it swells toward a projected 9.3 billion people by 2050. My friends and family and most of the world will continue to eat fish, and despite all the seafood guides and journalism on the subject, people are more confused than ever—about whether to eat wild or farmed, about which fish are healthier, about the implications of fish consumption for the oceans.

“Just tell me what fish I can eat,” my mother pleaded. So I set out to produce a better answer, and what I learned surprised me. Not only might fish offer the best, and least ecologically damaging, solution to global food insecurity in a flesh-eating world, but some seafood is now produced so efficiently that even a vegan might be tempted to rethink his absolutist vows.Ìę

Wondering how to put it all into practice?ÌęWe asked the experts and distilled their adviceÌędown toÌęsix rules of eating healthier, more sustainable seafood.

I. Consider the Source

The math is simple. Global demand for fish is at about 158 million metric tons annually (and growing), which is about twice theÌęalready worrisome 80 million metric tons we take from the oceans. Against that unrelenting pressure, it seems reckless to keep scarfing down wild fish.

But Kenny Belov, a burly, high-energy 38-year-old who co-owns , a fish distributor on Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, is quick to disabuse me of the idea that wild fish should be completely off the menu. Belov and his partner, Bill Foss, a cofounder of Netscape, caught my attention by lobbing grenades at their own industry in a probing about seafood sustainability (or lack thereof) a few years ago, and they have been outspoken advocates for rethinking our approach to eating fish ever since. Most days, Belov shows up at the TwoXSea warehouse at 3 A.M. to supervise the shipping of 1,500 to 2,000 pounds of seafood to top restaurants and stores in the Bay Area and a few other cities—all of it sustainably caught. He is as obsessive and conservative as they come in his views about whether any fish population is healthy enough to be fished and whether the catch method damages other populations or the ocean ecosystem.Ìę

Atlantic cod? “It’s overfished and mostly caught by bottom trawling, which is like clear-cutting the seafloor,” Belov scoffs. “I wish we would leave Atlantic cod alone. They need more time to recover after what we did for so many generations.”Ìę

Ahi tuna? “Almost all of it is caught on pelagic longlines, which are 40-plus miles of floating line dangling a baited hook every three feet. Longlines catch everything else in the habitat.” That’s called bycatch, a somewhat bloodless term for a fishing method that indiscriminately hooks as many as 150,000 sea turtles annually, along with tens of thousands of seabirds, whales, sharks, dolphins, and porpoises.Ìę

The Alaskan pollock so often used for fish fingers? “Caught by fishing vessels that are 100 to 200 feet long,” Belov says. “Their huge nets pull in lots of other species, like squid and salmon.”

So how is it that Belov has a warehouse full of sustainable wild fish? Because he scoured the West Coast fleet for fishermen who were tapping into healthy stocks the right way. Once he found them, he paid them a premium for their catch.

Belov walks me around TwoXSea’s facilities. On the day I visit, he’s got Coho salmon—beautiful, powerful, silvery fish—that were caught by the High Hope, out of Sitka, Alaska, using a method called trolling, in which a few lines are dropped behind a boat and pulled in one by one, reducing the risk of bycatch. He’s also got black cod, targeted with baited lines set by the Eagle III in Coos Bay, Oregon, and night smelt from Eureka, California. It was harvested by a fisherman named Dude Gifford, who dips a net stretched across an A-frame of poles into the surf. “We don’t sell anything that doesn’t come directly from a fisherman,” Belov says.Ìę

The real problem, he believes, is not that sustainable fish stocks aren’t out there. It’s that a lot of unsustainable fish is passed off as OK. Belov and Foss are also partners in a Sausalito restaurant called Fish, which Foss opened in 2004, promising customers that everything on its menu could be eaten with a clear conscience. They launched TwoXSea five years later because they got fed up with all the dishonesty they encountered trying to supply fish for Fish. “There is so much seafood fraud going on when it comes to labeling species, its origin, and the captain and vessel,” Belov says. He tells me about the time he went looking for scallops that hadn’t been caught by dredging, a process that tears up the seabed. He met with two distributors from New York City and explained that he would need traceability, vessel names, and documentation to confirm the catch method. Their glib responses made it clear that the information would be meaningless. “We have a long list of boat names,” they told Belov. “Just pick any one you want.”

Belov is not being paranoid. A , a nonprofit that campaigns to protect and restore the world’s oceans, concluded that 33 percent of fish in the United States is fraudulently labeled to increase profits. (There is now a presidential task force trying to address the problem.) To emphasize the point, Belov walks me outside onto the pier. He gestures toward two swordfish-longlining vessels that are tied up alongside another fish distributor’s warehouse. “See those boats?” he says. “Because they unloaded their swordfish here, it can be labeled PRODUCT OF CALIFORNIA, which means it will be sold to diners as local or San Francisco swordfish, even though it was caught 1,500 miles away in the middle of the Pacific.” He says restaurants will probably describe the swordfish as “line caught,” which sounds positively artisanal.

But both Belov and Foss believe that things are getting better and that the success of TwoXSea is in large part due to a younger generation of chefs who are making decisions based on an ethical rather than a financial stance. “People are much more aware of what is going on with dishonesty in seafood and all the fraud,” Belov says. “But I still think we have a tremendous way to go,” adding that when it comes to seafood sustainability, personal choices matter.

By the time Belov is done with me, I have a few new beliefs. One is that you can eat some wild seafood without trashing the oceans—wild-caught Alaskan salmon, for example, is a well-managed fishery. Another is that, in a perfect world, we would all know the name of the fisherman reeling in our fish, but that’s not the reality for most of us. There is so much complexity in catch methods, fishery management, and the supply chain that even a conscientious seafood lover might as well throw a dart at the menu. Luckily, there’s an app for that.Ìę

II. Red Light, Green Light

The , two hours south of San Francisco, is housed in an old sardine cannery, and one of its featureÌęattractions is a 335,000-gallon viewing tank that contains a forest of California kelp. Jennifer Dianto Kemmerly, 42, the director of the aquarium’s and an environmental scientist, sits down at a table in the cafeteria, her hair still damp from an early-morning dive into the kelp. There are a lot of seafood standards out there, but Seafood Watch’s are arguably the most independent, comprehensive, and rigorous, and it has taken a tough, truth-telling approach to assessing fisheries’ sustainability. “When we started red-rating fisheries in our own backyard, that was a really bold move,” Kemmerly says. “But after ten years lots of fish came back, and the message was heard by fisheries up and down the coast.”

Seafood Watch was launched in 1999, after aquarium visitors started walking off with cafeteria display cards listing a few which-fish-to-eat recommendations. Seeing an opportunity, the aquarium put together a program to produce detailed, science-based evaluations of specific fisheries to publish on its website and . Fish from well-managed, abundant populations—caught in a way that caused little harm to other species or habitat—got a green Best Choice designation. Fish that were OK to buy but were harvested in a way that caused Seafood Watch some concern, garnered a yellow Proceed with Caution tag, since changed to Good Alternative. Fish from a badly managed, overfished, or destructive fishery got called out with a red Avoid label.Ìę

Today, Seafood Watch has more than 2,000 unique recommendations, on both wild and farmed seafood, updated at least every three years. Of those, 22 percent are Best Choice, 38 percent are Good Alternative, and 40 percent are Avoid. More than 1,000 North American companies use this information in their buying decisions, and more than a million users have downloaded the app.Ìę

Seafood Watch data affirms that, in well-managed U.S. fisheries, sustainable wild fish is available. The program’s scientists recently assessed 129 species, which account for three million metric tons of catch annually. Of that haul, more than half a million tons, or 19 percent, are rated Best Choice. And just 2 percent are Avoid, which leaves 79 percent in the yellow Good Alternative limbo—a rating that worries some seafood advocates because it sounds too much like a buy recommendation. I mention to Kemmerly that eating a lot of yellow-rated seafood doesn’t seem very sustainable. “It isn’t,” she says. “But if we’d set the bar that you could only buy green, I don’t think this market-based-incentive movement would be pragmatic.”Ìę

Still, the truly conscientious seafood eater should aim to buy Best Choice, taking a precautionary approach and reducing our impact on fragile and complex ocean ecosystems. Plus, the more sustainable the rating, the less likely you are to eat seafood caught by fish pirates. “If there is a known IUU”—illegal, unreported, unregulated—“issue, then that will result in a red Avoid rating,” says Kemmerly. Though she cautions, “Unless there is full traceability from boat to plate, one can’t be sure if the product comes from a vessel that engaged in IUU activity.”

Eating in the green zone takes some dedication. That is, when you can find it and afford it—wild-caught Alaskan salmon can cost upwards of $15 a pound. And even with the app, you’ll have to ask a lot of questions.

Take albacore tuna. If it was caught by trolling or with a pole, in the North Atlantic or Pacific, Seafood Watch rates it a Best Choice. But if it was caught anywhere in the world on a longline—except off Hawaii and in the U.S. Atlantic, which have strict bycatch limits—it gets a red Avoid rating. Will the person selling you the fish know how it was caught and where, and can you be sure that person’s information is accurate?

Clear labeling at supermarkets and restaurants would make life a lot easier for consumers, and that is starting to happen. Seafood Watch and the , a New York–based ocean-conservation nonprofit run by marine ecologist Carl Safina, have partnered with Whole Foods on labeling, which has sold no red-listed wild seafood since 2012. Safeway, Target, and other supermarkets are working to implement similar changes. Meanwhile, 145 restaurants listed on the Seafood Watch site have also gone no-red.Ìę

What about when there’s no labeling at all, which is the case in most restaurants and stores? Use the app and ask questions about catch method and location. “It shows businesses that they have to stay on it,” Kemmerly says.Ìę

After she takes off for a meeting, I check out the aquarium’s cafeteria menu. The fish tostadas, at $15, are made using albacore tuna. Troll- or pole-caught in the Pacific, and not by longline, I assume, after glancing at my app. But I’d have to ask.

