I recently discovered a link to a livestream camera overlooking a bay in British Columbia��and claiming��to show orcas in real time. I hopped on to see what was happening, with the attitude of like I’m really going to see an orca thousands of miles away.��But I did! And then I spent an hour watching the orca frolic around in the water and listening to its blowhole exhalations. During these uncertain times, it was the only thing that relaxed me that day. (A shout-out��to , the world’s largest live-nature-cam network, for setting up the camera��and to the other organizations who make these experiences possible.) Later��I got hooked watching a real-time surfer on Oahu’s North Shore. During a period when we can’t travel, livestream feeds are one of the best armchair experiences. Until we can all get back out there, these webcams will take you on a journey around the world—and inspire future trips.

If You Want to Surf in Hawaii

Listen to crashing waves and catch a surfer or two on this at the Pipeline break on Oahu’s North Shore (where surfing is still allowed for now). And , a website that specializes in surf news and forecasting, has a Cam of the Moment set on a different break around the world at any given time.

If You Want to Go to Yosemite

Relax to the rushing��cascade of a huge waterfall in ��of��the park’s Upper Yosemite Falls.��

If You Want to Go Diving

The sounds of the current and images of flowing��kelp in this ��footage from��California’s Channel Islands National Park make for��another great offering by Explore. And in this Atlantic Ocean��, placed 34 miles off the coast of Cape Fear, North Carolina, I saw a big��ol’��shark cruise by, in addition to other vibrant marine life, after about five minutes of watching.��

If You Want to Go to New Zealand

Start dreaming about a trip to , the epicenter of adventure on the country’s South Island, by watching the light change on Lake Wakatipu and the Remarkables Mountain Range that surrounds the small town.

If You Want See Orcas in British Columbia

One of the many gifts of Explore’s��livestream cameras is its orca offerings in Johnstone Strait, a protected habitat in British Columbia��where 150 or more killer whales spend the warmer months. I like to open up and leave it on in the background until I hear some splashing or blowhole exhalations, and then I click��over to see the action. Different cameras are live at any given time. (If a camera isn’t live, Explore��runs Live Cam Highlights, which are divine.) Here are my two favorites, both from the straight:��The ��camera overlooks Robson Bight. The second is an ��in which you see orcas darting by and—even more awesome—hear them communicate through their high-pitched sounds. It’s a good reminder that nature is still thriving in many places��despite what’s happening to humanity.

If You Want to Go to Patagonia

Get inspired for a future trip to the Southern Hemisphere by watching this , focused on the stunning Torres del Paine National Park and Rio Serrano. Chilean Patagonia has some of the most pristine wilderness parks in the world.

If You Want to Be on a River

The sound of a river immediately relaxes me. Zone out to the rushing waters of the in Crescent City, California. Or you might catch some kayakers on North Carolina’s famous Nantahala River.

If You Want to Observe—or Be Inside of—a Volcano

Watch the clouds float over the top of in Costa Rica, or look deep inside in Hawaii’s Volcanoes National Park.

If You Want to Go on Safari in South Africa

Streamed daily at sunrise and sunset South African time (GMT plus two), tune in to ’s live, interactive online safaris. Professional gamekeepers and park rangers take viewers out into the savannas of South Africa’s Kruger National Park and Kenya’s Maasai Mara National Reserve to scout for wildlife, giving you the experience of a safari from home. Or if you just want to watch elephants meandering around a water hole, in South Africa’s Tembe National Elephant Park does the trick nicely and also works at night (which helps��given the time change).

If You Want to Visit��a Caribbean Island

These really got me longing to lounge on a white-sand beach, from chilling at�� to dipping my toes into the water��by��the on Jost Van Dyke in the British Virgin Islands, with its famous in hand.

If You Want to Tour the Happiest Country on Earth

https://youtube.com/watch?v=UwSJ26G9hns

Take a walk around Helsinki on Webcamtaxi’s�� of Finland’s capital. Or look at what’s happening at�� in Lapland, the northern region��of the country. Finland is consistently rated one of the happiest places in the world.

If You Want to Go to the Mountains

The Jungfrau is a mountain in the Bernese Alps of��western Switzerland. With the nearby Eiger and Mönch, it forms a group of three peaks��known as the triumvirate. In these , you can appreciate the Jungfrau’s glaciers and jagged contours. (The mountain is sometimes socked in by fog due to a storm, so check back on different days.) The camera was set up by the Jungfrau Railway company, which boasts��the highest train station in Europe a few hundred feet below.

The has long been on my bucket list. Set on 5,200 acres in Walland, Tennessee, the property��recently added ridgetop cabins with incredible views of the Great Smoky Mountains. When I’m watching , I pretend that I’m kicking back on a cabin deck with an Oskar Blues Mama’s Little Yella Pils, looking out at��the Smokies.��

If You Want to Enjoy��a Los Angeles Sunset

Thanks to a new campaign from Los Angeles Tourism, every day at around 6:30 P.M.��Pacific Time you can watch a from the top of ��overlooking Venice Beach.��

If You Want to Go to the South Pole

This , operated by the National Science Foundation, shows the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station research site in Antarctica, where the high temperature last week was minus 57 degrees. The camera is sometimes idle waiting on satellite connections, but it’s been up most times that I’ve logged on.

If You Want to Go to Venice, Italy

Leave it to the Italians to create the most civilized live cam. streams footage from various cameras around the city’s��beautiful canals and is set to the music of Interpreti Veneziana. We heart Italy.

And a Few More, Because Who Doesn’t Love Manatees, Sharks, and Seals?

The key with many of the livestreams mentioned in this story is patience. I left this ��at Homosassa Springs Wildlife State Park in Florida on in the background for a day until, all of a sudden, I heard a rush of bubbles. Lo and behold, there were three big, fat adult manatees and a snuggly��baby manatee swimming around. Warning: you may end up ��one.��

This next recommendation isn’t quite a livestream, but it’s still really cool. In a worldwide set up by Ocearch, a data-centric organization that helps scientists track tagged marine life in order to study and protect them, you can live-track great white sharks, turtles, and dolphins. My colleague Kaelyn Lynch turned me onto it. She’s been following Katharine, the famous 2,300-pound great white, since the shark��was tagged in 2013,��on her journey between the North Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico.

It’s hard not to walk away with a smile on your face after watching lounge and flop around the beach in Piedras Blancas State Marine Reserve on California’s central coast.

The post Travel the World with These Livestream Cameras appeared first on ���ϳԹ��� Online.

The last time I saw Scarlet alive, rain from a dismal September sky was pattering the Salish Sea. Despite the weather, dozens of people lined the cliff of San Juan Island’s Limekiln Point State Park, the best place to watch killer whales from land. It was as if they’d turned out to pay their respects to a funeral train.

I was on a NOAA Zodiac with a team that included a University of California at Davis wildlife veterinarian��who was hoping to dose the sick three-year-old orca with an antiparasitic��solution. As we approached Scarlet, she was struggling to keep up with her mother and three older siblings, all members of the Pacific Northwest’s critically endangered Southern Resident killer whales. The vet shot two darts filled with medication, but up close it was obvious that this and the other unprecedented attempts to save Scarlet weren’t going to be successful.

Scarlet’s once white eye patches had turned bilious orange, and instead of highlighting the Rubenesque form of a healthy killer whale, they wrapped tightly around the shape of her blubberless skull. She’d lost so much of her buoyant, insulating fat that it looked like just surfacing for air was an effort.

Less than a week later, after her mother had been seen several times without her, Scarlet was officially declared dead. The little orca likely just slipped away and sank forever into the cold, green water.

Losing Scarlet dropped the Southern Resident’s population to 74, its lowest level in 35 years. Since she was a female with breeding potential, her death nudges the whales that much closer to extinction.

The Southern Residents are sliding toward��oblivion for three main reasons: fish, fish, fish. Chinook salmon makes��up at least 80 percent of their diet, but many Chinook runs are also endangered. Man-made noise from vessels makes it harder for the orcas to communicate and hunt for what few fish are left. When they do catch a fish, it’s loaded with industrial and agricultural toxics.

The attention garnered by Scarlet and, last summer, by her podmate, , who carried around her dead calf for 17 days, spurred some government officials to action. Canada curtailed salmon fishing in several known orca feeding grounds, continued a noise-reduction program for ships heading to and from Vancouver, earmarked some funding for salmon recovery, and finally matched the U.S. requirement to stay at least 600 feet��from killer whales.

On the Washington State side of the Salish Sea, governor Jay Inslee formed the and challenged the group to come up with a package of “bold” proposals to save the orcas.

After a series of meetings and surveys that generated more than 18,000 public comments over six months, the task force and 36-point plan on November 16. As an in-depth primer on the Southern Residents and Chinook salmon and the complex anthropogenic impacts that both have faced for more than 100 years, the report is an excellent read. As a set of actions to save both linked species, it’s a strong push in the right direction including, as advertised, some bold and contentious ideas, such as��a moratorium on whale watching the Southern Residents.

Governor Inslee, who’s for president in 2020 on the strength of Washington’s burgeoning green economy and his attention to climate change and other environmental issues, kept up the task force’s momentum by turning its��recommendations into more than $1 billion worth of items in the state’s proposed 2019–21 budget, which will be up for approval with the legislature this spring.

Much of that funding would go to enforce existing regulations protecting habitat and to continue or accelerate restoration projects, all aimed at increasing Chinook salmon, because no Chinook equals no orcas. It also includes money to support the sounds-good-at-the-end-of-the-bar��fixes, such as culling seals and sea lions��and increasing salmon-hatchery production.

Sea lions will die because they’re smart enough to take advantage of the dam bottlenecks we created that block spawning salmon, serving��them up at all-you-can-eat buffets for the pinnipeds. People forget that, to protect salmon populations, Washington long had bounties on seals and sea lions ($1 and $2.50 a scalp, respectively, back in 1903; $8 a nose in later years, before the bounties finally ended in the 1960s), and all that time the Chinook numbers still crashed due to overfishing and habitat destruction.

The damage and disruption we’ve done to natural systems out West means we do need salmon hatcheries in the short and medium term, even though they threaten wild-run fish via competition and genetic dilution. (It’s the wild salmon that reproduce more successfully and have the resiliency needed to better face climate change.)

Along with the bounties on predators, we also forget that before we adopted the Northwest’s orcas as beloved icons, they were killed by fishermen because they, too, competed for salmon. The orcas were also shot by the military just for target practice. And we had no problem letting them be rounded up, driven into nets by explosives, calves separated from mothers, and shipped��off to marine parks to entertain us.��

Our attitudes toward orcas have evolved quickly, but only after we set in motion a clear path to extinction for the Southern Residents, to save themselves from us.

Reading through the task-force proposals and governor’s budget, what’s apparent��is that nearly all the beneficial orca and salmon actions will also serve to create a healthier, more productive environment for humans. Cleaning up toxics, preventing oil spills, letting rivers run more naturally, rebuilding fish stocks, and other steps to restore the ecosystem are all no-brainers, even if you don’t care about killer whales. The Washington State legislature should see it that way when it��votes on the budget.��

This billion dollars is not going to save the orcas, though. That will take decades of continuous effort at the state level as well as federal action on dams and mixed-stock salmon fishing outside Washington State waters. But it’s definitely movement in the right direction and a sign that the people of Washington are willing to invest, and maybe even inconvenience themselves, to help save a bellwether species that’s dying in order to show us what we’re doing to ourselves.

The task force’s stated recovery goal is to add ten Southern Resident orcas in ten years. Around the same time Scarlet was declared dead, aerial photos showed that one female from each of J, K, and L pods that make up the Southern Residents was pregnant. On January 11, researchers spotted what they estimate to be a three-week-old calf with one of those whales, L77, Matia. Designated L124, the baby looked healthy, and all three pods came together that day in a “superpod,” which is a gathering of the clans accompanied by lots of socializing and playing—something we’d recognize in our culture as a celebration.��

Unfortunately, according to the , two adult orcas, including Tahlequah’s mother, J17, look thin, and there’s serious concern whether they’ll make it through the winter.��Despite the federal government shutdown, NOAA just recalled its West Coast marine mammal stranding coordinator on an emergency basis, and wildlife veterinarians are making plans to conduct a health assessment on the two whales as soon as possible.

With two orcas in poor health and the Southern Residents’ recent rate of failed pregnancies, the odds are long against the population growing more this year. But then the odds weren’t good that Tahlequah would carry her dead calf around long enough for the world to take notice of the orcas’ plight, or that Scarlet could hang on long enough to ensure that the public and political will was strong enough to act.

The new baby and new actions means there’s hope for the Southern Residents. Hopefully it’s not going to take a continual procession of dead whales to keep us pursuing��positive steps to fix the ecosystem both we and the orcas depend on. ����

The post Washington’s Bold Plan to Save Its Orcas appeared first on ���ϳԹ��� Online.

