Miami Dade College marine biology student Markony Alvarado has lived in South Florida his entire life. Before he even understood his interest in marine life, he took elementary school field trips to zoos and aquariums across South Florida. One of them was the Miami Seaquarium, home to the world’s most well-known, and maybe most controversial, living captive orca whale.
ALVARADO: As a kid I didn’t really think about it much but then I looked back on it and I’m like yeah, the tank’s not very big. I feel like our hotel pool is bigger than that pool.
Toki, otherwise known as Lolita to Miami Seaquarium visitors and Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut to the Lummi Nation, has spent 53 years swimming in the aquarium’s concrete enclosure performing tricks for delighted school children and sunburnt tourists.
When she was only four years old, Toki was captured in the Pacific Northwest and shipped to the Miami Seaquarium. Originally, she had a companion orca named Hugo, but after years of ramming his head into their tank walls, he died of a brain aneurysm. Since Toki has never lived with another orca, despite the species’ need for socialization and familial interaction.
Last year, when new management took over, Toki’s shows ended after half a century. Still, every day she circles her concrete tank, the smallest whale enclosure the US, under the hot Miami sun.
Now, after years of protesting from Lummi advocates and others, Miami-Dade County signed a binding agreement with the aquarium to release Toki to her native waters.
But the question remains: how do you fly a 7,000-pound whale across the country?
It turns out you take them to UPS.
PALMER: With Keiko, actually, UPS came to us and said they wanted to do it. That they wanted to move Keiko.
That’s Mark Palmer, the associate director of the International Marine Mammal Project. He’s talking about Keiko, the only captive orca to ever be released to the wild, and also the titular star of Free Willy.
Palmer says the process of preparing a whale like Toki to move to a sea pen in their native waters is long. Likely, now, Toki is already being trained on how to enter a sling so she can be lifted out of her tank.
PALMER: Keiko, he took to, he was initially, I understand nervous about getting out of the sling and swimming around this new pen that he was put into but he got used to it very quickly and enjoyed himself immensely. There would be winter storms coming in with the wind blowing and stuff and he’d be out there jumping and having a great old time while the people who took care of them would be freezing to death.
Once a whale is in the sling, they start to fly. And they don’t really stop until they reach their final destination.
PALMER: The next thing they do is they have a large box. And they suspend the sling in that box. The box is filled with water and with ice. The ice seems to have a calming effect on orcas when they move them. They also put lanolin on the exposed portions, the dorsal fin and the back and other things to prevent basically the skin drying out. The box is then lifted by a big forklift and put ir into a truck to bring her to an airport.
The sling is important to remove Toki but also to get her in her new sea pen. But there are other important preparations.
PALMER: I think most of it at this stage is is mostly health related and you know, trying to boost her uh, her immunity and, you know, see if they can, they’ve put in I understand chillers to chill the water down into a temperature that is better for orcas than the original Miami Seaquarium had… there’s a lot of potential problems that could happen. Lolita, at this stage, does have some underlying health issues. She is improving, which is good, whether she gets improved enough that she can stand the stress of a move like that, given her age– She’s been 50 years swimming in circles in the same aquarium.
These health issues, along with Keiko’s eventual death from pneumonia, are the main reasons trainers of Toki are protesting her release. Lori Marino, a neuroscientist and founder of the Whale Sanctuary Project, doesn’t buy it.
MARINO: Well, that is so disingenuous, sure, eventually he died, eventually everyone dies. But the fact is, is that Keiko was a success. They took this whale who was in really bad shape living in a concrete tank in Mexico. And he had several years of living in the ocean, having the best time of his life. And sure he eventually died of pneumonia, but other whales, who live in wild die of pneumonia as well… So why weren’t these people concerned about all the different transfers that were occurring in other parks with other whales all the decades before this?
Palmer finds issue with this argument as well.
PALMER: At the same time we were rehabilitating Keiko, from the time we took them on to the time he died, 50 marine mammals died in SeaWorld. And so, you know, for them to come back and say ‘oh well he died.’ You know, we think it’s nonsense. Yes, he died. I suspect that he died because of his time in captivity.
Marino hopes that this release doesn’t just make Toki’s life better but is a step towards ending the captivity of all whales.
MARINO: She has really, you know, been in a situation where she deserves a chance to go back to her natal lands. I don’t think any orcas should be in captivity, period. I am certainly in favor of doing whatever we can to help each and every one get to a better situation.
The timing of Toki’s move is uncertain, but Palmer says the move should happen after her sea pen gets constructed next year.
MARINO: Trying to keep her and other animals in tanks to be gawked at by people is moving backwards… When you think about what was taken from Toki, everything, her life, her family, we had no right to do that. And so what we’re trying to do here is to, to make amends and do that in the most responsible scientific way we can. We had no business putting her in that situation to begin with.
For now, rehabilitators are playing her family’s songs over speakers in her tank, and Toki seems interested. When she finally does return to Puget Sound, scientists are hopeful that Toki will be able to hear her family’s songs in person once again.
For WNUR News, I’m Helen Bradshaw.