III. Modern Farmer

As diligent as you might be with the Seafood Watch app, there isn’t enough sustainable wild fish to feed the growing world. To fill the gap, many suppliers have turned to aquaculture, which has exploded from producing 1.6 million metric tons in 1960 to 66.6 million metric tons in 2012 and now provides about half of all the seafood we consume.Ìę

Farmed fish has confused consumers for years. Is it healthy? Bad for the environment? “Like any farming, aquaculture can be done well or it can be one of the most destructive things,” says Safina, who has fought for the oceans for more than two decades. “Particulars matter. There is sustainable aquaculture, and there are also fish farms that have wrecked coastal zones and mangroves and done bad things to poor people.”

Nearly 60 percent of fish farming takes place inland, in ponds and closed aquaculture systems, and produces finfish like tilapia, catfish, and carp, as well as shrimp. Pond farming conjures up images of overcrowded, feces-filled pools that require chemicals and antibiotics. But these days, most U.S. inland farming is done in line with good, healthy standards. U.S.–farmed catfish, salmon, and shrimp are all Seafood Watch Best Choices. Tilapia is also popular, and if it’s farmed in Canada, the U.S., or Ecuador, it too rates a Best Choice. Farmed tilapia and carp from China and other parts of Asia often get dinged to yellow for questionable chemical use and waste-management practices.Ìę

It’s the seafood raised in marine environments—especially salmon and shrimp—that has given aquaculture its controversial reputation. Waste, chemicals, antibiotics, and unused feed pollute nearby waters, farmed-fish escapees from these net pens threaten to spread disease and alien DNA to wild populations, and sensitive coastal environments become industrialized.

Marine fish farming also has a resource-use problem. It’s known as the fish-in, fish-out (or FIFO) ratio, and it’s an important measure of sustainability. Consider farmed salmon. According to Seafood Watch, it can take three pounds of smaller forage fish, like anchovies, menhaden, and sardines, to create the feed needed to produce a pound of salmon; even the most efficient farms have a ratio of 1.5:1. That’s not a particularly sustainable way to produce fish. For all these reasons, until recently Seafood Watch slapped most finfish farmed in marine environments with a red Avoid rating.

Kemmerly, however, believes that we’re on the verge of a paradigm shift, thanks to advances in aquaculture over the past decade or so. “It can be done responsibly,” she says.

To see what the future could look like, I seek out Josh Goldman, CEO of a company called . I find him, bespectacled and busy, in a cavernous two-acre warehouse complex in Turners Falls, Massachusetts, on the Connecticut River, which serves as company headquarters. Inside, it’s warm and humid, and the air is redolent with the sharp smell of a million fish, the sweet aroma of pellet feed, and the earthy fug of damp concrete.

Goldman walks me around, past massive tanks enmeshed in a complex web of -filters and industrial piping, until we stop at aÌęJacuzzi-size tank teeming with beefy-looking fish. They’re called barramundi, which is Aboriginal for “large-scaled fish.” In the wild, they can be found from northern Australia up through Southeast Asia and beyond, all the way to the coastal waters of India and Sri Lanka. These fish, though, did all their growing in Goldman’s tanks, which collectively contain 2.5 million gallons of water. Over 300 days, they were transformed from tadpole-size hatchlings, weighing just one-third of a gram, into meaty fish weighing one to two pounds.Ìę

Goldman has been experimenting with aquaculture since he first got hooked on the natural sciences at Massachusetts’s Hampshire College in the early 1980s. He thinks we’re in a transition from wild fish to farmed fish that is similar to the transition 13,000 years ago from hunting meat to domesticating it. “But we have the opportunity to learn from the mistakes,” he says.Ìę

To Goldman, the key is domesticating the right fish. After years of trying to improve on farming methods for popular species like striped bass, Goldman created a matrix of qualities that would make for a better farmed fish and, in 2000, started prospecting the world to find it. He ticks off some of the reasons barramundi fit his better-fish matrix: they have the high fecundity of a marine fish (large females can produce up to 40 million eggs in one season); they travel up rivers to forage, which means they are tough and adaptable; and they eat a flexible diet that includes plants. By experimenting with feed compositions over the growth cycle, Goldman managed to drive the FIFO at Turners Falls down to an impressive 0.98:1, meaning that it takes less than a pound of wild fish to produce a pound of barramundi. Seafood Watch approved, rating Goldman’s indoor barramundi, which has a sweet, buttery flavor and is packed with omega-3’s, a Best Choice.

Goldman’s next challenge was to take barramundi out of the tanks and grow it to scale in a marine net-pen farm. “People were looking at aquaculture in coastal zones as an environmentally harmful activity,” he says. “I wanted to right that wrong.”

He went prospecting again and found the location he needed in Van Phong Bay, on Vietnam’s southeast coast. Australis Aquaculture Vietnam started production in 2010. Today it turns out some 2,000 tons of barramundi a year—more than three times the output at Turners Falls, at roughly half the cost—and has permits to scale up to 10,000 tons annually. Its frozen fillets are shipped to more than 4,000 stores across North America and cost a reasonable $9 a pound at my local Whole Foods. Careful net-pen siting and low fish densities reduce pollution and the threat of disease. Antibiotics are used sparingly and only as needed, and escapees are rare and not much of a concern, since local barramundi were used as the brood stock in Australis’s hatchery. Last year, after careful inspection, Seafood Watch gave Australis Aquaculture Vietnam’s barramundi the first green Best Choice rating ever granted to a marine net-pen fish.Ìę

“I don’t think there is any question that barramundi can be a real player in global supply,” says Goldman, who already has his eye on another fish that looks farm friendly, though he won’t say what it is yet.Ìę

Meanwhile, for the consumer, it’s now much easier to find farmed Best Choice options. Of the 176 farmed recommendations on Seafood Watch, 52 percent are Best Choice, 40 percent Avoid. From inland farms, there is rainbow trout, Arctic char, and salmon. Then there’s marine net-pen fish like Goldman’s barramundi and New Zealand’s newly green-rated Chinook salmon. If that’s hard to find, Best Choice farmed tilapia and catfish, while not high in -omega-3’s, are still a healthy and affordable protein.Ìę

IV. Vegan Fish

After visiting Turners Falls, I start imagining a world increasingly fed by innovative aquaculture. It’s a hopeful vision, except for one glitch—the FIFO problem. Most of aquaculture relies on forage fish to provide fish meal for protein and fish oil for omega-3 fats, which they get from eating microalgae and phytoplankton in the ocean. But global forage-fish harvests have maxed out at 20 million to 25 million metric tons, a volume that some experts worry is too high. The industry has been doing a better job scavenging from fish-processing waste, but there are still a limited number of forage fish that can be taken from the sea, which is a serious impediment to sustainable aquaculture growth.

This problem inspired Bill Foss, Belov’s partner at Fish and TwoXSea, to ask fish farmers a question that could change everything: Why do you need to have fish in your feed?

“It’s been a well-known fact that the amount of fish needed to feed a fish is a pretty asinine way to produce a fish,” says Foss, sitting in a coffee shop in Petaluma, California. Foss, who is 50 and has little patience for the shortsightedness of the human race, tells me that about five years into supplying fish for his restaurant, Belov found out that their farmed Best Choice tilapia and trout—both of which can feed on plants—weren’t vegetarian. Neither wanted to serve fish that consumed overstressed wild forage-fish stocks. Besides, the cost of fish meal and fish oil has more than tripled over a decade.

To formulate a novel fish-free feed, Foss turned to a freethinking scientist: Rick Barrows, at the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service in Bozeman, Montana. Barrows is a slim, deliberate man, with wire-rim glasses and a wide mustache. His official title is research physiologist. That’s a sterile description for someone who has been on a decades-long quest to find the holy grail of aquaculture: replacing fish meal and fish oil in the feeds that sustain the industry. His research mainly takes place inside a lab tucked into the foothills outside Bozeman, where 320 holding tanks are arrayed in neat clusters, most containing small populations of rainbow trout. When Barrows shows me in, two assistants are netting, weighing, and grading the growth of some trout—“the white rats of aquaculture,” Barrows jokes—that are eating a pistachio-based feed made from deformed nuts rejected for human consumption.

Barrows has looked for an alternative to fish-based meal in everything from corn and soy to pistachios and peas. He’s even experimenting with black soldier fly larvae. “It was fairly easy to come up with a variety of new protein sources,” he says.Ìę

Last year, Barrows made more than 150 feeds for 22 fish species, and his research has proved that at least eight popular fish-farm species, including trout, salmon, and sea bass, can grow just as fast, or faster, on fish-meal-free feed. “If we can do it with those eight, we can do it with any fish,” he says.Ìę

Replacing fish oil, the key to providing the two omega-3’s—DHA and EPA—that are associated with good brain and heart health, was more difficult, Barrows says. We head out to look at the feed mill, where Barrows and his team homebrew their experimental feeds. They start with a mash of whatever ingredients they’re using and then run it through a massive twin-screw extruder, a machine used to make everything from dog food to Froot Loops. Today it’s spitting out small orange pellets, which drop into a large plastic garbage can. I suggest to Barrows that people should skip the fish and just consume the pellets directly. He grins. “Sure, you could eat it instead of cereal. Foss gave it a try.”Ìę

Foss and Barrows eventually solved the omega-3 problem by adding an algae-based DHA supplement, often used in baby formula, to the vegan feed, which also contains pea protein and flax oil (and love, Belov jokes). Since 2010, they have tried it out on successive generations of rainbow trout at a farm Foss and Belov purchased in the SierraÌęNevada near Susanville, California, run by David McFarland. The results have been interesting. The trout show a good DHA profile and also seem to be converting at least some of the DHA into EPA. “So DHA is all we need—the trout does the rest. Kinda cool, huh?” says Foss. “Plus, the algal DHA has none of the mercury or PCBs that come from forage fish, so we’re ahead in the health game.”Ìę

Unfortunately, the DHA supplement is expensive, which means that the vegan feed is pricey—$1.50 a pound rather than the 80 cents a pound for standard forage-fish-based feeds. That adds about 15 percent to the cost of the trout. If the costs of fish meal and fish oil continue to climb, the price differential will shrink or disappear. More demand and scaled-up production of the vegan feed would also bring the cost down. “The biggest thing holding us back is that someone like Whole Foods hasn’t said, ‘We want a million pounds of what you’ve got,’ ” Foss grumbles.