In addition to women, we’ve found another thing for which Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh has no respect: Whale trainers.��

On Thursday, I dug into ��in 2013 for the , where he compared whale training to “daredevil motorcycle jumps”��and��ranted strangely about the Spider Man musical. That’s right: We may actually have managed to find someone who watched ��and came away defending Seaworld.��

First, some background: OSHA filed its case against Seaworld after one of the park’s��trainers, Dawn Brancheau, was killed during a Shamu Show by an orca named Tilikum. ���ϳԹ��� reported on that��story in 2010 and 2011 with our features “The Killer in the Pool”��and “Blood in the Water,”��both written by��Tim Zimmermann. (He'd go on to co-write Blackfish.)��The two pieces tell the story of Brancheau and a years-long pattern of dangerous behavior at Seaworld.

OSHA argued��that��Seaworld should have taken more steps to protect its trainers and it��fined the park $70,000. Seaworld appealed, resulting in the court case, which in the end was��defeated by a two-to-one vote in the U.S. Court of Appeals. Interestingly, it was President Barack��Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court Merrick Garland, along with Judith Rogers, who for Brancheau’s death.��

Kavanaugh disagreed, writing a 2,900-word dissent that likened Brancheau’s work to other “extremely dangerous” sports like bull riding. “Participants in those activities want to take part, sometimes even to make a career of it, despite and occasionally because of the known risk of serious injury,” Kavanaugh wrote. “To be fearless, courageous, tough—to perform a sport or activity at the highest levels of human capacity, even in the face of known physical risk—is among the greatest forms of personal achievement for many who take part in these activities.” He went on to deny that close contact between whales and trainers is in any way different from “contact between players in the NFL or speeding in NASCAR races.”

The gist of his argument was that workers assume safety risks when they take jobs, writing: “When should we as a society paternalistically decide [that employees should be protected from] the risk of significant physical injury?”

Deborah Berkowitz, of the National Employment Law Project, ��in a story published on the group's website earlier this month: “A bipartisan Congress passed the Occupational Safety and Health Act in 1970, and President Richard Nixon signed the legislation into law,” she writes. “It provided workers with the fundamental right to go to work and come home every day; workers should not have to sacrifice their lives for a paycheck. The law is clear that it is the employer’s responsibility to provide a safe workplace.”

During Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing this week, Senator Dianne Feinstein questioned him��about that argument, to which , “The issue, Senator, was precedent. I follow, as a judge, precedent. The precedent��of the Labor Department, as I read it, was that the Labor Department under the statute would not regulate what it called��the intrinsic qualities��of a sports or entertainment show.”

Jordan Barab, who served as OSHA's deputy assistant secretary at the time of the ruling,��:��“He has made clear that he does not believe in the mission of OSHA, the goals of the Occupational Safety and Health Act or what Congress actually said in the law, despite his claim to be a textualist…He has shown himself, under sworn testimony, to be willing to make up facts and legal theories out of thin air to support his corporate-first ideology.”

Garland and Rogers ruled that whale performances are not a sport and thus��do not necessitate undue risk to human life in order to take place. OSHA’s fine was upheld. But Kavanaugh’s dissent is still troubling. “Kavanaugh’s dissent should send a shiver down the spines of all workers who face serious hazards at work,”��says��Berkowitz, of NELP. “What would a Justice Kavanaugh mean for workers in dangerous industries—e.g., steel workers, roofers, meatpackers, or health workers assaulted on the job?”

The post Kavanaugh Sided with Seaworld in ‘Blackfish’ Case appeared first on ���ϳԹ��� Online.

The little orca surfaces under an Apocalyptic red sun that’s barely visible behind a shroud of smoke from the wildfires burning across the West.

We’re headed east down the Strait of Juan de Fuca toward Washington’s San Juan Island, pacing a three-year-old killer whale named Scarlet, also known as J50, as she travels with her mother, brother, and older sister in endless pursuit of salmon.

All four whales are part of J Pod, now known around the world for the recent display of grief by pod member J35, or Tahlequah, who for 17 days and 1,000 miles. It was a protest march against all that we’ve done to kill off these magnificent animals by starving them of their food source, poisoning their water and prey, and filling their habitat with the incessant disturbance of vessel traffic.

I’m out here as a volunteer along with a team of whale specialists and a wildlife veterinarian under federal permit to assess and document Scarlet’s health. As she rises for a gulp of the same smoky air we’re breathing, her short, sharp blow is met with groans aboard our small boat. None of us have ever seen such a skinny whale.

For those of us who live among the orcas, Scarlet meant hope. She was a Christmas present, born at the end of December 2014 in the main fjord of the small island I live on, called, coincidentally, Orcas. The island was named after some Spanish viceroy, not the cetaceans, but you wouldn’t know it by the ubiquity of postcards, T-shirts, plushies, and whale watchers.

There’s an informal West Coast cult of the killer whale that’s devoted to J, K, and L Pods, which together make up the Southern Resident killer whales who spend a good part of their year foraging and socializing in the Washington State and British Columbian inland waters that make up the Salish Sea. In 50 years, this clan of supersize dolphins has gone from being vilified and shot by fishermen to being rounded up for marine parks—48 Southern Residents were caught or killed during the capture operations in the sixties and seventies—to becoming the most iconic creature of the Pacific Northwest wilds.

Those wilds are myth now. Ecosystem disruption reaches every part of the region. Climate change is exacerbating wildfires, killing seabirds, and melting the Cascades snowpack earlier—making the streams less suitable for salmon. Our centuries of assault on the rivers, forests, estuaries, and coastlines have done a number on this remarkable place.

And the looking very bad for killer whales, the apex predator in a dysfunctional environment. After the captures stopped, the Southern Resident population climbed from 70 to a high of 98 in 1995. Then they dropped again, to below 80, and were declared federally endangered by Canada in 2001 and by the United States in 2005. In 2015, they were named one of NOAA’s , the animals most at risk of extinction and deserving of extra effort and attention.

The Southern Residents numbered just 78, with no live births in more than two years, when Scarlet came along. Born to a beautiful female named Slick, Scarlet was the first of what became known as the baby boom, with eight calves added to J and L Pods over the following 13 months. A compact black-and-white package of pure exuberance, Scarlet represented everything we love about these playful, caring, intelligent, highly social animals, who stick together tighter than most human families.

I’ve been spending time out here on the water for 15 years, and my favorite hour came one August afternoon in 2015 while drifting off Stuart Island as J Pod hunted the tide rips. Scarlet, now eight months old, was determined to spend more time out of the water than in it. She did breach after full-body breach, stood��on her head and waved her tail in the air, slapped her wobbly pectoral fins on the surface, and bumped back and forth between her sister and an aunt, who created a playpen for her with their bodies. ����������

Three years later, half the baby boomers are dead. There are only 75 Southern Residents left, the lowest number in 35 years. And Scarlet is in very bad shape. Peanut head, they call it, when a whale loses so much blubber that you can see the shape of her skull. Healthy orcas do not have necks.

Nearly all the wild orcas seen in the condition Scarlet’s in have died, and Scarlet is a precious female, potentially producing up to six calves over her lifetime. So NOAA and a U.S. and Canadian collection of federal, state, local, and Native American tribal agencies, along with various public and private institutions and nonprofits, are making an unprecedented attempt to save her. Scarlet’s gotten lab tests and a shot of antibiotics, and there’s even been an attempt to feed her live Chinook salmon. Scientists weren’t able to determine whether Scarlet took the salmon, but she’s scheduled for more antibiotics and an anti-parasite shot if she makes it back within range of the wildlife vets in time.

Whether she lives or dies, Scarlet’s poor health and Tahlequa’s grief are just two agonizing illustrations of a larger picture: that the current state of the Southern Resident killer whales is a disgrace and a huge��embarrassment for the U.S. and Canada, both of which claim these orcas as totems of all that’s wild and exceptional about them.

We’ve declared the orcas national and regional treasures, bestowed upon them our strongest protections, yet we continue to kill them with building permits, logging, ranching and farming leases, fishing quotas, and dam permits, which all affect the Chinook salmon that these orcas need to survive.

The Canadian government is showing signs of environmental schizophrenia, cutting some Chinook quotas to leave more for the whales while at the same time doing everything it can to build the Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion that will cause a sevenfold increase of oil-tanker traffic through the orcas’ critical habitat.

Beyond the noise of all those ships, a single big spill could be game over for the orcas, who already carry a massive load of persistent organic pollutants in their tissues, which mothers inadvertently pass on to their babies in their milk, giving each newborn significant doses of toxic PCBs and chemical flame retardants during their most critical development period.

On the U.S. side, decades of greed and cowardice have left politicians no place to piss without hitting a third rail like dam removal, turning agricultural land back into salmon habitat, and curtailing treaty-mandated tribal fishing rights.

Stakeholders like commercial and recreational fishermen, farmers who use the water behind the Snake River dams for irrigation and transportation, whale-watch operators, coastal and watershed developers, and property owners have all dug in, firing blame at one another or at easy targets like sea lions, which have learned to feed on the salmon stuck behind dams. Government programs to cull sea lions are another arrogantly engineered human solution to a problem we created, just like the fish hatcheries we built after destroying native runs.

These circular firing squads leave the orcas in the middle, poisoned and starving.

No help can be expected from Washington, D.C., with the current administration and its congressional allies intent on ripping apart��the EPA that protects the nation's clean air and water and pays for Salish Sea restoration projects, and hobbling the Endangered Species Act, which is supposed to protect and restore the orcas and the Chinook salmon. The fix here is simple: vote in November.

At the Washington State level, there’s an opportunity that has every feeling of a last chance. Governor Jay Inslee has convened an emergency orca task force and promised to take bold action. There are some good folks on the committee, and their draft action plan is due on his desk October 1.

If the task force comes through, there could be legitimate short and long-term actions to save the Southern Residents, the Chinook salmon, and the habitat that they—and we—depend on. If, however, they punt on the tough stuff, as others��have in the past, then the orcas are screwed.

When we left Scarlet after following her that day on the water, she was chugging along at four knots. She hit a wall of current as the tide changed, and her family forged ahead in search of food, which orcas commonly share with their podmates. Scarlet fell a thousand yards behind the others but gamely continued pushing east. We lost sight of her small dorsal fin as the chop came up, her faint blows lost in the smoke from hundreds of fires. ��

Lead photo:��Scarlet, or J50, swimming with her family in early August (Katy Foster/NOAA Fisheries, permit��)

Bob Friel (), an author and documentary filmmaker working on a video series called��, lives in the San Juan Islands. He is a volunteer with the Marine Mammal Stranding Network and Large Whale Disentanglement Network.

The post Orcas in the Mist appeared first on ���ϳԹ��� Online.

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 ���ϳԹ���’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 23��were born in captivity.��In 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. ��

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. ��

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.

The post Seaworld to End Killer Whale Shows appeared first on ���ϳԹ��� Online.

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.��

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 both����and the��,��boats, 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. In��Blackfish, 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 the��(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.

But����and 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 orca��, author of��who in 1999 helped found the����(FEROP)��to study Russian killer whale populations. According to Hoyt, Russian hunters, working for the��, 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.��

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. ��

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.����the 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,��who is also a Research fellow with Whale And Dolphin Conservation,��says 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 the��. 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,” says��, 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.”

The post A Surge In Wild Orca Capture for Killer Whale Shows appeared first on ���ϳԹ��� Online.

At 11:25 A.M. on December 24, 2009, Estefanía Luis Rodriguez’s cell phone rang. Rodriguez, 25, is an earnest, friendly young woman who works as a pharmacy technician near the coastal town of Puerto de la Cruz, on the north coast of Tenerife in Spain’s Canary Islands. She glanced at the caller ID and saw that it was her fiancé, Alexis Martínez, a killer whale trainer at a nearby zoological park called , one of the largest tourist attractions in the islands. Loro Parque displays everything from birds and dolphins to sea lions and, as of 2006, four orcas it had been loaned by SeaWorld.

Rodriguez and Martínez, 29, had been together seven years, after meeting at a friend’s party, and had moved into an apartment together three months earlier. She adored Martínez, who was handsome, generous, funny, and, in his spare time, played guitar in a band, Inerte. He’d been working nonstop with the killer whales at Loro Parque’s Orca Ocean to prepare for a special Christmas show.��

When Rodriguez answered, however, it wasn’t Martínez on the phone. The caller was Orca Ocean supervisor Miguel Diaz, using Martínez’s phone. He told Rodriguez that Martínez had been involved in an incident with a killer whale but that he would be fine, that he was being taken to the University Hospital in San Cristóbal de La Laguna, about 20 miles away. Rodriguez immediately called Martínez’s family and then joined his mother, Mercedes, to rush to the hospital.��

In the car, Rodriguez was deeply apprehensive. For months, Martínez had been telling her that all was not well at Orca Ocean, that there was a lot of aggression between the killer whales and that they sometimes refused to obey commands, disrupting training and the shows. After starting in Loro Parque’s penguin and dolphin displays, Martínez had begun as a killer whale trainer in 2006. As he gained experience, according to Rodriguez, he began to fret about safety, and he twice contemplated leaving the job. Preparing for the Christmas show only added to the stress. “I’m so tired,” Rodriguez recalls Martínez telling her. “That’s OK, everyone is tired from work,” she’d responded. He shook his head. “My job is especially risky, and I really need to be well rested and ready. With everything that is going on, something could happen at any time.”