Australis’s Goldman, among others, is also experimenting with alternate plant-oil sources that might produce omega-3’s in fish. Until more farmed fish fed a vegan diet are widely available, try to add in FIFO-light options, like tilapia and catfish, to your menu. There’s also another solution.

V. The Seafood Chain

It’s tempting to think that as long as something is a green Best Choice, you can eat as much as you want. But Barton Seaver, a former chef who is now the director of the at Harvard’s T. H. Chan School of Public Health, would like seafood lovers to be conscious of more than a rating. Seaver, 36 and lanky, is a thoughtful presence who carries the slightly haunted air of a man who is wearied by all he knows. To Seaver, smaller portions and variety are key elements of sustainability. “What’s important is eating less seafood more often,” he says, noting that we get more nutrients than we need when we chow down on a large slab of fish.Ìę

Seaver spent his summers as a child fishing and crabbing on the Chesapeake Bay’s Patuxent River. In 2007, when he was 27, he opened Hook, a popular seafood restaurant in Washington, D.C. He got interested in sustainability after he called up a seafood supplier to place his first order. “Send me bluefish, crab, oysters, rockfish,” he said, eager to feature all the Chesapeake bounty he had loved as a boy. “Kid, what are you talking about?” the supplier responded. “We ate all those.”

“I realized that natural selection in our world is firmly holding a fork,” Seaver says.Ìę

I met with Seaver in Portland, Maine, in January, to see his friend Gary Moretti’s Casco Bay mussel farm. Moretti, a 63-year-old with the cheerful spirit of a man who loves being on the water, co-owns with his son, Matt. As he gets ready to back his converted lobster boat away from the wharf, a seal pops its head up. “Hey, Loretta, get out of the way,” he calls. “Don’t worry, I’ll give you a fish later.”

Within minutes we’re chugging toward Clapboard Island, where Bangs Island keeps four mussel rafts—40-by-40-foot steel frames dangling 400 fuzzy ropes to a depth of 30 to 40 feet, for mussels to adhere to. In the relative warmth of the boat’s wheelhouse, Moretti explains that siting a mussel farm is all about thinking like a mussel. You want plenty of phytoplankton, minimal sediment, and nice current-driven water flow that is uncontaminated by golf-course or industrial runoff. “But this is Casco Bay. Here you can pretty much grow mussels anywhere,” he says of the beautiful seascape around us.

We pull alongside a mussel raft, and Moretti and Seaver hop onto the ice-slicked girders. They tug up some lines to show me the thick clusters of blue-black bivalves growing under the raft. It occurs to me that I am looking at the ideal farmed protein. It requires no feed beyond the nutrients in the water, so it has a perfect FIFO—no fish in for lots of shellfish out. It filter-feeds, improving water quality instead of polluting it. There are a multitude of coastal zones around the globe where mussels can grow in abundance. And while they don’t pack the omega-3 wallop that salmon does, they do deliver a shot—three servings a week gets you to the recommended minimum. Another bonus: being low on the food chain, mussels have little mercury, more than 30 times less than larger predator species like swordfish and tuna.

“The benefit of mussels is you can’t be greedy and wolf them down,” says Seaver. “There is an elegance and mindfulness to eating them.”

If ever there was an animal protein that a vegan could adopt, the mussel is it, I decide. Because of their rudimentary nervous system, they likely feel no pain and would give me some DHA and EPA omega-3’s, which are mostly absent in the vegan diet. (Flaxseed, popular with vegans, provides a different omega-3.) Farmed mussels are a Seafood Watch Best Choice, but I start to think of them as a Super Green Choice.Ìę

I realize that an interesting thing happens when you approach seafood with sustainability and health in mind: you end up eating a diverse diet that pushes you lower down the food chain and away from the rut of salmon, shrimp, and tuna, the most commonly eaten seafood in the U.S. The healthiest, most sustainable seafood that’s also high in omega-3’s and low in mercury? Wild Pacific sardines, a Best Choice. Other green-listed options that have decent omega-3’s and low mercury: U.S.–farmed striped bass, U.S.–farmed rainbow trout, farmed Arctic char, Australis’s barramundi, and wild or farmed mussels. Wild or farmed oysters, farmed scallops, farmed tilapia and catfish—use your Seafood Watch app to find the Best Choice for these—are also highly sustainable and provide good protein, some omega-3’s, and little mercury. For an occasional treat and a massive shot of omega-3’s, have some Best Choice wild Alaskan salmon every once in a while. That’s a pretty green way to get all the protein and omega-3’s you need without going too heavy on the FIFO scale.Ìę

VI. Navigating the Marketplace

When I get home, I make a run to Costco to shop at the seafood counter with fresh eyes. It isn’t easy. I see a few Marine Stewardship Council CERTIFIED SUSTAINABLE SEAFOOD stickers. MSC is a nonprofit that certifies fisheries that meet its sustainability and traceability standards. Though the standard has critics, Seafood Watch recommends most MSC-certified fisheries and says that they are equivalent to at least a yellow Good Alternative. Still, most of Costco’s seafood is unlabeled. So it’s me and the Seafood Watch app.

I work my way down the cooler. Farmed salmon from Chile—red, with an unappealing label that says “color added.” (Some farmed salmon are fed the carotenoid astaxanthin to give their flesh the orange color they’d normally get from eating shrimp and krill in the wild.) MSC-certified wild Atlantic cod—yellow. Ahi tuna from the Marshall Islands in the western Pacific—there’s no information on how it was caught, and the Costco employee stocking the cooler doesn’t know, so I worry it was a longline and would rate red. I find some tilapia farmed in Honduras, but Seafood Watch is still in the process of rating it. In the frozen section, it’s more of the same. Most everything seems to fall into that yellow, not-egregious-but-not-really-OK category. I call Belov for guidance. “It’s so complicated, and there are too many standards,” he says sympathetically. “We have a long way to go, but all we can do is keep pushing and asking questions.”

Later, when I check in with Bill Mardon, Costco’s assistant general merchandising manager in fresh seafood and poultry, he explains that Costco doesn’t sell 12 of the most overfished species and is working toward having more of its seafood supply meet MSC or Aquaculture Stewardship Council standards. (ASC was created by the World Wildlife Fund and the Sustainable Trade Initiative; its certified catfish, shellfish, and shrimp equate to at least a Seafood Watch Good Alternative.) “One hundred percent of our tilapia is ASC certified, and this year we are getting going on salmon and shrimp,” Mardon says. “Call me in two, three, or four years, and I hope we will be at 80, 90, or 100 percent.”

A few days later I hit up my local Whole Foods, and the experience is a lot simpler. Whole Foods sells MSC Certified Sustainable wild fish and puts Seafood Watch labeling on any wild fish that MSC hasn’t certified yet. A graphic atop the counter explains the color coding and tells shoppers that if it’s red, “We don’t sell it!” “The whole point of having these high standards is that any choice you make is a responsible one,” says Carrie Brownstein, the global seafood quality-standards coordinator for Whole Foods and a former research coordinator at the Safina Center.

I see a lot of choice: croaker, halibut, cod, and hake. Most of the Seafood Watch labels are yellow—which reflects the state of wild fisheries—but I spot some green-rated Best Choice wild Spanish mackerel for $9 a pound. (Brownstein told me that what’s available varies seasonally and regionally, which affects how much green-rated wild fish you might find at any given time.) There’s also a lot of farmed seafood—tilapia, catfish, shrimp, Arctic char. Whole Foods has certified it with its own Responsibly Farmed logo, which requires aquaculturists to meet a strict standard on pollution, chemical and antibiotic use, and other criteria. Most of it, as far as I can tell, would earn a green, and I can see a Best Choice menu here that my mother could happily live on. There’s a good supply of oysters, mussels, and clams, both farmed and wild, and the farmed tilapia and catfish. She might also be tempted by Spanish mackerel. In the frozen section, I find some of Australis’s Vietnam barramundi fillets.

“Anything you buy regularly, I’d stay in the green,” says Safina, who tries to eat only seafood that he catches himself. “But if it’s something you splurge on once a summer, then yellow is probably OK.” Still, he adds: “If you really want to be conscientious about seafood, you should eat rice and beans.”

I agree. While I’m encouraged by the promise of better fisheries management and aquaculture innovation, I still don’t intend to eat fish, for the same reasons I stopped in the first place. I believe in author Wendell Berry’s observation that “how we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used,” and I want to use the world less. Fish raised in tanks, no matter how well cared for or sustainable, are inevitably the human processing of living things. Even TwoXSea’s delicious vegan rainbow trout, which spend their lives high in the Sierra Nevada in perhaps the most beautiful farming environment on the planet, tug at my conscience. To see them idling in concrete raceways instead of chasing an insect hatch is a reminder that farmed life is a faint facsimile of life in the wild. But I will maintain my exemption for mussels, which in my opinion are an ethically defensible animal protein.Ìę

Regardless, a sustainable approach to seafood has a lot to offer. Andy Sharpless, the CEO of Oceana and the coauthor of a book about fish called , says that if we stopped overfishing and gave spawning stocks a chance to rebuild, most fisheries would fully recover within ten years and allow sustainable harvests that are 20 to 40 percent higher than the current global catch. “A well-managed global ocean could provide the equivalent of a healthy seafood meal for a billion people every day forever,” he says.

Meanwhile, it’s worth asking: How many apps rate other kinds of meat according to its environmental footprint? “If we are scared away from buying farmed salmon because it is red-listed, what do we do instead? We go buy ground beef,” Seaver points out. “If you look at the environmental factors of protein by category, often those other proteins—beef, pork, chicken—have a larger impact than even the worst of the seafood products.”

So with apologies to Michael Pollan, I’d recommend this for conscientious nonvegans: Eat a lot less meat and a lot more sustainable seafood, wild when you can verify it, and lower on the food chain, but mostly farmed, particularly mussels, clams, and oysters.Ìę

On the way back from Clapboard Island with Seaver and Moretti, stamping our feet in the wheelhouse to stay warm, I fantasized out loud about a universal food-labeling system that would rate everything according to its environmental impact and health benefits. Of course, I’d like an animal-welfare rating, too, but I don’t want to get carried away. Moretti told me about his fantasy: converting used offshore drilling platforms into massive mussel farms to help feed a growing world population. “In my dream, Bill Gates or Warren Buffett calls me up and says: ‘Hey, Gary, I really think we should do that oil-rig-mussel thing. Here’s $100 million.’” We smiled at the improbabilities—and the potential.ÌęÌęÌę Ìę

Correspondent Tim Zimmermann ()Ìęwas an associate producer of the documentary Blackfish. He wrote about zoos in March.

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Wild or farmed? Caught on a hook or with a net? As ocean stocks plummet, the question of which fish belongs on our plates is more confusing than ever. Let these six rules be your guide.Ìę

1. Get curious about your fish. Inquiring about sustainability and how and where the seafood at supermarkets and in restaurants was caught puts pressure on retailers to provide better options. Learn more about catch methods from the Safina Center’sÌę.
2. Download the Seafood Watch app. The ’s free app () rates more than 2,000 farmed and wild seafood options according to their sustainability—green is Best Choice, yellow Good Alternative, and red Avoid. Use the app at supermarkets and restaurants, and purchase Best Choice seafood whenever possible.
3. Know your seafood farming. Some aquaculture practices are OK and some aren’t. The good news is that there are more Best Choice farmed options than ever before. Use the Seafood Watch app to see how a farmed fish is rated before purchasing.
4. Move down the seafood chain. “Eat the rabbits of the ocean and not just the lions and tigers,” says Andy Sharpless, CEO of . “They’re more abundant, sustainable, and affordable.” Vary how often you consume, say, wild salmon by adding anchovies, herring, mussels,and clams to your menu.
5. Get enough omega-3’s. Some seafood provides more omega-3 fatty acids than others. The average person needs at least 2,000 milligrams a week for brain and heart health. That’s about one six-ounce serving of high-level omega-3 seafood (like salmon or Pacific sardines), two servings of rainbow trout, or three of mussels.ÌęNational Geographic’sÌęÌęlets you click on a fish type and see its omega-3 level and sustainability rating.
6. Check the mercury content. Mercury levels are rising in some oceans, thanks to coal-burning power plants and other industrial practices. Mercury is a neurotoxin, so if you eat a lot of seafood it’s smart to be aware of your intake. Large predator fish, like swordfish, bluefin tuna, and shark, have higher levels than seafood lower on the chain, like salmon, mussels, and most farmed fish. The Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit dedicated to the health of people and the environment, has athat offers a list of sustainable, low-mercury and high-omega-3 options based on your weight, age, and other health factors.Ìę

The author, a longtime student of marine environments, dove into an amazing new world of ethical harvesters, renegade farmers, and problem-solving scientists. The result: a solution to global food insecurity in a flesh-eating world.ÌęPLUS: The geniuses on the front lines of sustainable seafood.

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Last November, my ten-year-old son and I watched a about killer whales moving into the Arctic as the ice cover shrinks. It was gripping stuff. An orca pod stalked a group of narwhals while marine biologists described the group dynamics of a hunt. My son was glued to the screen and full of questions. Understanding how kinetic and wide-ranging orcas are in the wild—and how compromised their lives are in captivity, a subject I’ve covered extensively over the past five years—is one reason that so many people are now calling for the closing of marine parks. The outcry is a long time coming, and the same logic applies to zoos. Watching my son light up in front of the screen, I wondered: If a Nature special can be so inspiring and educational, are there any good arguments for keeping animals in artificial enclosures that, at best, are only a fraction of the size of their natural habitats?

Zoos think so. For decades they have argued that seeing live animals helps educate and mobilize the next generation of conservationists, and the cites multiple studies. But a few years ago, sociologist Eric Jensen, who teaches at the University of Warwick in England, discovered that most of that research assessed whether visitors (instead of whether they actually learned anything). Worse, many of the studies excluded children, the very demographic that zoos claim they are trying to inform and inspire.

[quote]The average life span of a captive elephant is 17 years—39 years shorter than in the wild.[/quote]

Jensen set out to address these flaws by surveying almost 3,000 children before and after visits to the London Zoo. , published in the August 2014 edition of Conservation Biology, weren’t encouraging. On unguided visits, only 34 percent of students showed “positive” learning, meaning they gained new information, and 16 percent actually demonstrated “negative” learning, picking up false information. (The numbers were slightly better for guided visits.)

Against the murky evidence that zoos educate or inspire is a growing amount of research showing that the animals housed in them suffer. A 1980s analysis of necropsy reports from the much lauded San Diego Zoo, for example, found frequent malnutrition, injuries from transport and the use of anesthetics and tranquilizers, and incidences of both cannibalism and infanticide. Yes, zoos have worked hard to improve conditions for their animals since then, but a in the journal Nature revealed that 33 of the most popular animals in zoos—including lions and polar bears—still exhibit signs of being under stress, from pacing to higher infant mortality rates. There’s a reason Gus, the popular Central Park Zoo polar bear who was after developing a tumor, had his own therapist.

As we accelerate into an era of rapid human-fueled species loss, perhaps the most compelling argument for zoos is the Noah’s Ark one. Facilities like the Smithsonian National Zoo in Washington, D.C., and the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo in Colorado Springs have done important work supporting condors, giant pandas, and black-footed ferrets. The Association of Zoos and Aquariums reports that its 228 members are actively working to save 30 species. But that accounts for a small portion of zoo breeding; the reality is that most programs build and sustain zoo populations, not wild ones. “In American zoos there has never been an elephant that has gone from a zoo back into the wild,” says Lori Marino, a psychobiologist and executive director of the . “It is a one-way ticket.”

There was a time when zoos really were the only place to see exotic animals. Today you can experience our greatest creatures in other ways—on YouTube or PBS, for starters, in full HD. No, you’re not seeing the animals “live,” but at least they’re in their natural habitats, engaging in natural behaviors. Add in what we’re learning about the impact of confinement on many species and zoos with cages or even natural-looking enclosures become hard to justify. In 2013, Costa Rica announced a plan to close its public zoos. It’s time for the rest of the world to move the legitimately conservation-oriented breeding programs to spacious sanctuaries and preserves—where the public can still view the animals—and follow suit.

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It's been a tough four years to work in public relations at a marine park. Intensive reporting about the conditions of marine mammals in captivity—in stories at șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű, in the book , and in the documentaryÌę, which I associate-produced—has generated widespread public debate and inspired legislation, both at the and in , to improve the welfare of marine-park animals. Over the past year, musicians like Willie Nelson, Barenaked Ladies, and Pat Benatar . Last month, Southwest Airlines with SeaWorld. Early this year, Sir Richard Branson the use of wild-caught cetaceans in tourism, and Virgin Unite (the nonprofit foundation of the Virgin Group) and Virgin Holidays have been reviewing the question of cetaceans in captivity. And SeaWorld's , which was released last week and sent shares tumbling 33 percent, indicates that SeaWorld is facing widespread public doubts about the use of killer whales and other marine mammals for profit and entertainment. SeaWorld, the industry leader, has pushed back hard, saying that its marine mammals live good lives and are well cared for, and recently to increase the size of its underwater habitat for orcas.

As the debate has raged, I've thought that to truly understand what life is like for a killer whale or dolphin at a marine park, you have to talk to the animal care workers, who are on the front lines with vets and trainers when animals are sick, give birth, need transporting, or die. But few animal care workers have been willing to talk in depth and on the record.

Over the past year, however, as Blackfish and helped inspire more SeaWorld veterans to come forward about their work, I finally connected with a few. Jim Horton spent 16 years working at marine parks, including SeaWorld Orlando, Oahu's Sea Life Park, and Atlantis Paradise Island in the Bahamas. While at SeaWorld, he received one of the park's highest honors, the Animal Stewardship Award. He also worked on the project to return Keiko, the killer whale star of Free Willy,Ìęto his native Icelandic waters. Cynthia Payne worked at SeaWorld Orlando in animal care, and Krissy Dodge worked at SeaWorld San Antonio. Why come forward now? They wanted to create a more complete picture of marine-park life.