On the road to La Laguna, Rodriguez and Mercedes worked their cell phones, and their sense of foreboding increased. Mercedes’s brothers and others had heard that Martínez wasn’t at the hospital at La Laguna but at Bellevue, the local hospital in Puerto de la Cruz, five minutes from Rodriguez and Martínez’s apartment. Confused, Rodriguez called Miguel Diaz. He again said that Martínez was at the hospital in La Laguna, but a short while later he called Rodriguez back to confirm that Martínez was at Bellevue. When Rodriguez and Mercedes finally arrived at Bellevue—at around 12:30 p.m., after about an hour of errant driving—they found Wolfgang Kiessling, Loro Parque’s president, already there, along with legal representation.��

It was at Bellevue that Rodriguez and Mercedes learned that Martínez had, in fact, been killed, by an orca called Keto, during a training session. Rodriguez was in a state of shock, overwhelmed by sorrow and disbelief. Martínez’s body had been wrapped tightly in a shroud, and only his head and face were visible. Rodriguez says that no one from Loro Parque would tell her much, except that there had been an accident and Martínez had drowned. In the days and weeks that followed, she asked Martínez’s fellow trainers for more information, but she says they offered only evasive answers. Not until months later, when Rodriguez and the Martínez family learned the details of the autopsy, did they become aware of the full extent of the trauma and bite marks Martínez had sustained, suggesting a much more violent incident.

Rodriguez believes that Martínez’s death had been obscured and covered up. Keto’s attack on Martínez occurred at 10:25 a.m. Diaz called Rodriguez an hour later, and the autopsy report gives an estimated time of death of 11:35 a.m. “They had time to talk and prepare the body,” Rodriguez says of the more than two hours that passed between the incident and her arrival at the right hospital.��

I asked Patricia Delponti, director of communications and public relations at Loro Parque, about the incorrect information Diaz had given Rodriguez. “As soon as the accident took place, we called his family’s home but got no answer,” she explained in an e-mail. “Therefore, we took Alexis’s mobile phone and called his girlfriend, whose number was in the address book. This call was made right after Alexis was taken to the hospital by emergency services.”

Delponti added, “This was a very difficult time for everyone, and if incorrect information was shared with those closest to Alexis in the time immediately following the accident, it can fairly be attributed to the nature of an emergency response.”

Rodriguez is skeptical. “Everyone in the family felt lied to,” she says.

The death of Alexis Martínez was a quiet tragedy for his family and loved ones. It received little media attention, even on Tenerife. The Martínez family received a life-insurance payout from Loro Parque and looked into the possibility of suing over Martínez’s death, but they were told by lawyers that Canary Islands law favored a large corporate entity like Loro Parque. Canary Islands authorities (including the police and the Ministry of Work and Immigration) also investigated the incident; there have been no major repercussions.

But exactly two months after Martínez was killed, on February 24, 2010, 40-year-old Dawn Brancheau, a skilled senior trainer working at SeaWorld Orlando, in Florida, was killed with similar violence by SeaWorld’s largest orca, Tilikum. This time the world noticed, and the media jumped all over the story. SeaWorld suspended orca-show routines that put trainers in the pools with its killer whales—a SeaWorld specialty known as water work—at all three of its locations, in San Diego, Orlando, and San Antonio, to conduct a safety review. That suspension remains in place, and SeaWorld’s new orca show, One Ocean, is performed without trainers in the water.

I wrote about the death of Brancheau, and the life of Tilikum, in a July 2010 ���ϳԹ��� story called “The Killer in the Pool”.�� At the time, I’d heard that another trainer had died just before Brancheau, at a park in the Canary Islands. But I could find almost no information aside from a brief news article. As details of the Brancheau story emerged, though, what happened at Loro Parque began to seem increasingly important—a stark warning about the unpredictability and lethal potential of killer whales being kept at marine parks for our entertainment.

Tilikum had been involved in two previous deaths, and SeaWorld’s trainers were prohibited from getting in the pool with him. That he managed to kill again—he grabbed Brancheau from a shallow pool ledge and yanked her into the water—was tragic, though not necessarily shocking. But Keto, the whale who killed Martínez and is also owned by SeaWorld, was cleared for routine water work. If Keto could kill, I wondered, how could any marine park orca be considered truly safe?��

That question is at the heart of a between SeaWorld and the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the federal agency that oversees workplace safety. OSHA investigated Brancheau’s death and for failing to protect trainers “from recognized hazards that were causing or likely to cause death or serious physical harm.” In addition, OSHA said SeaWorld had willfully ignored the dangers of working with killer whales. “SeaWorld recognized the inherent risk of allowing trainers to interact with potentially dangerous animals,” Cindy Coe, OSHA’s regional administrator in Atlanta, said in an August 23, 2010, . “Nonetheless, it required its employees to work within the pool walls, on ledges and on shelves where they were subject to dangerous behavior by the animals.”

OSHA levied $75,000 in fines against SeaWorld—a small amount for a company that reportedly earned $1.2 billion in revenues in 2010. But OSHA’s stipulations on safety, conveyed in a document titled “Citation and Notification of Penalty,” could have dramatic implications for SeaWorld’s future. The citation is directed against SeaWorld Orlando and stipulates that to create a safe work environment, the park must either end water work and “dry work”—when trainers work with killer whales from the stage or on shallow poolside ledges—or adopt significant new safety measures, such as placing physical barriers between trainers and killer whales. If made, such changes—which presumably would be adopted at all SeaWorld’s parks—would fundamentally alter the nature of SeaWorld’s crowd-thrilling water-work shows, in which trainers swim with and ride the killer whales, sometimes even launching into the air from their noses.

Brancheau was the first SeaWorld trainer to be killed by an orca, after more than four decades of killer whale shows at the parks. (Though, as I learned while reporting “The Killer in the Pool,” during that same period dozens of trainers had been involved in serious incidents with killer whales, a number requiring hospitalization.) Naturally, SeaWorld was not happy about OSHA’s charge that it knowingly subjected trainers to undue risk, nor with the agency’s demand that it adopt intrusive safety measures. The marine park flatly rejected OSHA’s conclusions, arguing in a that they were “unfounded” and that OSHA’s “allegations in this citation are unsupported by any evidence or precedent and reflect a fundamental lack of understanding of the safety requirements associated with marine mammal care.”

The dispute comes to a head this September, when SeaWorld’s appeal of OSHA’s findings will be heard before a federal administrative-law judge of the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission, an independent agency that adjudicates and issues written decisions when OSHA rulings are challenged.��

SeaWorld’s rebuttal to OSHA pointed me back toward Alexis Martínez and Loro Parque. Martínez died just two months before Brancheau. Was his death a stand-alone tragedy, or was it relevant to the wider debate between OSHA and SeaWorld about the safety and future of killer whale entertainment?

As I learned, SeaWorld was a key partner in the launch of the orca program at Loro Parque, loaning the park four killer whales to help it start Orca Ocean. SeaWorld’s vice president of communications Fred Jacobs explained it to me this way in an e-mail: “Loro Parque is a highly respected zoological institution, and we have worked with them for years. The relationship was conceived primarily as a breeding loan and to allow Loro Parque to showcase these remarkable animals.” He added, “The deal differed only in scale from the dozens of similar partnerships we are part of at any given time. The addition of Orca Ocean, a facility that is comparable in size and sophistication to anything found in the U.S., also provided us greater flexibility in managing our collection of killer whales.”

At the time the loan was announced in December 2005, Jacobs publicly said there was a “financial arrangement,” but he declined to give details. What’s clear is this: SeaWorld would be deeply involved in managing its killer whales from the moment they arrived in February 2006. SeaWorld personnel oversaw their care and training at Loro Parque, and Brian Rokeach, a senior trainer from SeaWorld San Diego, supervised the training session in which Martínez died. To the extent that his death might be considered a precedent for what happened to Brancheau or evidence that working with killer whales in marine parks is risky and potentially lethal, SeaWorld was intimately aware of the details.

I asked Jacobs if Martínez’s death should be considered relevant to OSHA’s conclusions regarding SeaWorld and trainer safety. “Loro Parque is an independent and highly respected zoological institution with its own protocols,” he responded. “Because it is in the Canary Islands, however, it is not subject to OSHA. Because we are contesting OSHA’s citations, we are unable to discuss it further, except to reiterate that their allegations reflect a fundamental lack of understanding of the safety requirements of caring for these animals.”

SeaWorld and Loro Parque were somewhat responsive to my initial inquiries for comment for this story, but they repeatedly declined requests for interviews with the trainers and personnel directly involved in the tragedy, citing the OSHA litigation. Nevertheless, what emerged from extensive reporting and detailed information from confidential documents related to the incident is a case study of the knife edge on which orca trainers work, how easy it is for a killer whale to suddenly go rogue, and how difficult it is to help a trainer in the water once an orca decides to attack.

Finding out what goes on��behind the scenes at a marine park is surprisingly difficult. In my experience, SeaWorld officials are selective about allowing media access to their current trainers. Many of their former trainers still work in the marine-park industry, where SeaWorld has enormous influence, or are reluctant to speak openly about their work. The fact that Loro Parque is on a Spanish island closer to Africa than to North America didn’t make things easier. Last summer, however, Naomi Rose, a senior marine-mammal scientist with , connected me with a former contract employee at Orca Ocean, Suzanne Allee. Allee worked there from February 2006 until July 2009, leaving about six months before Martínez was killed.

A 42-year-old Texas native, Allee ran the audio-visual department at Orca Ocean; during shows, from a booth above the main pool, she orchestrated music and video elements to sync with the sequences being performed by the whales and trainers. I met her last October, when she was in Washington, D.C., to meet with government agencies—including the National Marine Fisheries Service and the Marine Mammal Commission—involved in the export and care of killer whales in marine parks. She hadn’t intended to speak out about Loro Parque after her contract with the park ended, but when Martínez died she decided she wanted government officials to understand what was happening there, and she wrote a detailed report about what she’d observed.

Allee now lives near San Antonio and works as an independent filmmaker and screenwriter. In 2005, she was working on a seasonal contract in the entertainment department at SeaWorld San Antonio when she heard that SeaWorld was striking up a partnership with Loro Parque to launch Orca Ocean. A completely new facility of pools—to be filled with millions of gallons of seawater pumped in from the Atlantic Ocean—was being built. A full-time contract on an exotic island sounded attractive.

Allee arrived at Orca Ocean on February 13, 2006, a day before SeaWorld’s four killer whales were flown in on a wide-body transport plane. Keto (a ten-year-old male) and Tekoa (a five-year-old male) came from SeaWorld San Antonio. Kohana (a three-year-old female) and Skyla (a two-year-old female) came from SeaWorld Orlando. Killer whales are highly intelligent, social animals, and adapting to a new environment and social order is always tricky. Both the young females, who were expected to breed as they matured, were separated from their mothers for the move. And Keto, who was born at SeaWorld Orlando, was headed to his fourth marine park in seven years. (For more details on the lives of captive orcas compared with those in the wild, see “The Killer in the Pool”.) Thad Lacinak, then SeaWorld’s vice president and corporate curator for animal training, had flown in to release the whales into their new home. Mark Galan, a senior trainer from SeaWorld Orlando, was also there to receive the killer whales and would supervise their care and training for the next 18 months.��

To help get Orca Ocean going, SeaWorld had trained a group of Loro Parque killer whale trainers at its San Antonio and Orlando parks. After it opened, SeaWorld senior veterinarian James McBain made regular visits, and SeaWorld vets held biweekly conference calls with Loro Parque’s trainers to talk about the health of the animals. SeaWorld was able to monitor its whales remotely through the Orca Ocean’s video surveillance system, and SeaWorld’s chief zoological officer, Brad Andrews, made a practice of flying in at least twice a year to make assessments.

When the assigned SeaWorld supervisor was away for any reason, SeaWorld would rotate in a temporary replacement. In September 2006, Dawn Brancheau pulled a temporary rotation at Loro Parque, arriving to fill in for Mark Galan. According to Allee, Brancheau’s skill and artistry in the water with the whales impressed the Loro Parque team. Brancheau also became close to Martínez. After his death, Estafanía Rodriguez says, “Dawn was the only person who really showed her feelings about Alexis. When she died, we had to relive everything again.”��

As Allee strolled through Loro Parque for the first time, she thought Orca Ocean looked like it would be a spectacular facility, with a couple of back pools and a medical pool fronted by a large stadium pool with a main stage and a huge video screen. It was all set against a lush tropical background, with picturesque views of the ocean. Before long, however, Allee started to wonder if Orca Ocean was ready for prime time. The tone was set when the whales first arrived: as Keto was craned toward the pool, the hammock he rode in started to split while still suspended over the concrete deck. “There was a mad dash to get him back into the [transport] water tank before he splatted all over the place,” Allee recalls. The next three-plus years at Orca Ocean only intensified her concerns. “They didn’t have a clue about what it took to run an orca operation,” she says.