What follows are a series of surprising and shocking conversations in which the three talk about the rewarding and challenging sides of their jobs, from teaching a newborn orca how to eat to disposing of dead animals and witnessing dolphin mothers kill their calves.Ìę

Despite the often difficult nature of the work, Horton, Payne, and Dodge were dedicated to caring for the animals. “Animal care is the one thing that SeaWorld can be proud of,” Horton says. “We were the unsung heroes.”

Here are Horton, Payne, and Dodge in their own words.

Editor's note: SeaWorld initially responded to a number of șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű's questions—feedback which is included throughout this story—before VP of communications Fred Jacobs sent us a statement, published in part at the bottom of this article, condemning our reporting. A comment from SeaLife Park runs at the end of this story, too.

Captive Breeding

The process of breeding killer whales in captivity has been critical to SeaWorld’s growth and success, especially after public opinion in the 1970s turned against capturing them in the wild. The first SeaWorld killer whale born and raised in captivity was Kalina, a.k.a. Baby Shamu, who was born in September 1985 at SeaWorld Orlando. Since then, SeaWorld’s breeding program—which also developed artificial-insemination techniques, so that killer whales in marine parks around the world can be bred without having to transport the enormous animals—has produced 31 more captive-born orcas. Nine have died, and 23 are still alive today.Ìę

The breeding program—which includes dolphins, among other species—also has a tragic side, because it sometimes results in miscarriages and stillbirths. These problems also occur in the wild, and sometimes wild orca and dolphin mothers have been observed supporting their dead calves on the surface for hours, and even days.

Horton and Payne recall some of their experiences with killer whale and dolphin breeding.

Jim Horton:ÌęWith orca labor, the fluke [the calf’s tail] can be out for a while. You want that, because the fluke is curled up inside the mother, and once it comes out blood circulates to it, and that flow hardens it up so that the newborn can use it to swim to the surface to take that first breath. That's why headfirst births are so scary, because the fluke hasn't had time to stiffen up. Mothers then push the calves up. It’s pretty rare, but I've seen it a few times. It is survivable.ÌęIf the tail is out and nothing happens within six hours, then things are getting scary. You could tell a calf was dead when their skin starts to peel off or discolor. Or you start to see big chunks of placenta at the same time. That indicates that there is a problem.

On a number of occasions, Horton dealt with captive-breeding situations in which a stillborn calf became stuck in the mother’s birth canal during labor. This condition, known as , sometimes leads to the death of the mother as well.

This is a pregnancy outcome that appears to be rare in wild killer whales, though it's difficult to study. “Adult female survivorship during the prime reproductive years is extraordinarily high in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska,” says Naomi Rose, a marine-mammal biologist at the who has studied Pacific Northwest killer whale populations. “When it has been lower, it's usually associated with poor prey levels, so the increased mortality was almost certainly because of that. I think dystocia must be very rare or absent in wild populations.”

Horton: When I was first at Sea Life Park, a female dolphin went into labor. The flukes came out but the calf was stuck. The vet [who was away and was reached by phone] did not want me to go in and try to pull the calf out, because he was fearful that I would tear the uterus. We tried to give the dolphin injections to cause her to dilate more. But after about 16 hours, the mother and calf died, with the calf still stuck in her. When I pulled the mother and calf out of the pool, I couldn’t pull the calf out for necropsy [a post-mortem exam]. I had my boots up against the mother’s abdomen. In the end, I basically had to stick my hand up inside, cut the calf, and pull out the calf’s internal organs through the mother’s vagina in order to remove the calf. I probably would have ruptured the mother if I tried to pull the calf out during labor.

Because a calf stuck in a birth canal can lead to life-threatening complications for the mother, Horton says marine parks have a special tool, which he used on the calf mentioned above, that can be employed to eviscerate a stillborn orca or dolphin. The goal is to protect the life of the mother by making the stillborn calf easier to remove from the birth canal.

Horton:ÌęThe evisceration device is a small blade on a ring that fits on your finger, with the blade under your hand. It’s also used to quickly cut a net that can be wrapped around a dolphin. We took them with us on [wild] manatee rescues in case one of us got wrapped in a net with an animal that spun; it happens quickly and it could kill you.

șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű asked SeaWorld about the ring knife and its uses, and Fred Jacobs responded: “Our veterinary medical care program is identical to that found in referral hospitals and veterinary medical teaching hospitals around the United States. We practice comprehensive medical and surgical care. That includes obstetrical care and, rarely, surgery to reduce fetal dystocia. The tools used for veterinary obstetrics are similar to those used in human medicine. The instrument you’re referring to is used in a procedure known as fetotomy.”

When we contacted Sea Life Park during our reporting, they sent us a statement that read in part: “The majority of our dolphins were born under human care through a responsible breeding program. They receive the highest quality care including round-the-clock on-site veterinary care, individualized dietary needs, and enrichment from the animal training staff.” Sea Life’s complete statement appears at the end of this story.

The Trauma of Stillbirth

Tilikum, a 12,000-pound male, is SeaWorld’s most controversial and notorious killer whaleÌębecause of his involvement in three human deaths, including SeaWorld trainer Dawn Brancheau’s in 2010. He was acquired from Canada's SeaLand of the Pacific marine park in 1992, along with two females, Haida and Nootka. Nootka, caught off Iceland in 1982 (a year before Tilikum also was caught off Iceland) came to SeaWorld Orlando in January 1993, a year after Tilikum. While still at Sealand, Nootka gave birth to a male calf, fathered by Tilikum, that lived just over a month. In August 1994, at SeaWorld Orlando, Nootka gave birth to another calf, again fathered by Tilikum. Unfortunately, it was stillborn. Payne and Horton recall the event.

Cynthia Payne: I was on night watch when Nootka had a stillborn. The supervisors determined that they had to take the baby immediately. I was told it was for Nootka’s health and safety. Nootka was in the back pool, which is long and rectangular. They dropped a net the width and depth of the pool, and I saw her push the baby over the top of the net after carrying it around for a while. As she pushed the baby around, they were trying to get it from her—not just one guy, a swarm.Ìę

I asked, “Please, can’t she just have a minute?” She was vocalizing and distressed. There was a shallows on the perimeter of the pool. Most of the guys were in the shallows, using nets and poles to get the calf close enough so they could grab it. I remember Nootka did get the calf back a few times, and in the end it was a very fast heave to get it out of the pool. Nootka was panicked. It was gut-wrenching to watch.Ìę

She about killed a couple of staff. She was mad. But they took the calf, and she did everything she could to get it back. There was no honor or care. There was nothing. They just pulled the calf and threw it in the back of a truck. And they put Nootka in the med pool [a small side pool with a floor that can be raised], and that’s where she stayed the entire night. I’ll never forget it. She cried and cried for her calf.Ìę

Horton: I do remember pulling Nootka’s calf out of the pool. It was basically born sideways, folded in half. After getting it to the side of the pool, I distinctly remember that two or three of us had our arms wrapped around the calf’s fluke, and we are trying to heave it over the wall. The damn thing was so slippery. And Nootka is right there snapping at us, her sole motivation being to get the calf back, a mother in full panic mode willing to do anything to get her baby, dead or alive. It was scary.

Before the decision is made to remove a calf, there is discussion regarding how to and when. During this time, the mother is with her deceased calf undisturbed. I have seen it take hours upon hours to get a calf, utilizing a lot of manpower, creating a lot of stress on the mother and possibly other animals in the pool. It just made sense to get started, because it could take a long time. The longer the calf remains in the pool, the more damage can occur to the carcass that can undermine the findings of the true cause of death during a necropsy. The sooner you can get the mother back into her normal routine and behavior, the sooner you can best assess her overall health and disposition to determine if the birth caused her any ill affects.

I don’t believe I’ve seen any form of grieving while the calf is still in the pool. I’ve seen mothers take a calf in their mouths and swim around to elude removal. Is this grieving, or is it keeping something that belongs to them away from staff? I believe that the grieving, or what may appear to be grieving, starts once the calf is removed.Ìę

Less than a month after her stillborn calf was born, Nootka died. Ìęwhether her death might have been related to the complications of the stillbirth.

SeaWorld’s Jacobs offered the following comment on Nootka’s death: “Any stillbirth brings potential complications for the mother, regardless of species and regardless of whether it lives at SeaWorld or the wild. It is also fair to say that our veterinarians spend a great deal of time contemplating any health issue with our animals. Your source should have included a reference to failure to thrive among neonatal wild killer whales to put this matter in context. The obvious difference between wild whales and ours is that SeaWorld whales get comprehensive veterinary care. In fact, as scientists continue to work to understand the plight of the endangered Southern Resident killer whales”—a population of about 80 orcas off the Pacific Northwest coast—“they are looking into environmental causes of morbidity and mortality, including pollutants and other contaminants in the water.”

Mothers Killing Calves

Another unusual aspect of captive breeding experienced by Horton and Payne is that mother dolphins would sometimes attack and kill their newborn calves. have been observed killing calves, but mothers have rarely been seen doing so. Horton explains why there is little that can be done about it.

Horton: I’ve seen mother dolphins kill their calves. It’s very disturbing to watch. The first time I saw it, we were in shock, and the calf died. We were like, “Whoa! That’s terrible.”

There was one time [at a non SeaWorld park] where the mother was killing her calf. I look over and my partner dives in, and as soon as he dived in, I dived in, too. Literally in a matter of ten seconds, he had been fluked [struck with the tail fluke] in the arm. That female came after us. She bit me on both of my arms and fluked me on the side of my head. She almost knocked me unconscious. Then she fluked me in the back of my head as I was trying to get out of the pool. The whole side of my head was swollen up. We learned right there not to do that again. You can’t jump in and try to pull a baby away from a mom that is trying to kill it. And she killed that calf.

Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether the mother is trying to kill the calf or trying to help it and doing it wrong. It’s weird, because it is such a panicky moment for the mom, who has maybe never seen a birth before. That’s one of the problems of being captive born, so we try, generally, to put an experienced mother in with the female that’s ready to give birth, especially if it’s a first-timer.Ìę

Sometimes there were issues with a calf, or it comes back through pathology that there was something off. But not consistently. Sometimes the calves were perfectly healthy. Sometimes it was after they had taken a breath or two.

When asked if dolphin mothers ever killed calves at SeaWorld, Jacobs responded: “Not that we can recollect, but scientists dolphins killing their young in the wild.”

Killer whale mothers at marine parks can also turn on their calves, sometimes rejecting them and refusing to nurse, sometimes getting physical with them. In November 1987, SeaWorld Orlando imported a mature, wild-caught female from Holland named Gudrun, in part to diversify the orca breeding program. In July 1989, Gudrun gave birth to a female calf called Taima. Just over four years later, in December 1993, Gudrun gave birth to another female calf, Nyar. But Nyar exhibited developmental issues, and her relationship with Gudrun was fraught. Ultimately, Nyar had to be separated from Gudrun.

Payne: Gudrun was always in trouble, always the nonwilling participant anytime there was a show that went wrong. She did not do well in captivity, nor did any of her offspring.

When she gave birth to Nyar, she tried to drown her. After that, we had to hand-feed Nyar and do constant physicals. I would help with physicals, and you’d flip her [to draw blood] and her fluke looked like a heroin addict’s arm.

The hand-feeding of Nyar, required because she wasn't being nursed by Gudrun, was a challenge. Animal care had to teach Nyar to eat the same fish that mature SeaWorld killer whales eat.

Horton: I think we tried to bottle-feed Nyar. I know tube feeding was involved. Tube feeding was a constant medical treatment, to get fluids and medications in any animal that came in sick or was compromised. Tubing was so easy. We did it all the time. If you were sick, you got tubed, because it really helped.Ìę

When Nyar was close enough in age to where she didn’t need milk as much and could start eating fish, there was a huge urge to get Nyar to start eating. She had the teeth, that’s for sure, and she ended up eating fish after a long process.

What you do is put your hand in the back corner of the mouth, in the gape. If you apply enough pressure, it gets the calf to open its mouth. Then you basically keep your hand inside the mouth at the back to keep it open. Then you take whole fish, whole herring or whole capelin—Nyar required about five pounds of fish or so per session—and you’d put them in her mouth.Ìę

This had to be done between shows. So, with some of the fish, if she wasn’t eating it, or wasn’t trying, you would literally shove it down her throat. Eventually what you do with each session is place the fish so that it’s barely in the back of the throat, and then just sitting on the tongue, because you want her to learn to swallow it and physically help with the process.Ìę

But, at the same time, she’s thrashing her head from side to side and chomping her mouth, chomping on your hand, chomping on your arm. You’d have big dents and bloody holes all over your hand.Ìę

Nyar was progressing until I couldn’t do it anymore. My hands were the size of softballs. They got so swollen I couldn’t use them. So we had to teach other people to do it.Ìę

To me, I was doing something remarkable. I am trying to save a killer whale. I didn’t want to stop until my hand stopped functioning.Ìę

Eventually we got her to the point where all you have to do is pry open her mouth, put the fish in her mouth, and close it. And she’d swallow it.Ìę

Asked about mothers turning on calves at SeaWorld, SeaWorld’s Jacobs commented: “On rare occasions mothers reject their young and we have to intervene to hand raise the calf. We closely monitor the interactions of mother and calf and, if we feel a calf is in jeopardy (which is very rare) we are prepared to intervene. In fact, through work with our killer whales, we have developed the formula for a killer whale’s milk, which can be used for our animals or potentially for an animal abandoned in the wild. Killer whales generally are very good mothers. This is one of the reasons we have a growing population of healthy whales. It should be noted, though, that maternal rejection can be found throughout the animal kingdom for numerous reasons.”

In the end, Nyar, who was thought to have been born with a brain infection, .

Labor Gone Wrong

In February 1996, Gudrun was pregnant again and went into labor. The calf was stillborn and stuck in the birth canal. SeaWorld’s vets and the animal care staff faced the difficult dilemma of figuring out how to save Gudrun’s life.

Horton: With Gudrun, there had to be some point where the vet said, OK, we’ve got to pull this calf out. The reason why you have to do that is that the mom can go septic and end up dying. So the vets say, We've gotta do something to save the mother.

Gudrun was brought into the med pool. She was put into a stretcher and suspended from the crane over a lot of foam, so we could get to the calf. We put some chains or ropes around the calf’s tail to a come-along attached to a vehicle to winch it out.

We got Gudrun back in the water, and I think her uterus came out.

Gudrun died four days later. Coincidentally, in 2010, Taima, Gudrun’s first calf, also died from complications resulting from trying to give birth to a stuck and stillborn calf.Ìę

Regarding Gudrun, Jacobs explained: “On rare occasions veterinarians have to help an animal pass a fetus. With very large animals like whales, elephants, rhinos, horses and cows, there are specifically designed veterinary obstetric instruments. The goal of any such procedure is to save the life of the mother and quickly ease any discomfort she would have as a result of the stillbirth. The tools used by SeaWorld are identical to those used by large animal veterinarians.”

Killer Whale Transport

Helping move killer whales and other animals from one SeaWorld park to another, or from SeaWorld to another marine park, was part of the animal care job. Transporting orcas involved a specially designed crate that the whale could be stretchered into and kept wet. The crate could be shipped on a truck or a plane, making it possible to transport the animals long distances. In November 2006,ÌęSeaWorld San AntonioÌęshipped Kayla, an 18-year-old female, to SeaWorld Orlando. Krissy Dodge talks about helping with that transport.

Krissy Dodge: It took months for animal care to get the crate ready to go, months to get all the supplies and everything exactly ready, because there is so much involved in getting the whale on the truck. Animal care and the training staff got Kayla into the med pool and raised the bottom of the pool so there was no water. I was going to be one of the ones to help with my hands on her. But Kayla started to freak out, and she was making really loud and angry vocalizations. Her eyes got really big. She was thrashing her tail. She was really upset.Ìę

During her time at SeaWorld, Dodge kept a journal in which she recorded her experiences. Here is her account, written in the aftermath of Kayla’s transport:Ìę

Nov. 17, 2006: killer whale transport. Not fun. I got to work at 7am, worked a whole shift, stayed to finish up transport prep, then an evening meeting to discuss transport, which was to begin at 11pm. At 11pm we were up at Shamu [Stadium]. I was assigned to be in a wet suit to assist in getting her into the stretcher. I wasn’t sure I wanted to do this. I was nervous. The whale was in the med pool, false bottom raised to beach her. She began to stress out. The trainers couldn’t get her to do what they wanted. She started thrashing and making loud vocals.ÌęI was literally terrified. I was then told not to get in. More experienced people only. I was relieved. I was close enough to see her eyes, she was so upset and sounded like she was screaming. Animal Care staff had to leave the water several times because of the danger of being attacked. Finally they were able to get her into the stretcher and she was lifted into the box. She sat quietly for a few minutes and I was assigned to sit up on top of the box by her head and record respirations. I was within 2 feet of her head and I could see the defeated look in her eye. I felt awful. Then somehow a piece of foam that was supporting her dorsal floated towards her head. She panicked and began thrashing. She began thrusting her tail up and down and smashing the baffle above her tail. The box was shaking and water was going everywhere. I lost my balance, dropped my clipboard and moved my leg just as her giant head reared up, mouth open, towards me. I had moved just in time. I was really scared. When she calmed down I got off the box and was angry [about] what I was just a part of.

During our conversation, Dodge elaborated further.

Dodge:ÌęThat whole experience of seeing her so angry and the fear that I felt, that was a big thing for me. It was in the middle of the night. I remember lying there thinking, “What did I just help with?” I felt like it was really wrong for that whale to be so stressed out and so angry.

I was starting to feel like not only was that a stressful event for the whale, but she shouldn’t even really be here in the first place. I felt by being involved in this I was contributing to the situation. I felt ashamed that I participated in that.

At the time of this transport Kayla was pregnant. Six months later, she miscarried.

Regarding Kayla, SeaWorld’s Jacobs stated: “The transport had nothing to do with the miscarriage.”

He also commented on transport in general: “Animals are sometimes moved from one habitat to another within our parks and beached animals are moved into and out of our veterinary hospital (and then, after successful rehabilitation, transported for return to the wild). Animals are occasionally moved between accredited institutions, but not every Animal Care employee is involved every time an animal is moved. All employees who participate in animal transports are trained and supervised by experienced zoological professionals.”

Dead Animals

Most animals that die at SeaWorld undergo a necropsy to determine the cause of death. Animal care workers often participate in the procedures and help dispose of the corpses. Dead animals mainly come from of sick or dying wild whales and dolphins that are stranded on beaches or picked up in the hope of nursing them back to health.

Horton: In the early days [1980s], we would take the pieces and parts out to Florida’s Merritt Island, which was near the Cape Canaveral space-shuttle area. Ninety-nine percent of all those pieces and parts were beached dead or nearly dead wild animals that were brought back to SeaWorld for necropsy or attempts to save a near-death animal. [Dead] captive stock were handled the same way, but I honestly recall maybe one a year. I do recall at least one killer whale buried at SeaWorld, maybe two.