Asked about Allee’s concerns, Loro Parque’s Delponti argues that Allee isn’t in a position to make such judgments because she’s not a trained whale expert. “It should be noted that Allee’s time at Loro Parque never involved training, caring for, or interpreting the animals that live there,” Delponti e-mailed me. “She was an audiovisual technician working under contract. We have been caring for and displaying marine mammals for many years. Our staff is highly respected and well trained. We worked with SeaWorld on every aspect of this program.”

Orca Ocean officially opened on February 17, 2006, with a gala celebration attended by Loro Parque president Wolfgang Kiessling; August Busch III, then chairman of Anheuser-Busch InBev (which at the time owned SeaWorld); and Adán Martin, then president of the Canary Islands. The opening had originally been scheduled for December 17, 2005, Loro Parque’s 33rd anniversary, but construction on the pools had fallen behind. After the opening celebration, the complex was shut down for four weeks so that electrical work and other final touches could be completed and, Delponti says, so that the recently arrived whales could acclimate to the pools.

The first show open to the general public took place on March 17, 2006, but there were problems with the new pools. They had been coated with a product called Metflex, which hadn’t adhered properly. (Metflex and Loro Parque both lay the blame on the other.) And that, in turn, led to orca problems. Killer whales, the largest members of the dolphin family, have sophisticated sonar and an ability to locate and exploit any flaws in their pools. They also have a proclivity for seeking out any possible diversion in the relatively barren marine-park environment. Keto, Tekoa, Skyla, and Kohana quickly developed the habit of using their teeth to peel away strips of Metflex from the pool walls, like bored kids picking at loose paint.

One week after the opening, Allee says, while a packed stadium awaited, all four whales appeared in the backstage area with strips of Metflex hanging from their mouths and pool paint smeared across their rostrums, or snouts. Trainers rushed to wipe away the paint with isopropyl alcohol. When the whales were finally released into the show pool, they ignored the trainers and went back to nibbling. The show was a mess. Once again, Orca Ocean was shut down for repairs, this time for ten weeks.��

Even after the repairs, Metflex strips would show up in the pool skimmers, and the killer whales continued to pick at it and ingest it. Toward the end of 2006, Keto, Skyla, and Kohana underwent endoscopies to examine their gastrointestinal tracts. Endoscopy on a killer whale requires raising the animal up out of the water using a medical pool’s lifting floor. While trainers try to restrain the whale, a wooden bit is inserted into its mouth and a flexible tube with a camera snaked down through the bit to examine the digestive system. Allee documented the procedures on video. This clip shows key moments during an endoscopy that Keto underwent in November 2006.��

When asked about the procedures, Delponti told me: “Endoscopy is a routine diagnostic procedure used if veterinary professionals suspect the ingestion of a foreign object. Such events are rare, and all animals living at Loro Parque are in excellent health today.” (Eventually, Loro Parque replaced the Metflex with a different pool coating.)

The four Loro Parque killer whales also struggled to adapt to one another. In the wild, most killer whales live in family groupings, or pods, with a well-organized matriarchal structure. Keto, Skyla, Kohana, and Tekoa were all bred and born in marine parks, but they had been removed from their established social structures at SeaWorld San Antonio and SeaWorld Orlando. Without the ties of family or language, marine park whales have to sort out an ad hoc social pecking order, often through bullying and aggression, which sometimes results in a relatively stable grouping and sometimes not. The social structure was likely complicated at Loro Parque because there was no mature and clearly dominant female to establish order.

During her time at Loro Parque, Allee documented some of the injuries that resulted from whale aggression. This picture shows Kohana in October 2006, after Keto bit her dorsal fin.

I asked Delponti about the killer whales’ social structure and about any aggression, such as raking, ramming, and biting, they might have exhibited toward one another at Orca Ocean. She responded that the whales are a stable group. “Killer whales are social animals and any group of these animals, whether in the wild or in a facility like Orca Ocean, works out their own social structure, including dominance hierarchy,” she wrote, adding that “bumping and raking … expressions are entirely normal in any social species” and that “any injury or illness in our animals is promptly and professionally treated.”

Alexis Martínez also paid close attention to the social structure and behavior of the whales. Like any good trainer, he knew that the better he got to know each whale—its moods, its predilections, its likes and dislikes—the safer and more effective he would be. He kept notes in journals, recording how the whales interacted with one another and how they behaved during training and shows. Between June and October 2009, Martínez focused his entries on Kohana—who would undergo an ultrasound in August to determine if she was pregnant—and made reference to her frequent slowness in practice and training, as well as her frequent unhappy vocalizations. “Bad vocals in Pool A (alone),” Martínez noted in June. “Back to feeling insecure when separated, alone, both in shows & in sessions.” In late September, he noted that Kohana’s vocalizations and attitude had improved but that she “always has rises & falls in temperament (unstable).”��

In August, he summarized the complicated sexual dynamics in the pools, which also affected the stability of the killer whale grouping. “Keto is obsessed with controlling Kohana, he won’t separate from her, including shows,” he wrote. “Tekoa is very sexual when he is alone with Kohana (penis out). Keto is sexual with Tekoa.” On September 2, 2009, without elaborating, he noted that “Brian [Rokeach, SeaWorld’s supervising trainer at Loro Parque at the time] had a small incident with Keto the first hour of the morning,” and that it was “a very bad day for Keto.” On September 12, he wrote, “All the animals are bad. Dry day for Kohana.”

������’s a video of Martínez performing with Kohana in spring of 2009.

Sometimes the charged dynamic between the whales would get a very public airing. During one show that Allee was working in the summer of 2007, Tekoa was performing when Keto raced into the show pool, rammed him, and then proceeded to chase him. After the trainers regained control, they completed the performance with Tekoa, even though blood was visibly seeping from his wounds. His final display of behavior was a full-body pose on the main stage. “The last image the audience saw was the stage covered in Tekoa’s blood,” Allee recalls.

Allee had seen intra-whale conflict during her work at SeaWorld San Antonio, but the dynamic at Loro Parque seemed different. “I never saw so many instances in which the animals were out of control or beating up on each other,” she told me. “There were lots of shows I directed where the trainers did not do water work or have control of the animals.”

It's impossible to know how the challenge of adapting to a new life in Loro Parque’s pools increased any potential danger the trainers faced. But two years before Keto killed Martínez, Loro Parque almost lost a female trainer, 29-year-old Claudia Vollhardt, to an attack by Tekoa. In October 2007, Vollhardt was working a training session with Tekoa, who weighed about 3,000 pounds at the time, under the supervision of SeaWorld senior trainer Steve Aibel—who was .

When killer whales perform a behavior correctly, they are “bridged” (often with a whistle sound, in essence signaling “well done”) and then receive reinforcement in the form of a reward, such as a fish or a playful rubdown. When they don’t perform correctly, the trainer reacts with a three-second neutral response and withholds the reward. This is known as a least-reinforcing scenario, or LRS. Repeated failed attempts—and the corresponding lack of reward—can sometimes lead to a frustrated killer whale. “The question the trainer has to constantly be asking is: Is this animal mildly frustrated but still has the ability to stay with it and work through the problem?” explains Samantha Berg, who worked as a trainer at SeaWorld Orlando’s Shamu Stadium in the early 1990s. “Or have I gone beyond this animal’s limits and it’s time to cut the losses, take a break, and start over?”

Vollhardt, who had transferred to Orca Ocean from the Loro Parque dolphinarium, was having trouble practicing a foot push, a behavior in which the killer whale presses its rostrum against the trainer’s foot and propels the trainer across the pool, either underwater or above the surface. After a few failed attempts, Tekoa grabbed Vollhardt’s arm and took her to the bottom of the pool. He then dragged her toward the steel gate between the show pool and the back pools and began banging her against it.��

Allee was in the trainers’ office when she heard the emergency siren go off, and she ran out to a chaotic scene. Aibel was crouching by the trough, yelling for the Orca Ocean staff to get a net in the pool. (The whales are taught to retreat when a net is dropped into the water and pulled across the pool.) When Tekoa let Vollhardt go for a moment, Aibel managed to haul her up onto the pool deck. He immediately began CPR and yelled for someone to call an ambulance, even as Tekoa continued to try to reach Vollhardt as she lay by the side of the pool. Vollhardt was carried into a nearby office, where her wetsuit, covered in bite marks and blood, was cut away, and then rushed by ambulance to the intensive-care unit of the hospital in La Laguna. She eventually recovered, after surgery on her lacerated and broken arm.

“Claudia is an experienced marine biologist and marine mammal professional,” Delponti wrote to me when I inquired about this incident. “She was conducting herself appropriately on that day. Our response protocol worked properly and we are gratified that she made a full recovery. To this day, she works by her own wish in Orca Ocean.”

In a media release, Loro Parque described the incident as an accident caused by bad luck. But both Loro Parque and SeaWorld conducted a post-incident safety assessment, which led to improved emergency-response measures, including installing an onsite defibrillator. According to Allee and Rodriguez, Orca Ocean trainers stopped water work for more than six months. In addition, special protocols were enacted for Tekoa, and restrictions were placed on working with him in the water. “Our protocols are continuously evaluated and we seek to learn from incidents like this and improve our techniques and equipment,” Delponti wrote.

Skyla has shown signs of unpredictability, too. In the spring of 2009, during a public show, she started pushing her trainer around the pool and up against the pool wall. Shortly thereafter, special protocols—limits on water work and a mandate that only senior trainers work with her, according to Allee—were enacted for Skyla as well. Out of the four SeaWorld killer whales at Loro Parque, only Keto and Kohana were now considered fully suitable for routine water work.

Following Tekoa's attack on Vollhardt, Rodriguez says, Martínez told her about the unpredictability of the whales and how they often banged on the gates between the pools. He said he saw plenty of small incidents that he worried could easily have turned dangerous. Everyone at Orca Ocean treated this behavior as normal, he explained to her.

Martínez loved working with killer whales. Over time, though, according to Rodriguez, the excitement and allure of working at Orca Ocean started to fade for him. The pay just wasn’t worth the risks and the exhausting work, he told her. But in 2009, with Christmas approaching, Martínez was selected to perform in the holiday show, alongside SeaWorld San Diego’s Brian Rokeach. On the fatal day, December 24, Martínez and Rokeach, along with five other Orca Ocean trainers, ran through a morning practice session with Keto, who worked alone in the show pool while the other three killer whales were secured in the two back pools.

As noted, SeaWorld and Loro Parque declined to make anyone with direct knowledge of the incident available for comment. But marine parks investigate and create formal reports after serious incidents, and there is a confidential corporate-incident report, dated December 30, 2009, that tells the story of Martínez’s death. I learned the details contained in it, but when I asked SeaWorld’s Fred Jacobs and Loro Parque’s Patricia Delponti for comment, they declined to offer any, citing the OSHA litigation, and added that they would no longer be communicating with me or ���ϳԹ��� about the story. (Jacobs also stated that there were errors in my reporting but declined to specify them or offer any corrections.) What follows, as a result, is based on the details of the corporate-incident report.��

According to the report, which was written in Spanish, Keto “appeared in a good mood” that day and had behaved well during routine animal care and a swim session with Skyla. However, the report notes that Keto often showed more interest in what was going on with the other whales than in working alone in the show pool. It also alludes to a September 2, 2009, incident—presumably the same incident with Rokeach that Martínez mentioned in his journal—and says Keto was emitting vocals during a perimeter ride and then left “control” and took off, swimming fast around the pool and bowing (porpoising in an agitated manner) after the trainer who’d been riding him had hopped off.

During the fatal session, Rokeach worked from the show pool’s main stage, Martínez joined Keto in the water, and the other Loro Parque trainers were at different locations around the pool. According to the report, Keto started off well, but then Martínez tried a behavior called a stand-on spy hop, in which he stood on Keto’s rostrum as Keto drove his body vertically up and out of the water. Keto had good power but was leaning slightly as he rose from the surface, and Martínez fell off. Because the stunt had not been executed cleanly, Keto was not bridged.

A short time later, Martínez initiated another spy hop. Again, Keto came up twisting, and this time Martínez responded with an LRS. To help get Keto back on track, he was called to a shallow ledge across the pool from the main stage, and when he obeyed another trainer rewarded him with two handfuls of fish. Keto, according to the report, seemed calm. Martínez then told Rokeach and the others that he was going to ride Keto down into the pool and up onto the stage, a sequence called a haul-down into stage haul-out.