We’d go way out into the woods on Merritt Island, and there was a large horseshoe pit, maybe eight feet wide and eight feet deep in a mosquito-infested swamp area. We would throw all the guts and everything into the pit. Wild hogs would come and eat half of it. Some of it would slowly rot away. It was a really gross part of the job. The mosquitoes were unreal, and you were covered in guts, head to toe. So when you are slapping mosquitoes, you are slapping guts all over your face. Afterward we would head straight down to the beach and take a bath in green antiseptic soap.Ìę

Then we started taking parts to a rendering plant about an hour away. You’d dump all the parts into a giant vat.Ìę

I almost died at that rendering plant. I got yanked off the back of the truck with a big hunk of pilot whale. You’d back the truck right up to a vat, which had blades that are mushing everything up. We had worked on a mass stranding of wild pilot whales in the Florida Keys. I hadn’t slept in days, and we had done like 20 necropsies. I was standing on the back of the truck, and there was a guy on the other side from me. We had meat hooks, taking these 100-pound chunks of meat and chucking them off the back of the truck. The meat hooks have this little wrist strap, and I took one chunk and threw it off, and my hook didn’t come out. It yanked me right off the back of this truck into this vat where all the blades are. I grabbed the bumper, so I am hanging there with this 100-pound hunk of meat on one arm and the bumper under the other. I got my hook off and another guy pulled me into the truck. I tore all the muscles in my arm. I would have died, or at least lost my legs in a big soupy green pit. I eventually had to go to the hospital and have surgery on my arm.

Noted SeaWorld’s Jacobs: “Animal remains have always been disposed of in accordance with state law and zoological best practice. Many skeletons are donated to specific scientific projects or museums so that the animal can continue to contribute to knowledge and education even after death.”

The Decision to Leave

Sometimes the transition between life and death was particularly difficult to experience. Krissy Dodge talks about another incident that affected her decision to leaveÌęSeaWorld San AntonioÌęthat involved the birth of a baby beluga. Dodge had the night watch and was monitoring the mother and staying alert for a trail of blood, which would precede the emergence of the calf's flukes. Dodge also recorded that experience in her journal:

Sept 17, 2006. Sunday a week ago I had whale watch from 12am–7:30am. Siku the beluga was due at any moment. An hour into it I thought I saw a small amount of blood. I didn’t see any crunching [flexing by the mother] though, and kept watching. I saw more blood and half of the tail flukes come out. I was so excited I started shaking. I immediately called my supervisor and he arrived in 10 min. After everyone was called I got into my wetsuit in case I was needed to get into the water.ÌęWhen the calf was half way out, the supervisor told us to surround the pool so if the calf went around, it wouldn’t bump into walls or flop out of the pool. The calf was born and I watched it take its first breath. It seemed to be doing OK. It was very exciting for me. I almost wanted to cry. Of course I didn’t since no one shows any emotion in our dept.

I stayed watching until I was off at 7:30am. The next day I found out that the calf was not nursing and had to be tube fed. He didn’t take it well. To do it, someone had to jump in and catch it, swim it over, then a tube was shoved down its throat. A few times milk and blood was being expelled from the blowhole. It was decided on Friday to make an emergency move of Siku and calf to a back pool. Apparently when they got into the water to move the calf, it died in a trainer’s arms. I found out it died as they were bringing it back to 72 [the necropsy room] on the back of a cart.ÌęI had to help in the necropsy. It was my first one and was indeed traumatic. To be the one to see it being born and also the one to cut it up was really difficult. When it was finished I walked to the zoological building to get a shower. I was still taking it all in and trying not to cry. A coworker was there and asked how it went. I said it was ok, but difficult being my first one. She said, “Oh don’t worry, you’ll get used to it. Soon it won’t even phase you.” To have this job, the only way to do it is to become hard and desensitized to everything. This job is so difficult. Not just physically, but emotionally. It’s made me question who I am and what I believe in. I’m ready to move on. This chapter needs to be closed.

She elaborated further in our conversation.

Dodge: It was sad to be so exhilarated to see the birth and then to come back two days later and be the one who has to do the necropsy. Once the animal dies, it is really weird. There are meat hooks, and you hang the calf by the blowhole. It’s hard to see when you first do that sort of thing. They take brain samples and use a saw to cut through the skull.

Then, basically, for lack of a better term, the animals have to be cut up and put into 40-pound biohazard bags. And those are put into cardboard boxes and then into a freezer. Then, whenever the truck would come, they were taken to be cremated.

SeaWorld’s Jacobs confirmed the death of Siku’s calf and noted that the necropsies are performed to determine a cause of death. “Our veterinary pathologists conduct comprehensive post-mortem exams, which assess all organs and systems,” he said. “The tools and techniques used for these exams are standard in human and veterinary medicine.”

He also added, “It is likely that neonatal mortality is far more prevalent in wild populations than at SeaWorld.” Rose, of the Animal Welfare Institute, disagrees with that assessment. “Neonatal mortality is essentially unknown in cetacean populations of any species, since births are very rarely observed,” she says.

Strange Days

Animal care, as described by Horton, Dodge, and Payne, involves a variety of unusual experiences. But some are more unusual than others.

Horton: I was working in the dive department when I came back to SeaWorld. We vacuumed Shamu Stadium every morning. All of the killer whales would be in other pools. I specifically remember Tilikum lying on the bottom of the neighboring pool masturbating. I'm right next door vacuuming the pool and watching him through a gate, humping the bottom of pool and climaxing. That stuff's everywhere.

Payne: When I was working in education, over at the walrus exhibit, Garfield would masturbate for hours in public. The whole team would log how many times he did it in an effort to get him a new exhibit. That was one of my primary assignments when I first worked at SeaWorld: logging how many times Garfield masturbated every day.

In 1981, SeaWorld acquired a young Icelandic killer whale named Kotar. After spending some time at SeaWorld San Diego, Kotar was transported to SeaWorld Orlando. Horton remembers Kotar well.

Horton: Kotar was a really aggressive whale. He hated animal care. He would lunge at us if we got too close to the side of the pool. It's like he knew when the animal care guys came down to Shamu Stadium.

In 1987, SeaWorld acquired a male killer whale called Kanduke from Marineland in Ontario and transported him to Orlando. “Duke,” as he was sometimes referred to, had been caught off Canada’s Pacific coast in 1975 and was older and bigger than Kotar. Horton recalls what happened when the two killer whales from different oceans were first introduced and the unusual injury that resulted.Ìę

Horton: Duke showed up at Orlando in early 1987. When he first hit the pool, Kotar and Kanduke were both on either side of a gate, going at it. That’s when Duke got bit on his penis, as soon as he arrived. There was splashing and chaos, and you could see dicks in the air, and the gate was rattling back and forth. No one knew how severe the injury was. We thought it was possible it was bitten off, because there was blood coming out of Kanduke’s genital slit. So we immediately began a 24-hour watch. The pool turned green from all the blood [mixing with the blue water], and that’s a big pool. We kind of jokingly called it Dickwatch ’87, because no one knew if it was bitten off or not or how severe it was. Kanduke’s penis didn’t show again for three or four days. We finally got to see it, and there were rake marks [lacerations from Kotar’s teeth] close to the tip. Kanduke bred, so I guess it still worked after that.

Asked to comment on Kanduke’s injury, SeaWorld’s Jacobs responded: “We don’t know what whale bit him. Whales occasionally bite and rake one another whether they live at SeaWorld or in the wild. The difference is that any injury that an animal at SeaWorld sustains is promptly and appropriately treated.”

Kanduke sired two calves at SeaWorld Orlando, Katerina and Taima. Kotar was shipped off toÌęSeaWorld San AntonioÌęin early 1988, leaving Kanduke as SeaWorld Orlando’s breeding male. Kanduke died in September 1990 . (Captive orcas spend a lot of time surface-resting and are vulnerable to mosquito bites.)ÌęAccording to Jacobs, “a study into the cause of death was funded by a grant from the National Institutes of Health, and our scientists .”

Kotar died atÌęSeaWorld San AntonioÌęin April 1995, when a gate he managed to open between pools closed and .Ìę

JIM HORTON worked for SeaWorld in Florida from 1981 to 1996 and again from 1999 to 2000, before going off to work on the project to return Keiko to Iceland. Horton subsequently worked at Sea Life Park (2002 to 2004) and at Atlantis Paradise Island (2004 to 2012). He now lives on Oahu and recently retired as a yacht broker to spend more time with his wife and newborn girl.Ìę

CYNTHIA PAYNEÌęstarted working in the education department at SeaWorld Orlando in June 1992, straight out of high school. She quickly transferred to animal care and worked with Horton until she left SeaWorld in December 1994. Today, Payne runs a recycling company called Full Stream Recycling LLC in Charlotte, North Carolina.

KRISSY DODGE began her work at SeaWorld San Antonio in 2004, after getting a degree in zoology from California’s Humboldt State University. She started in aviculture, working often with SeaWorld’s penguins, before moving to animal care in 2006. Dodge left SeaWorld on December 31, 2006,* to return to Humboldt County, where she is raising two small children and occasionally assists in marine-mammal rescues.ÌęÌę

Here is more of SeaWorld’s final statement to șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű, dated July 30, 2014:Ìę

șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű has sent us nearly 70 questions from a story ostensibly about “animal care workers’ experience in marine parks.” The number and nature of these questions suggests something else: That șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű will continue to report as news anything, no matter how baseless and offensive, so long as it seeks to damage SeaWorld. Despite the obvious bias and charged accusations in șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű’s first set of questions, we made the good faith effort to respond to each in a professional manner. Our response was met with another set, equally baseless and provocative. …ÌęIt is clear that șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű has a greater interest in the sensational than in truly informing its readers about SeaWorld. We will no longer participate in a “fact checking” exercise for a story that is apparently already written and shares the same bias as the other SeaWorld stories șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű has published.