On the way down Keto went too deep, and as he approached the bottom of the 12-meter pool Martínez abandoned the haul-out and asked Keto to follow his hand with his rostrum. Together they drifted up to the surface, and again Martínez responded to Keto’s failure with an LRS.��

This time, though, Keto responded oddly. According to the incident report, “Keto surfaced with Alexis and seemed calm, but appeared to position himself between Alexis and the stage. Alexis waited for calm from Keto and requested a stage call via underwater tone.” Keto responded and swam over to Rokeach, who was standing on the stage. But Rokeach observed that Keto appeared “not committed to remaining under control” and a little “big-eyed.” Instead of walking back to get a fish bucket, Rokeach asked another trainer to bring it to him. Like Martínez, Rokeach gave Keto a hand target to focus him, one of the simplest and first behaviors most marine-park killer whales learn. When Rokeach felt Keto was under better control, he asked Martínez, who had been waiting patiently near the center of the pool, to swim slowly toward the slide-over (a ramp connecting the show pool to the back pools) at the edge of the main stage so he could get out of the water. Notably, the incident report makes no mention of Rokeach feeding Keto any fish.

As Martínez started to paddle gently through the water, the report indicates, Keto took note and started to lean in his direction. Sensing he was about to lose control, Rokeach gave Keto another hand target. This time Keto ignored it. He went after Martínez, driving him to the bottom of the pool with his nose. (In his testimony to Canary Islands’ investigators, Orca Ocean assistant supervisor Rafael Sanchez said, “The animal in question moved towards him and hit him and violently played with his body.”)

Rokeach and the other trainers did what they could, but a powerful 6,600-pound killer whale is the master of his domain. Rokeach slapped the water and banged the bucket on the stage, both signals for Keto to return. He slapped the water again, and this time Keto responded, leaving Martínez at the bottom of the pool—Martínez had been under an estimated 30 seconds by then—and surfacing without him. Rokeach sounded the emergency alarm. Keto took a quick breath, returned to Martínez, and then came back to the surface carrying Martínez’ limp body across his rostrum. Rokeach called for the team to get a net in the water while others raced to corral the other three killer whales into one of the back pools. It took almost two minutes to get Keto out of the show pool and secure the gate between the pools (Keto slowed the process by about a minute by interfering with the gate as trainers tried to close it).

By this point, Martínez—apart from the brief moment Keto brought him to the surface—had been on the bottom of the pool for almost 3 minutes. Rokeach and another trainer dove in and resurfaced with Martínez, who was unconscious and had blood coming from his nose and mouth. A distraught Rokeach immediately initiated CPR. A defibrillator was brought out, and Loro Parque called for an ambulance. But Martínez was never revived.

Loro Parque issued a statement saying Martínez’s death was an “unfortunate accident” and that he had likely died due to asphyxiation resulting from compression of his chest. “After completing the [exercise],” the statement said, “Alexis was knocked by the orca in an unexpected reaction of the animal,” adding that “the study of the facts shows that the animal’s behavior did not correspond to the way in which these marine mammals attack their prey in the wild, but was rather a shifting of position.”��

But as with Dawn Brancheau, the autopsy report on Martínez was telling and states bluntly that his was a “violent death.” It describes multiple cuts and bruises, the collapse of both lungs, fractures of the ribs and sternum, a lacerated liver, severely damaged vital organs, and puncture marks “consistent with the teeth of an orca.” It concludes that the immediate cause of death was fluid in the lungs (i.e., drowning) but that the fundamental cause was “mechanical asphyxiation due to compression and crushing of the thoracic abdomen with injuries to the vital organs.”��

In other words, at some point Keto probably slammed into Martínez with such force that he caved in his chest.��

So what drives an animal in captivity to snap? SeaWorld and Loro Parque maintain profiles of their killer whales, which, in addition to history, physical characteristics, and health notes, include tendencies and personality observations. These profiles are closely guarded, but I managed to learn some of the details used to help trainers understand Keto.��

Keto’s profile indicates that before he moved to Loro Parque in 2006, he disliked major environmental changes and occasionally struggled with prolonged separations from other whales. In the “aggressive tendencies” section, the profile notes that Keto would sometimes become vocal, ignore bridges, and perform behaviors incorrectly in advance of getting aggressive. On a few occasions during his time at SeaWorld’s parks, the profile shows, Keto either came at a trainer with his mouth open, mouthed trainers’ feet, or, in one incident, mouthed a trainer’s leg. None of the incidents, according to the profile, resulted in injury.

As Keto matured, the profile indicates, he developed into a fairly reliable water-work killer whale. It notes, however, that Keto’s reliability was influenced by the social structure of the whales in his group and that he could be inconsistent when there was social unrest or sexual activity. At SeaWorld San Antonio, the profile notes, SeaWorld management took the precaution of avoiding water work with Keto when Kayla (a female killer whale Keto was interested in) was together with Ky (another male whale).

To further explore what might have set Keto off, I asked four former SeaWorld trainers to analyze Martínez’s interaction with him. They all cautioned that the judgments a trainer has to make in the water are highly subjective. “A trainer applying what works for one whale could have completely different consequences during an interaction with another whale,” says Carol Ray, who worked at SeaWorld Orlando from 1987 to December 1990.

Based on the information I shared with them about the incident, no one saw an obvious error or catastrophic decision. However, they did focus on a few facts: that Keto executed a succession of high-energy behaviors that did not earn him a bridge or any fish, that Keto was switched between a number of trainers during the session, and that Rokeach had asked Martínez to swim out before giving Keto any primary reinforcement (fish) after coming to the stage.��

Internally, I learned, SeaWorld personnel would focus on Rokeach’s decision to direct Martínez to the slide-over (which was the quickest way out but also brought him closer to the stage and to Keto) instead of having him exit from the other side of the pool. Rokeach’s decision to ask Martínez to swim out before feeding Keto fish at the stage—possibly establishing better control—also drew scrutiny. (I repeatedly tried to reach Rokeach, directly and via SeaWorld, to get his take on the incident but never got a response.)

What I took away was this: given the subjectivity and complexity of the interaction between a human and a killer whale in a marine-park pool, it seems unlikely that any trainer can make the right decision each and every time. As former SeaWorld trainer Samantha Berg puts it, “Things are happening on so many different levels that any assertion that it’s possible to control all the variables is absolutely ludicrous. And you can bet the whales were often frustrated when trainers did something that didn’t make sense to them.”

A frustrated killer whale—whether it’s struggling with captivity, social structure, sexual tension, poor health, or training failures—is a potentially dangerous killer whale. “This is not an issue with most whales most of the time,” says Ray. “But in cases like Keto, Alexis, and Brian, it might be enough [for Keto] to say, ‘Screw you! I did my effing best to haul your human ass out of the water the way you wanted me to—twice, dammit!’ Just as we should expect stress to get to any large, intelligent, confined animal with hormones who is trying to do the right thing for the people that control its food and life.”��

The corporate incident report, in effect, acknowledges the imperfect understanding between man and whale. Regarding Keto’s killing of Martínez, the report drily concludes, “Behavior of the animal involved: unforeseen, incorrect.” “Incorrect” is a wholly inadequate description of what Keto did to Alexis Martínez. But it’s the “unforeseen” part that should make any trainer nervous. Keto had not been designated a dangerous whale, but he sent the message that no marine-park killer whale can ever truly be considered safe—and that no trainer in the water with one is ever truly free from risk.

Since Martínez’s death, Orca Ocean has not resumed full water work with its mature killer whales. Three of the four orcas it received from SeaWorld—Keto, Tekoa, and Skyla—now have a history of incidents. Meanwhile, Kohana gave birth to her first calf, Adán, in late 2010. For its part, SeaWorld briefly ceased water work at its three parks in the immediate aftermath of Martínez’s death as it tried to get details about what happened. But within a week, water work was under way again at all of them. It continued for almost two months, until Dawn Brancheau’s death prompted another suspension of water work, which remains in effect.

Still, SeaWorld has said that it would like to resume water work with its whales, and the park has been exploring the installation of fast-rising floors in some of its pools to quickly raise a whale and a trainer in trouble out of the water. Other safety measures that have been considered include personal air systems for trainers and the deployment of underwater vehicles that could distract the orcas in case of an emergency. That certainly suggests that SeaWorld understands there are inherent risks that arise when humans get in the water with one of the ocean’s most powerful and intelligent predators.

In the end, Martínez’s death offers the most compelling testimony possible on this point. In its report, the Canary Islands Ministry of Work and Immigration notes that the main risk is “precisely in the interaction with an animal that weighs more than three thousand kilos and is also in its natural environment (water).” The report concludes that Martínez was engaged in an “inherently risky activity” and that the only preventive action is a simple one: “prohibition of the activity.”

Ultimately, the question of whether performing in the water with killer whales at SeaWorld should be ended or severely constrained by safety measures will be decided by the OSHA proceedings. If, after the legal proceedings are resolved, water work becomes a distant memory for marine-park fans, that will be fine with Rodriguez. Martínez is never far from her mind, and his ashes are interred in a spot near their home, beneath the protective canopy of a Canary Islands Dragon Tree that overlooks the sea.��

“If one demonstrates that there is no safety due to the unpredictable behavior of killer whales, this type of show should be ended,” she says. “Too many people have died, and this should not happen again.”

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To work closely with a killer whale in a marine park requires experience, intuition, athleticism, and a whole lot of dramatic flair. Few people were better at it than top SeaWorld trainer Dawn Brancheau, who, at 40, was blond, vivacious, and literally the poster girl for the marine park in Orlando, Florida, appearing on billboards around the city. She decided she wanted to work with killer whales at the age of nine, during a family trip to SeaWorld, and loved animals so much that as an adult she used to throw birthday parties for her two chocolate Labs.

This past February 24, Brancheau was working the Dine with Shamu show, featuring SeaWorld’s largest killer whale, a six-ton, 22-foot male known as “Tili” (short for Tilikum). Dine with Shamu takes place in a faux-rock-lined, 1.6-million-gallon pool that has an open-air café wrapped around one side. The families snacking on the lunch buffet that Wednesday were getting an eyeful. Brancheau bounced around on the deck of the pool, wearing a black-and-white wetsuit that echoed Tilikum’s coloration, as she worked him through a few of the many “behaviors” he had learned during his nearly 27 years as a marine-park denizen. The audience chuckled at the sight of one of the ocean’s top predators performing like a circus animal.

The show ended around 1:30 P.M. As the audience started to file out, Brancheau fed Tilikum some herring (he eats up to 200 pounds a day), doused him a few times with a bucket (killer whales love all sorts of stimulation), and moved over to a shallow ledge built into the side of the pool. There, she lay down in a few inches of water, talking to him and stroking him, conducting what’s known as a “relationship session.” Tilikum floated inert in the pool alongside her, his nose almost touching her shoulder. Brancheau was smiling, her long ponytail flaring out behind her.

One level down, a group of families gathered before the huge glass windows of the underwater viewing area. A trainer shouted up that they were ready for Tilikum. That was Brancheau’s signal to instruct the orca to dive down and swim directly up to the glass for a custom photo op. It’s an awesome sight when six tons of Tili come gliding out of the blue. But that day, instead of waiting for his cue and behaving the way decades of daily training in captivity had conditioned him to, Tilikum did something unexpected. Jan Topoleski, 32, a trainer who was acting as a safety spotter for Brancheau, told investigators that Tilikum took Brancheau’s drifting hair into his mouth. Brancheau tried to pull it free, but Tilikum yanked her into the pool. In an instant, a classic tableau of a trainer bonding with a marine mammal became a life-threatening emergency.

Topoleski hit the pool’s siren. A “Signal 500” was broadcast over the SeaWorld radio net, calling for a water rescue at G pool. Staff raced to the scene. “It was scary,” Dutch tourist Susanne De Wit, 33, told investigators. “He was very wild.” SeaWorld staff slapped the water surface, signaling Tilikum to leave her. The whale ignored the command. Trainers hurried to drop a weighted net into the water to try and separate Tilikum from Brancheau or herd him through two adjoining pools and into a small medical pool that had a lifting floor. There he could be raised out of the water and controlled.

Eyewitness accounts and the sheriff’s investigative report make it clear that Brancheau fought hard. She was a strong swimmer, a dedicated workout enthusiast who ran marathons. But she weighed just 123 pounds and was no match for a 12,000-pound killer whale. She managed to break free and swim toward the surface, but Tilikum slammed into her. She tried again. This time he grabbed her. Her water shoes came off and floated to the surface. “He started pushing her with his nose like she was a toy,” said Paula Gillespie, one of the visitors at the underwater window. SeaWorld employees urgently ushered guests away. “Will she be OK?” one asked.

Tilikum kept dragging Brancheau through the water, shaking her violently. Finally—now holding Brancheau by her arm—he was guided onto the medical lift. The floor was quickly raised. Even now, Tilikum refused to give her up. Trainers were forced to pry his jaws open. When they pulled Brancheau free, part of her arm came off in his mouth. Brancheau’s colleagues carried her to the pool deck and cut her wetsuit away. She had no heartbeat. The paramedics went to work, attaching a defibrillator, but it was obvious she was gone. A sheet was pulled over her body. Tilikum, who’d been involved in two marine-park deaths in the past, had killed her.

“Every safety protocol that we have failed,” SeaWorld director of animal training Kelly Flaherty Clark told me a month after the incident, her voice still tight with emotion. “That’s why we don’t have our friend anymore, and that’s why we are taking a step back.”

Dawn Brancheau’s death was a tragedy for her family and for SeaWorld, which had never lost a trainer before. Letters of sympathy poured in, many with pictures of Bran­cheau and the grinning kids she’d spent time with after shows. The incident was a shock to Americans accustomed to thinking of Shamu as a lovable national icon, with an extensive line of plush dolls and a relentlessly cheerful Twitter account. The news media went into full frenzy, chasing Brancheau’s family and flying helicopters over Shamu Stadium. Congress piled on with a call for hearings on marine mammals at entertainment parks, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) opened an investigation. It was the most intense national killer whale mania since 1996, when Keiko, the star of Free Willy, was rescued from a shabby marine park in Mexico City in an attempt to return him to the sea. Killer whales have never been known to attack a human in the wild, and everyone wanted to know one thing: Why did Dawn Brancheau die?

KILLER WHALES have been starring at marine parks since 1965. There are 42 alive in parks around the world today—SeaWorld owns 26 of them—and over the years more than 130 have died in captivity. Until the 1960s, no one really thought about putting a killer whale in an aquarium, much less in a show. The public knew little about them beyond the fact that they sounded dangerous. (Killer whales, or orcas, are the largest members of the dolphin family.) Fishermen tended to blast them with rifle fire if they came near salmon and herring stocks.

But Ted Griffin helped change all that. A young impresario who owned the Seattle Marine Aquarium, Griffin had long been obsessed with the idea of swimming with a killer whale. In June 1965, he got word of a 22-footer tangled in a fisherman’s nets off Namu, British Columbia. Griffin bought the 8,000-pound animal for $8,000. He towed the orca, which he named Namu, 450 miles back to Seattle in a custom-made floating pen. Namu’s family pod—20 to 25 orcas—followed most of the way. Griffin was surprised by how gentle and intelligent Namu was. Before long he was riding on the orca’s back, and by September tens of thousands of people had come to see the spectacle of the man and his orca buddy. The story of their “friendship” was eventually chronicled in the pages of National Geographic and in the 1966 movie Namu, the Killer Whale. The orca entertainment industry was born.

Namu was often heard calling to other orcas from his pen in the sea, and he died within a year from an intestinal infection, probably brought on by a nearby sewage outflow. Griffin was devastated. But his partner at the aquarium, Don Goldsberry, was a blunt, hard-driving man who could see that there was still a business in killer whales. He and Griffin had already turned their energies to capturing orcas in the Puget Sound area and selling them to marine parks. Goldsberry first built a harpoon gun, firing it by accident through his garage door and denting his car. Eventually, he and Griffin settled on the technique of locating orca pods from the air, driving them into coves with boats and seal bombs (underwater explosives used by fishermen to keep seals away from their catch), and throwing a wall of net across their escape path. Goldsberry and Griffin would then choose the orcas they wanted and let the remaining ones go. They preferred adolescents, particularly the smaller females, which were easier to handle and transport.

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

Over the next decade, around 300 killer whales were netted off the Pacific Northwest coast, and 51 were sold to marine parks across the globe, in Japan, Australia, the Netherlands, France, and elsewhere. Goldsberry, who became SeaWorld’s lead “collector” until he retired in the late 1980s, caught 252 of them, sold 29, and inadvertently killed nine with his nets. In August 1970, concerned about backlash, Goldsberry weighted some dead orcas down with anchors and dumped them in deep water. When they were dragged up on a Whidbey Island beach by a trawling fisherman, the public started to understand the sometimes brutal reality of the “orca gold rush.”

In 1972, the Marine Mammal Protection Act prohibited the taking of marine mammals in U.S. waters, but SeaWorld continued to receive killer whale capture permits under an educational-display exclusion. In March 1976, Goldsberry pushed his luck and the limits of public opinion. He sighted a group of killer whales in the waters just off Olympia, Washington’s state capital. In full view of boaters—and just as the state legislature was meeting to consider creating a Puget Sound killer whale sanctuary—he used seal bombs and boats to chase six orcas into his nets at Budd Inlet. Ralph Munro, an aide to Governor Dan Evans, was out on a small sailboat that day and remembers the sight. “It was gruesome as they closed the net. You could hear the whales screaming,” Munro recalls. “Goldsberry kept dropping explosives to drive the whales back into the net.”

The State of Washington filed a lawsuit, contending that Goldsberry and SeaWorld had violated permits that required humane capture, and as the heat and publicity built, SeaWorld agreed to release the Budd Inlet killer whales and to stop taking orcas from Washington waters. With the Puget Sound hunting grounds closing, Goldsberry flew around the world looking for other good capture sites. He settled on Iceland, where killer whales were plentiful. By October 1976, SeaWorld’s first Icelandic orca had been captured.

Over the next few years, Goldsberry spent freely to help create the infrastructure to net and transport whales out of Iceland. In November 1983, in the cold, rough waters off Berufjördur, Icelander Helgi Jonasson drew a large purse-seine net around a group of killer whales. Three young animals—two males and a female—were captured and transported to the Hafnarfjördur Marine Zoo, near Reykjavík.

There they were placed in a concrete holding tank. The smaller male, who was about two years old and just shy of 11.5 feet, would remain there for almost a year, awaiting transfer to a marine park. In the pool, he could either cruise slowly in circles or lie still on the surface. He could hear no ocean sounds, only the mechanical rush of filtration. Finally, in late 1984, the young orca was shipped to Sealand of the Pacific, a marine park just outside Victoria, on British Columbia’s Vancouver Island. He was given a name to go with his new life: Tilikum, which means “friend” in Chinook.

SEALAND, SITUATED at Oak Bay Marina, was a wholly alien world for a wild orca. Its performance pool—about 100 feet by 50 feet, and 35 feet deep—was created by suspending mesh netting from the floating docks. The pool was open to the marina water, and thus to any bilge oil or sewage pumped into it by boaters. Marina traffic and motors created a cacophony of artificial underwater background noise, obscuring the natural sounds Tilikum had known in the wild. In the 14 years before his arrival, seven orcas had died under Sealand’s care. Their average survival time was just shy of three and a half years.

At Sealand, Tilikum joined two female killer whales, Haida and Nootka, who were sorting out the social pecking order. (Orca society is dominated by females.) That meant conflict and tooth raking for all three orcas, and even after Haida established herself as dominant, both females continued to push the young Tilikum around. The stress was worse at night. Sealand’s owner, a local entrepreneur named Robert Wright who’d captured his share of Pacific Northwest killer whales in the early 1970s, worried that someone might cut the net to free his orcas, or that they might chew through it themselves. So at 5:30 P.M., after the shows were over, the orcas were moved into a small metal-sided pool that was 26 feet in diameter and less than 20 feet deep. The trainers referred to it as “the module,” and the orcas were left in it for the next 14 and a half hours.

According to Eric Walters, who was a trainer at Sealand from 1987 to 1989 while working toward a bachelor’s degree in marine biology at the University of Victoria, the module was so tight that the orcas had difficulty avoiding conflict, and their skin would get scratches and cuts from rubbing against the sides. About once a week, Walters says, one or more of the orcas would simply refuse to swim into the module and would have to be left in the performance pool overnight.

The orca show was performed every hour on the hour, eight times a day, seven days a week. Both Nootka and Tilikum had stomach ulcers, which had to be treated with medication. Sometimes Nootka’s ulcers were so bad she had blood in her stool.

Walters was interested in the science of training and was encouraged when Sealand brought in Bruce Stephens, a former SeaWorld head trainer, to make recommendations to improve Sealand’s practices. Stephens gave each trainer a handbook, which warned, “If you fail to provide your animals with the excitement they need, you may be certain they will create the excitement themselves.” He emphasized that killer whales needed constant change to keep them engaged and responsive, and made a series of recommendations for new learning sessions and playtime for Sealand’s orcas. But within a month, Walters told me, Sealand was back to its usual routines. “They basically ran it like you would run McDonald’s,” he says. “It just can’t be good for an animal that is so intelligent to do the same thing every day.” (Wright still runs a marina at Oak Bay but declined to speak to ���ϳԹ���.)

As Stephens had warned, bored killer whales look to make their own fun. If any unusual object ended up in the water, Haida, Nootka, and Tilikum would race for it and play keep-away with the trainers. Once the orcas took something, they were determined to hang on to it. Walters worried about what might happen if one of the trainers—who worked in rubber boots on a painted fiberglass deck—fell into the pool. Many marine parks try to defuse the danger with desensitization training that teaches the killer whales to stay calm and ignore anyone who falls in. The training might start with just a foot in the water (the orca is conditioned to ignore it) but ultimately requires gradually easing an entire person into the pool. According to Steve Huxter, who was the head of animal training and care at the time, desensitization was a Catch-22. After thinking about it carefully, “Bob [Wright] was not willing to take that risk.”

Each whale had a distinctive personality. Tilikum was youthful, energetic, and eager to learn. “Tilikum was our favorite,” says Eric Walters. “He was the one we all really liked to work with.”

Nootka, with her health issues, was the most unpredictable. According to Walters, Nootka pulled a trainer into the water. (He quickly yanked her out.) Twice she tried to bite down on Walters’s hands. Not even the audience was safe. A blind woman was once brought onto the stage to pat Nootka’s tongue. Nootka bit her, too.

Frustrated, Walters quit in May 1989. A year later, he wrote a letter to the Canadian Federation of Humane Societies, to share with participants at a conference on whales in captivity. In it, he detailed Sealand’s treatment of its marine mammals and the safety concerns he had. In closing, he wrote, “I feel that sooner or later someone is going to get seriously hurt.”

On February 20, 1991, Sealand had just wrapped up an afternoon killer whale show. Keltie Byrne, a 20-year-old marine-biology student and part-time trainer, was starting to tidy up when she misstepped and fell halfway into the pool. As she struggled to get out, one of the killer whales grabbed her and pulled her into the water. A competitive swimmer, Byrne was no match for three orcas used to treating any unusual object as a toy. “They never had a plaything in the pool that was so interactive,” says Huxter. “They just got incredibly excited and stimulated.” Huxter and the other trainers issued recall commands and threw food in the water. They tried maneuvering a life ring close enough for Byrne to grab, but the orcas kept her away from it. In the chaos and dark water, it was hard to see which killer whale had her at any one time. Twice, she surfaced and screamed. After about ten minutes, she popped up a third time for an instant but made no noise. She had drowned.

Bryne was the first trainer ever killed by orcas at a marine park. It took Sealand employees two hours to recover her body from Nootka, Haida, and Tilikum. They had stripped off all of her clothes save one boot, and she had bruises from bites across her skin. “It was just a tragic accident,” Al Bolz, Sealand’s manager, told reporters at the time. “I just can’t explain it.”

Paul Spong, 71, director of OrcaLab, in British Columbia—which studies orcas in the wild—did part-time research at Sealand before Tilikum arrived. He is not so befuddled. “If you pen killer whales in a small steel tank, you are imposing an extreme level of sensory deprivation on them,” he says. “Humans who are subjected to those same conditions become mentally disturbed.”

Byrne’s death led to a coroner’s inquest, which recommended a series of safety improvements at Sealand. The park responded, but according to Huxter, “the wind came out of [Wright’s] sails for the business.” In the fall of 1991, Sealand contacted SeaWorld to ask if it would like to buy Nootka, Haida, and Tilikum. Sealand closed in 1992.

IF YOU WANT TO TRY to get an inkling of what captivity means for a killer whale, you first have to understand what their lives are like in the wild. For that, there’s no one better than marine biologist Ken Balcomb, 69, who has spent 34 years tracking and observing killer whales off the coast of Washington State.

In early May, I meet Balcomb in his cluttered yard on San Juan Island. He’s trying to find the source of a leak on his Boston Whaler. His wood-framed house, which also serves as headquarters for his Center for Whale Research, sits perched atop the rocky shores of the Haro Strait, a popular orca hangout; Balcomb says he sees them about 80 days a year from his deck. Inside, there’s gear all over the place—spotting scopes, cameras, tool kits—from a recent expedition to California. In the middle of it all, on a table, sits an enormous killer whale skull that he picked up in Japan in 1975, when he was a flier and oceanographic specialist for the U.S. Navy.

Balcomb, of medium build, with a ruddy, sun-baked face and a salt-and-pepper beard, has been carefully photographing, cataloging, and observing the Puget Sound orcas—also known as the Southern Residents—since he was contracted by the National Marine Fisheries Service in 1976 to assess the impact of the marine-park captures. Many people assumed there were hundreds of orcas around Puget Sound. After identifying each individual killer whale by its markings, Balcomb found that there were just 70 left.