We received this statement, dated July 23, 2014, from Sea Life Park in response to our questions:

For the past 50 years Sea Life Park, which was opened in conjunction with the Oceanic Institute, has been dedicated to providing the highest level of care and a safe home for all our animals who serve as ambassadors for the birds, mammals, turtles and fish that live in and near the ocean, including species native to Hawai‘i.

As a member of the Alliance of Marine Mammal Parks and Aquariums, we are dedicated to the highest standards of care for marine mammals in order to provide an enriching educational experience for our park guests. Our animals receive constant attention and affection, and the best food, shelter and veterinary care, including on-site professionals and world-renowned experts who are on retainer to the Park.

The majority of our dolphins were born under human care through a responsible breeding program. They receive the highest quality care including round-the-clock on-site veterinary care, individualized dietary needs, and enrichment form the animal training staff.

Our green sea turtle breeding program plays a key role in educating the public and raising awareness of the challenges that green sea turtles face in the wild; and we are the only location on O‘ahu to provide rescue and rehabilitation services for native Hawaiian seabirds, including the shearwaters. Our Hawaiian monk seals are governed by a permit under the Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

Through Sea Life Park, thousands of people, including our local school children, are reached every year by a live encounter in the Park or by our educational outreach programs in the schools that motivate conservation awareness and action.

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Should a captive killer whale be listed under the Endangered Species Act? That is the question NOAA is considering with regard to a wild-caught killer whale named Lolita who has been performing shows at Miami’s Seaquarium for more than 40 years. Lolita was captured as a calf in Puget Sound in 1970, from a group of killer whales known as the Southern Residents. In 2005 the Southern Residents were listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act (ESA), with Lolita excluded from the listing. But last week the National Oceanic And Atmospheric Administration’s Fisheries Division—in response to —proposed a rule that would .

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“The government is now poised to reverse the unlawful and unexplained 2005 decison to deny Lolita protection under the Endangered Species Act. It’s a huge first step, but it’s only a first step,” says Jared Goodman, Director of Animal Law at PETA, which is also suing the U.S. Departmernt Of Agriculture for renewing Miami Seaquarium’s licence to display Lolita despite keeping her in conditions (especially her small pool) which PETA argues are in violation of the Animal Welfare Act.

NOAA is now seeking scientific and expert comment on , and a final decision could be a year away. But if Lolita is, in the end, granted endangered status, she would be the first captive killer whale to get that protection and Miami Seaquarium would have to apply for a special permit to keep her.

Andrew Hertz, Miami Seaquarium’s General Manager, has been fighting efforts to free Lolita (the marine park’s lone orca since her male companion, Hugo, died in 1980), for years. In , Hertz said: “This decision is not final. Based on NMFS’ announcement, Lolita will continue to be an ambassador for her species from her home at Miami Seaquarium.”

Animal welfare advocates hope that NOAA’s proposed rule is the first step toward Lolita’s journey back to her family. Plans have long existed to create for Lolita in the waters frequented by (the killer whale believed to be her mother is still alive). But even if Miami Seaquarium in the end has to give Lolita up, NOAA expressed concern about returning her to her native waters, noting in its review of Lolita’s case that “release of a captive animal into the wild has the potential to injure or kill not only the particular animal, but also the wild populations of that same species.”

Naomi Rose, a killer-whale expert with the Animal Welfare Institute, says that absent a solid seapen plan, including funding, it is possible that Lolita could even end up at another marine park, with better facilities, such as SeaWorld. And she acknowledges the risks involved in transporting a killer whale that is estimated to be almost 50, and the mixed memories about the fate of Keiko—of Free Willy fame—who died after being returned to his native waters off Iceland. Still, Rose says: “The big difference is the proposed sea pen would be where Lolita’s family is. It could flip her out completely, or she would cope like she has coped all these years. I don’t think anyone knows. It’s difficult to be playing God with her, but keeping her at Miami Seaquarium is playing God, too. If the law says she can’t stay there, then the potential of a sea pen is far greater than in that pool.”

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No matter what one thinks about the wisdom and morality of marine park killer whale shows, most people find the idea of marine parks stocking their pools with killer whales taken from the wild objectionable. The reason is pretty simple: wild captures are traumatic, break up tightly knit killer whale families, and deplete wild populations.Ìę

A blogger posted a story about his visit to the “Centre of Marine Mammal Adaptation, near Vladivostok, Russia, where Narnia is kept. He captured a photo of three small pools and 20 new young beluga whales in them.

Narnia 2, at Vladivostok.

In one 1970s capture in the Pacific Northwest, documented in bothÌęÌęand theÌę,Ìęboats, explosives, and nets were used to ensnare dozens of orcas so that young calves (smaller and easier to transport) could be taken and shipped to marine parks. InÌęBlackfish, one grizzled veteran of the hunt—who likens the experience to taking a child from its family and during the capture was ordered to cut open, weigh down, and sink a number of orcas that had drowned in the nets—calls it the worst thing he has ever done.

The public backlash against taking wild killer whales drove SeaWorld’s capture teams out of United States waters and on to Iceland. More important, it prompted SeaWorld to develop the know-how and technology needed to breed killer whales in captivity. The first successful “Baby Shamu” birth was celebrated in 1985. Since then, SeaWorld and other marine parks have preferred to rely on captive breeding, which now includes artificial insemination techniques, to keep their killer-whale inventories flush. Today, only 12 of theÌę(and two, a killer whale called Kshamenk in Argentina, and a killer whale called Morgan, who was found off the Netherlands in 2010 and is now with SeaWorld’s killer whales at Loro Parque in the Canary Islands, started as rescues). In most of the world, the era of wild captures has long been over.

ButÌęÌęand captive breeding is not prolific enough to supply new or planned marine parks that may be hoping to draw big crowds with killer whale shows. Hoping to score big and meet potential new demand (a killer whale can sell for a $1 million or more), Russian hunters are reported to have recently caught seven wild killer whales in the Sea Of Okhotsk. After being netted and dragged ashore in two separate operations in August and October, the killer whales were trucked hundreds of miles to a sea pen near Vladivostok, where they joined a young female, dubbed Narnia, who was snared last year.

The reports come via orcaÌę, author ofÌęwho in 1999 helped found theÌęÌę(FEROP)Ìęto study Russian killer whale populations. According to Hoyt, Russian hunters, working for theÌę, have been trying to capture wild Russian orcas since at least 2002. In 2003 they managed to corral a group more than 30 orcas off southeast Kamchatka, killing one young female in the nets and transporting a second female across Russia to the Utrish Marine Station on the Black Sea, where she died 13 days later.Ìę

Since then, Hoyt says, additional attempts were made (five orcas in total are estimated to have been killed during Russian capture attempts), but Russia, thanks in part to appeals by FEROP, stopped issuing permits for orcas off Eastern Kamchatka. Permits for 6-10 orcas a year continued to be issued for the Sea Of Okhotsk, but it is more logistically challenging, which seemed to put a brake on capture efforts. Ìę

Last year, however, a Russian team, which had already been engaged in beluga captures in the Sea Of Okhotsk, managed to capture Narnia, a young female. That same team pulled off two more capture operations this year, in August and October, netting the additional seven orcas who have joined Narnia near Vladivostok.ÌęÌęthe newly captured orcas arrived at the sea pen after the long transport in very poor condition, and initially refused to eat. It was only after Narnia started to bring them fish that they started to feed normally.

Hoyt,Ìęwho is also a Research fellow with Whale And Dolphin Conservation,Ìęsays that these new wild captures are being conducted by a conglomerate of companies called White Sphere, which captures marine mammals, and builds and operates aquariums in Russia. One aquarium, the Sochinskiy Delfinariy has been identified as the owner of Narnia. Hoyt believes that two of the recently caught orcas, a 4-year-old female and an 8-year-old male, are being offered for sale abroad, perhaps to a Chinese facility, and that at least two of the remaining group of five (one is a mature female; the sex and ages of the others are not known) will be shipped to Moscow soon to be placed in an Oceanarium that is being built at theÌę. Hoyt worries that the mature female might be the mother of the two young orcas being offered for sale abroad, which means that the family group would be broken up.

No one seems to know where the remaining three orcas will end up. But Russia has 17 marine parks, and China already has some 50, with two more nearing completion. “It seems like China is becoming, or has become, a primary source of the demand for belugas, dolphins, and orcas alike,” saysÌę, which helps sponsor Hoyt’s and FEROP’s work. “Chinese facilities also source from the Taiji dolphin hunts. Twenty-four dolphins were exported from Japan to China in 2012, and CITES trade reports suggest over 60 wild-caught belugas were exported from Russia to China between 2008 and 2010 alone.”

Hoyt and FEROP are lobbying the Russian government to end orca-capture permits in the Sea Of Okhotsk for 2014. But as the Russian Far East threatens to become the next wild orca gold rush, tapping into a remote orca population that until now has mostly been left alone, Hoyt sees only one way the wild orca hunts will truly stop. “A lot depends on how many people per year pay to get into SeaWorld in the U.S., as well as paying to get into the growing number of such facilities in China, Japan and Russia,” he says. “By last count, more than 120 facilities in these countries exhibit whales and/or dolphins. If there is no demand from the owners of these facilities and from the paying public, the selling price will go down and eventually there may be little or no supply offered for sale. Then the orca trafficking can stop.”

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