Since then, he’s become the Southern Residents’ scientific godfather, noting every birth and death, and plotting family connections. The population, he says, is now at 85 orcas, but he won’t know for sure until they show up this summer. Talking on his sun porch, Balcomb stresses that one of the most important things to know about killer whales like Tilikum is that, in the wild, they live in complex and highly social family pods of 20 to 50 animals. The pods are organized around the females. The matriarch is usually the oldest female (some live to 80 or more), who has a wealth of experience and knowledge about where food can be found. Within the pod, mothers are at the center of smaller family groups. Males, who can live to 50 or 60 years, stay with their mothers their entire lives and often die not long after she does. According to Balcomb, separation is not a minor issue.

The Southern Resident population is made up of three distinct pods. Each pod might travel some 75 miles a day, following the salmon, and vocalizing almost constantly to keep the entire group updated on who’s where and whether there are fish around. Killer whales are highly intelligent. They coordinate in the hunt, share food freely, and will help an injured or ill member of the pod stay on the surface to breathe. Most striking is the sophistication of their dialect. Each family group within a pod uses the same vocalizations, or vocabulary, and there are also shared vocalizations between pods. Balcomb says he can usually tell which pod is about to turn up simply by the sounds he hears through a hydrophone.

The social and genetic connections that bind orcas in the wild are intense. There’s breeding between the Puget Sound pods. Sometimes they’ll all come together at once and go through a distinctive greeting ceremony before mixing. But they will have absolutely nothing to do with the genetically distinct, transient killer whales that sometimes pass through their waters. (Transients travel in much smaller groups over vast distances and mostly feed on marine mammals instead of fish.) “When you get born into the family, you are always in the family. You don’t have a house or a home that is your location,” says Balcomb. “The group is your home, and your whole identity is with your group.” Aggression between members of a pod almost never occurs in the wild, he adds.

Puget Sound is small enough that Balcomb used to run into Goldsberry from time to time. Despite their differences, the two men would talk killer whales, drink Crown Royal, and trade stories. Today, Goldsberry, 76, lives about 100 miles away, in a small, ground-level condo near Sea-Tac Airport. His only water view is of a man-made lake, and when I go to see him he’s busy drilling a walrus tusk that’s been made into a cribbage board. Goldsberry has a square head, with close-cropped white hair. His health is fragile and he has an oxygen tube clipped to his nose. But he still has the beefy arms of a waterman, and he appears unmoved by the controversy of his hunting days. “We showed the world that killer whales were good animals and all of a sudden people said, ‘Hey, leave these animals alone,'” he says, sipping a mug of vodka and ice. “I had to make a living.”

Goldsberry has mostly kept his mouth shut about his work for SeaWorld and doesn’t much like talking to reporters. “I’m only speaking with you because those idiots out there, mainly the politicians, want to release all the killer whales,” he growls. “You might as well put a gun to the whales’ heads.” He spends the next couple of hours telling me about his cowboy days in the orca business: how he helped build the global trade, how he kept one step ahead of Greenpeace and activists, and how he battled the media, dropping one TV newsman’s camera into the water, asking, “I wonder if this floats?”

Goldsberry says he always got the resources he needed to keep the killer whales coming, and developed relationships with other marine parks around the world, which would often hold killer whales for him, many of which would eventually end up at SeaWorld. (Balcomb calls it Goldsberry’s “whale laundry.”) “I would go into SeaWorld and say, ‘I need a quarter of a million’ or ‘a half-million dollars,’ and they put it in my suitcase,” he says with a grin. “It was good, catching animals. It was exciting. I was the best in the world. There is no question about it.”

Asked about Goldsberry’s work for SeaWorld, Fred Jacobs, vice president of communications, denies that killer whales were laundered. “Any killer whale that entered our collection from another facility did so in full accordance with their export and our import laws,” he says. “We have imported whales that were collected by other institutions, but they were not collected on our behalf and held for us.”

Goldsberry’s last great haul of wild orcas came in October 1978, when he caught six off Iceland. (Five ended up in SeaWorld parks.) He continued to collect all sorts of other animals for SeaWorld for the next decade. When Goldsberry and SeaWorld finally parted ways, in the late 1980s, Goldsberry says he was offered $100,000 to keep quiet about his work for two years. He happily took it. SeaWorld’s Jacobs explains that Goldsberry’s relationship with SeaWorld occurred under prior ownership. “I have no way of knowing if this is true or not,” he says.

Whatever his methods, Goldsberry had helped SeaWorld turn killer whales into killer profits. The company currently has parks in Orlando, San Diego, and San Antonio, which are visited by more than 12 million people annually. Most of those visitors, paying up to $78 each for an entrance ticket, come to see killer whales. Last year, Anheuser-Busch InBev sold SeaWorld’s marine parks—and seven amusement parks housed with SeaWorld under the Busch Entertainment umbrella—to private-equity giant the Blackstone Group. The purchase price was reported to be $2.7 billion.

One of the keys to SeaWorld’s success was its ability to move away from controversial wild orca captures to captive births in its marine parks. The first captive birth that produced a surviving calf took place at SeaWorld Orlando in 1985. Since then, SeaWorld has relied mostly on captive breeding to stock its parks with killer whales, even mastering the art of artificial insemination. “Early in the morning, the animal-care crew would take hot-water-filled cow vaginas and masturbate the males in the back tanks,” says John Hall, a former scientist at SeaWorld. “It was pretty interesting to walk by.”

Tilikum’s sudden availability in 1991 was a boon to the captive breeding program. While preparing to transfer Haida, Nootka, and Tilikum, SeaWorld, one of only a few facilities with the expertise to care for them, discovered that Tilikum had already impregnated Haida and Nootka. A sexually mature male, even one involved in a dangerous incident, was a welcome addition. “It was not the only reason [SeaWorld] had interest but definitely a part of the decision,” says Mark Simmons, who worked as a trainer at SeaWorld from 1987 to 1996 and was part of a team sent to Sealand to manage Tilikum’s transfer. Media reports at the time pegged Tilikum’s price at $1 million.

IF SEALAND WAS LIKE a McDonald’s, SeaWorld Orlando was like a five-star restaurant, with 220 acres of custom marine habitats, thrill rides, eateries, and a 400-foot Sky Tower. There were seven different killer whale pools, including the enormous Shamu show pool, and seven million gallons of continuously filtered salt water kept at an orca-friendly 52 to 55 degrees. There was regular, world-class veterinary care. Even the food was a custom blend, made up of restaurant-quality herring, capelin, and salmon.

The big question for SeaWorld was whether to teach Tilikum to perform with trainers in the pool. Called “water work,” it has long been the most thrilling element of the Shamu shows. In contrast to Sealand’s repetitive food-for-work equation, SeaWorld’s training strategy was finely honed and based on intense variation. Daily activities were constantly altered, and the orcas were given a variety of rewards—sometimes food, sometimes stimulation (backrubs, hose-downs, toys, or ice), and sometimes nothing. “Variability makes the animals more flexible about what the outcome is and keeps them interested,” says Thad Lacinak, who was SeaWorld’s vice president and corporate curator for animal training when Tilikum arrived and who left in 2008 to found Precision Behavior, a consulting firm for zoos and other animal facilities.

Lacinak believed that Keltie Byrne had died because Sealand’s killer whales had never been trained to accept humans in the water. So when she fell in, they treated her like any other surprise object. Lacinak had confidence that Tilikum could be trained for Shamu-show water work. But he and SeaWorld’s top management also knew that when it comes to killer whales (or any wild animal), there are no guarantees. Normally, SeaWorld begins training in-water interaction when its killer whales are 1,000 pounds or less, but Tilikum was by now a very large bull. Plus Tilikum had been involved in a death. “If something did happen, you would look like a fool,” Lacinak says. “It was too risky, and from a liability standpoint it was decided not to do [water work].”

Some of the trainers at least wanted to desensitize Tilikum in case someone fell in. “There were several of us that pushed for water de-sense training. You don’t run from the storm; you harness the wind,” says Mark Simmons, who left SeaWorld in 1996 to earn a business degree and later co-founded Ocean Embassy, which consults on conservation and marine parks. “We wanted to make humans in the water so commonplace that it didn’t elicit any response. And if that had been done, it would be very unlikely that we’d be having this conversation today.”

But SeaWorld faced the same vexing Catch-22 that had given Sealand pause. SeaWorld’s head trainer, Flaherty Clark, says that it’s impossible to prove or disprove what might have happened if Tilikum had been desensitized. “It’s easy for former trainers to frame that as a hypothetical,” she says, “but we viewed water work with him and all the conditioning that might have permitted it to be effected safely as simply too great a risk.”

Instead, SeaWorld focused on creating roles for Tilikum that showcased his size and power when no trainers were in the water. The sight of him rocketing into the air awed the crowds. One of his specialties was inundating the front rows—the “splash zone”—with a tidal wave pushed up by his enormous flukes. “He’s a crowd-pleasing, showstopping, wonderful, wonderful wild animal,” says Flaherty Clark.

Keeping Tilikum from water work made sense for another reason: As long as SeaWorld had been putting trainers in the water with killer whales, trainers had been getting worked over by them. Since the 1960s, there have been more than 40 documented incidents at marine parks around the world. In 1971, the first Shamu went wild on a bikini-wearing secretary from SeaWorld, who was pulled screaming from the pool. For every incident the public was aware of (the ones that occurred in front of audiences or that put trainers in the hospital), there were many more behind the scenes. John Jett was a trainer at SeaWorld in the 1990s. He left to pursue a Ph.D. in natural-resource management in 1995, having grown disillusioned with the reality of keeping large, intelligent animals in captivity. He says that getting nicked, and sometimes hammered, was just part of the price of living the killer whale dream: “There were so many incidents. If you show fear or go home hurt, you might be put on the bench.” Flaherty Clark says SeaWorld gives trainers wide latitude: “The safety of our trainers and animals is paramount. Our trainers are empowered to alter any show or session plan if they have even the slightest concern.”

In 1987 alone, SeaWorld San Diego experienced three incidents that hospitalized trainers with everything from fractured vertebrae to a smashed pelvis. Jonathan Smith was one of them. In March, during a show, he was grabbed by two killer whales, who slammed him on the bottom of the 32-foot-deep pool five times before he finally escaped. “One more dunk for me and I would have gone out,” he says. “They let me go. If they didn’t want to let me go, it would have been over.” Smith was left with a ruptured kidney, a lacerated liver, and broken ribs. In response to these serious injuries, as well as other incidents, SeaWorld shook up its management team, pulled trainers from the water, and reassessed its safety protocols. After a number of changes (including making sure that only very experienced trainers worked with killer whales), trainers were allowed back in the pools.

Despite the modifications, in 2006 another serious incident took place at SeaWorld San Diego, when head trainer Kenneth Peters was attacked by a killer whale called Kasatka. Kasatka grabbed Peters and repeatedly held him below the surface of the pool for up to a minute. He came close to drowning, and Kasatka joined Tili­kum and a couple of other unruly SeaWorld orcas on the “no water work” blacklist.

Following the Peters incident, OSHA opened an investigation. After digging into the inner workings of SeaWorld’s killer whale shows, OSHA issued a report in 2007 that warned, “The contributing factors to the accident, in the simplest of terms, is that swimming with captive orcas is inherently dangerous and if someone hasn’t been killed already, it is only a matter of time before it does happen.” SeaWorld challenged the report as filled with errors, and OSHA agreed to withdraw it.

IN LATE MARCH 2010, a month after Bran­cheau’s death, I visit Orlando’s SeaWorld park for the first time. I pause for an instant to take in the sheer enormity of the place, with its hundreds of diversions, but there is just one thing I really want to see: a killer whale show. I thread my way through families and packs of ecstatic kids. Shamu Stadium, SeaWorld’s colossal amphitheater, looms before me.

The current Shamu show is called “Believe,” and Dawn Brancheau was one of the stars. Music, video, and killer whales are wrapped around the story of a kid who paddles out to bond with a wild orca and is inspired to become a trainer. Every element is intimately choreographed, with whales exploding into the air and onscreen in perfect synchronicity. Even though Brancheau’s death has prompted SeaWorld to temporarily reinvent “Believe” without trainers in the water, it is still absolutely mesmerizing. The show builds to a climactic finale with a pack of orcas lining up and using their flukes to sweep a tidal wave of water onto the shrieking and willing inhabitants of the splash zone.

After the show, I sit down with Brad Andrews in front of the underwater viewing area of G pool. Two killer whales are amusing a crowd of people who probably have no idea of the scene the same windows revealed a month earlier. Andrews is SeaWorld’s chief zoological officer, and he’s been with the park since 1986. He explains that while part of the goal is entertainment, SeaWorld’s aim is to use the shows to educate and inspire visitors, as a way to help conserve the environment and support wildlife.

There’s a lot of criticism that flies back and forth between SeaWorld and the hard marine-science community, but there’s no question that SeaWorld’s close contact with killer whales over the course of decades has contributed to the world’s knowledge of them. “The gestation of killer whales was never known to researchers in the wild. It was always assumed it was like a dolphin, 12 months,” Andrews says. “Then we found out it’s 17 to 18 months. We supplied an answer to a part of their puzzle.”

The advances SeaWorld has made in veterinary care have also paid off when it comes to rescuing stranded or sick marine animals, and SeaWorld’s state-of-the-art breeding techniques could be useful in trying to preserve marine mammal populations on the brink of extinction, such as the vaquita porpoise in the Sea of Cortez. SeaWorld also nurtures multiple partnerships with leading conservation nonprofits, from the World Wildlife Fund to the Nature Conservancy. “Every year we spend $3 million to $4 million on research and conservation programs outside our park and another $1.5 million on rescuing stranded animals,” Andrews says.

Head trainer Kelly Flaherty Clark still has faith in the benefits of SeaWorld’s mission in the wake of Brancheau’s death. One of her mantras, known around the park as “Kellyisms,” is “Do the right thing.” As we sit together in the stands of Shamu Stadium, “Believe” looks like pure family fun. But for the trainers, the shows are the product of countless hours of hard work and practice. They know there are risks. “These are not dogs,” Flaherty Clark says. “Every day you walk into your job, you are walking into a potentially dangerous situation. You never forget that. You can’t afford to forget that.”

SeaWorld doesn’t forget, and conducts safety and rescue training once a month. Among other things, trainers are taught to go limp if they are grabbed, so the whales will lose interest. The killer whales are taught to keep their mouths closed while swimming, and desensitized so they stay calm and circle the perimeter of the pool if someone accidentally falls in. They learn emergency recall signals—transmitted via a tone box and hand slaps—and are trained to swim to a pool exit gate if a net is dropped in. Scuba gear is always nearby. SeaWorld’s intensive regime helped its trainers interact with killer whales more than two million times without a death. But when a killer whale breaks from its training, all bets are off.

It’s hard to know exactly what triggers an incident. It could be boredom, a desire to play, the pent-up frustration of confinement, a rough night in the tank with the other orcas, the pain of an ulcer, or maybe even hormonal cycling. Whatever the motivation, some trainers believe that killer whales are acutely aware of what they’re doing. “I’ve seen animals put trainers in their mouths and know exactly what the breaking point of a rib cage is. And how long to hold a trainer on the bottom,” says Jeffrey Ventre, who was a trainer at SeaWorld Orlando from 1987 until 1995, when he was let go for giving a killer whale a birthday kiss, in which he stuck his head into an orca’s mouth.

If you’re a killer whale in a marine park, there’s probably no better place than SeaWorld. Yet no matter how nice the facility, there’s stress associated with being a big mammal in a relatively small pool. Starting at Sealand, Tilikum had developed the habit of grinding his teeth against metal pool gates. Many of his teeth were so worn and broken that SeaWorld vets decided to drill some of them so they could be regularly irrigated with antiseptic solution. And once again, he had to deal with the stress of hostile females, particularly a dominant orca called Katina. “Tili was a good guy that got beat down by the women,” says Ventre, now a doctor in New Orleans. “So there are a lot of reasons he might be unhappy.”

John Jett, who was a team leader for Tilikum, says he sometimes would suffer a beatdown bad enough to rake up his skin and bloody him and would have to be held out of shows until he healed. Jett had a term for the blood left streaming in the water: “sky writing.” After a good thrashing from the other orcas, Jett says, Tili­kum might be “off” for days, “splitting” from his trainer to swim at high speed around the pool, acting agitated around the females, or opening his eyes wide and emitting distress vocals if asked to get into a vulnerable position (like rolling over on his back). “It’s extremely sad if you think about being in Tili’s situation,” says Jett. “The poor guy just has no place to run.”

SeaWorld’s Fred Jacobs denies that Tilikum was ever held out of shows due to injuries from other orcas. “Injuries as part of the expression of social dominance are rare and almost never serious,” he says. “We manage Tili­kum’s social interaction on a daily basis.”

In 1999, Tilikum reminded the world that, at least when it came to humans, he could be a very dangerous animal. Early on the morning of July 6, Michael Dougherty, a physical trainer at SeaWorld, arrived at his office near the underwater viewing area of G pool. He glanced through the viewing glass and saw Tili­kum staring back, with what appeared to be two human feet hanging down his side. There was a nude body draped across Tilikum’s back. It wasn’t moving. As in the Brancheau incident, Tilikum was herded onto the medical lift in order for SeaWorld staff to retrieve the body. Rigor mortis had already set in. It was a young male, and again the coroner’s and sheriff’s reports are telling. He had puncture wounds and multiple abrasions on his face.

The victim was Daniel Dukes, a 27-year-old with a reddish-blond ponytail, a scraggly beard and mustache, and a big red “D” tattooed above his left nipple. Four days earlier, he’d been released from the Indian River County Jail after being booked for retail theft. On July 5, he apparently hid at SeaWorld past closing or sneaked in after hours. At some point during the night, he stripped down to his swim trunks, placed his clothes in a neat pile, and jumped into the pool. Perhaps he was simply crazy or suicidal. Perhaps he believed in the myth of a friendly Shamu.

The coroner determined the cause of death to be drowning. There were no cameras or witnesses, so it’s not known if Tilikum held him under or hypothermia did him in. But it’s clear Tilikum worked Dukes over. The coroner found abrasions and contusions—both premortem and postmortem—all over his head and body, and puncture wounds on his left leg. His testicles had been ripped open. Divers had to go to the bottom of the pool to retrieve little pieces of his body. SeaWorld ramped up its security, posting a 24-hour watch at Shamu Stadium. Keltie Byrne had not been an aberration.

IF ANYONE WAS GOING to take care around Tilikum, it was Dawn Brancheau. She was one of SeaWorld’s best and completely dedicated to the animals and her job. (She even met her husband, Scott, in the SeaWorld cafeteria.) She had worked at SeaWorld Orlando since 1994, spending two years working with otters and sea lions before graduating to work with the killer whales. She was fun and selfless, volunteering at a local animal shelter and often keeping everything from stray ducks and chickens to rabbits and small birds at her home.

Over time, Brancheau had become one of SeaWorld’s most trusted trainers, one of the dozen or so authorized to work with Tilikum. “Dawn showed prowess from the minute she set foot here. There’s not one of us who wouldn’t say that she was one of the best,” says Flaherty Clark. Brancheau knew the risks and accepted them: “You can’t put yourself in the water unless you trust them and they trust you,” she once told a reporter.

Perhaps she trusted Tilikum too much. Thad Lacinak, the former VP of animal training at SeaWorld, thinks so. He says Brancheau was an exemplary trainer, one of the best he’d ever seen in the water. Still, Lacinak thinks Brancheau made a mistake lying down so close to Tilikum’s mouth and letting her hair drift in the water alongside him. “She never should have put herself in that vulnerable a position,” he says. “One of the things we always talked about at SeaWorld was you never want to get totally comfortable with any animal.”

Former trainer Mark Simmons has been involved in deconstructing previous SeaWorld incidents between trainers and killer whales and was a friend of Brancheau’s. He also thinks Brancheau’s vulnerable position and hair (which he says she was growing long so she could give it to cancer patients for wigs) were the key factors that led to her being pulled into the pool. “Tilikum has never had an aggressive disposition,” he says. “This was not the first time Dawn had laid down next to Tili in that position, but it was the first time her hair was that long and contacted Tili.” Simmons believes Tilikum reacted to this “novel stimuli” by taking it in his mouth. When Brancheau tried to tug it free, as spotter Jan Topoleski described, Tilikum suddenly had a tempting game of tug of war, which he was bound to win. (After Brancheau’s death, SeaWorld’s longstanding policy that long hair be kept in a ponytail was revised to mandate that it be kept in a bun.)

At least two witnesses, however, told investigators they saw Tilikum grab Bran­cheau by the arm or shoulder, which would suggest a more intentional act. Asked how certain he was that Tilikum pulled Brancheau in by her hair, SeaWorld’s Fred Jacobs responds, “Witness accounts support that conclusion, and we have no reason to doubt it.”

The second critical question is: Why did Tilikum get so violent once Brancheau was in the water? The coroner cataloged a fractured neck, a broken jaw, and a dislocated elbow and knee. A chunk of skin and hair was ripped from her scalp and recovered from a pool. “When a 12,000-pound animal gets its hands on ‘the cookie jar’ and responds with the excited burst of energy common in such situations, it can have tragic consequences,” Simmons says. “Once the alarm was sounded and emergency net procedures were initiated, Tilikum’s behavior became agitated. This is what appears to the untrained observer to [constitute] an ‘attack.'”

Whether the emergency response increased Tilikum’s agitation or not, once Brancheau was in the water, her fate was up to a killer whale that hadn’t become accustomed to humans in the pool. “He got her down and that was it—she wasn’t getting out,” says former trainer Jonathan Smith. “I truly believe that they are smart enough to detect and know what they are doing. He’s going to know she is trying to get to the surface.” Former trainer Ventre agrees. “If they let you out, it’s because they decide to,” he says. “We don’t know for sure what motivated Tilikum. But there’s no doubt that he knew exactly what he was doing. He killed her.”

SeaWorld says it is conducting the most exhaustive review in its history. At press time, the review was not complete, and OSHA’s report is not expected until late summer. For the moment, SeaWorld is not taking any chances. No trainers are performing in the water with orcas, and all direct human contact with Tilikum has ceased. “We used to interact very closely with Tilikum but now maintain a safe distance,” Flaherty Clark wrote on the SeaWorld blog in March. Where Tilikum once got regular rubdowns and close contact during cleanings and other husbandry, now he’s hosed down instead of hand-massaged, and his teeth are cleaned with an extension pole. His isolation has only increased, opening a wider debate about the future of killer whale entertainment.

After Brancheau’s death, Jean-Michel Cousteau, president of the Ocean Futures Society, made a videotaped statement in which he said, “Maybe we as a species have outgrown the need to keep such wild, enormous, complex, intelligent, and free-ranging animals in captivity, where their behavior is not only unnatural; it can become pathological,” he said. “Maybe we have learned all we can from keeping them captive.”

Cousteau raises a profound point. But regardless of how this incident affects orca captivity, Tilikum’s fate is likely sealed, despite calls for his release back into the wild. Free Willy‘s Keiko underwent extensive retraining before being released into the seas off Iceland, and appears to have foraged for food on his own. But he never reintegrated with a pod. A little over a year later, after swimming to Norway, he died, likely from pneumonia. Ken Balcomb still believes that most marine-park orcas can be taught what they need to know to be returned to the wild. (No real effort was made to find Keiko’s family, Balcomb says, which is a key to success.) But even he rules Tilikum out. “Tilikum is basically psychotic,” he told me as we looked out over Haro Strait in May. “He has been maintained in a situation where I think he is psychologically unrecoverable in terms of being a wild whale.”

There is one other option. “We have proposed to Blackstone Group a sea-pen retirement,” says Naomi Rose, a marine-mammal scientist at the Humane Society International. “Tilikum needs more space, more stimulation to distract him. Living as he is, with minimum human contact in a small concrete tank, is untenable.”

SeaWorld’s Fred Jacobs dismisses the idea. In addition to citing worries about the impact of taking him out of the social environment he is now accustomed to, and potential threats to his health from pollution and disease, Jacobs says, “All the animals at SeaWorld allow people a really rare privilege to come into contact with these extraordinary animals and learn something about them and maybe when they leave SeaWorld carry that respect forward into their lives. Tilikum is a really important part of that.”

Whether or not Tilikum ever performs again, he’s still SeaWorld’s most prolific breeder. He’s sired 13 viable calves, with two more on the way this summer. Most likely, he will finish his life as he’s mostly lived it, in a marine park. He’s nearly 30, and only one male in captivity, who is still alive, is known to have lived past that age.

Three thousand miles away, Balcomb often sees a pod of killer whales easing their way through the wilderness of water that is his Haro Strait backyard. They swim with purpose and coordination, huffing spumes of mist into the salty, spruce-scented air. The group is known as L Pod, and one, a big male designated L78, was born just a few years after Tilikum. Balcomb has been tracking L78 for more than two decades. He knows that his mother—born around 1960—and his brother are always close by. He knows that L78 ranges as far south as California with his pod, in search of salmon.

L78’s dorsal fin stands proud and straight as a knife, with none of Tilikum’s marine-park flop. He hunts when he’s hungry, mates with the females who offer themselves, and whistles to the extended family that is always nearby. He cares nothing for humans and is all but oblivious to their presence when they paddle out in kayaks to marvel as he swims. He knows nothing of the life of Tilikum or the artificial world humans have manufactured for him. But Tilikum, before 26 years in marine parks, once knew L78’s life, once knew what it was like to swim the ocean alongside his mother and family. And perhaps, just perhaps, that also helps explain why Dawn Brancheau died.

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