Free Lolita! A Whale Story

Whale capture was big business in the 1960s and early 1970s, especially in the Pacific Northwest. According to the National Marine Fisheries Services, about 50 orcas are known to have been killed or captured in that region between 1965 and 1973. The last whale capture in Puget Sound took place in 1976. Ralph Munro, an assistant to the governor of Washington, happened to be sailing in the region at the time. He alerted his boss, Gov. Dan Evans, who sued Sea World--the amusement park owned by Anheuser-Busch--whose contractors had used planes and small explosives to herd orcas into their nets.  All of the whales from that capture were eventually released, and a Seattle district court ruled that the use of those planes and explosives had violated the company's permit to collect the whales. While capturing orcas is still not illegal in Washington, doing so requires a permit--a political nonstarter in the whale-crazy state.

When she first arrived in Miami, Lolita had company. She was placed with a young male named Hugo, who, Garrett says, had been taken from Lolita's family 18 months earlier. For 10 years, the two orcas performed together as the Seaquarium's star attraction. But as Hugo matured, critics say he became too big for his tank, and he repeatedly bashed his head against the walls and windows, says Michael Royce, a former Seaquariam show master who worked with both whales. Hugo died of a brain aneurism in 1980.

Today, Lolita is the only known survivor of that captured group, and her family--all members of the Southern Resident Orca Community, found in Puget Sound--have been added to the list of endangered species. At about age 40, the 20-foot, 7,000-pound female spends her days in a tank that's 80 feet across at its widest point and 20 feet deep. The whale would have to swim back and forth across her pool more than 6,000 times to keep up with her fellow orcas in the wild--who swim more than 100 miles on some days and can dive as deep as 500 feet. Many experts are quick to call those accommodations "cruel," as Bob Wood, president of the Seattle-based Global Research and Rescue, puts it--and Royce actually testified to the USDA about the small size of the tank back in 1978. (The tank has not changed since then.) At the same time, both admit that turning Lolita loose has the potential to end up as hazardous as it could be liberating. "While some activists have romantic visions of [Lolita] romping happily in the ocean enjoying her new-found freedom, I see [her] experiencing total shock as she is dropped into the hostile world of nature," says Royce. "My hope is that she can be transferred to a much larger tank."

Orcas are highly intelligent and intensely social creatures, traveling and hunting in family units known as pods that never break up. Years of study have shown that family cohesion is the cornerstone of orca communities around the world: children stay with their mothers their entire lives. Each orca community also has its own diet, rituals, mating patters and language. (In 1995, "Dateline NBC" put that language to the test: Lolita made national television when they played a recording of her family to her. "She literally leaned over so her ear was as close as she could get it," says Garrett.)

But after 37 years in a controlled environment, there are major obstacles to readapting to that life in the ocean. To begin with, Lolita must be free of viruses, bacteria and parasites that could transfer to other animals before a move is even considered. If she is, there's the question of whether her body can handle the pollution of the Puget Sound region--a known PCB hotspot--after years in a tank. Scientists must then ensure she has the strength to hunt for food (she's seen nothing but filleted fish for years)--and that, once reunited with her family, she could keep up with them.

In addition, there's the stress of a coast-to-coast transport, the necessary approval from various government agencies, and making sure that, after nearly four decades in captivity, she won't go up to boats hoping someone will feed her. Lolita has already outlived the normal orca lifespan in captivity, which is estimated at about 30 years for females and less for males. But in the wild, females have life spans and reproductive periods similar to that of humans. "As a vet, my guiding light is to do what's best for the animal," says Dr. Peter Schroeder, an orca expert who has helped develop marine-mammal programs for the Navy, and at one point had 66 dolphins under his care. "The possibility of her dying in the next 10 years, of old age, are pretty high. The stress of a transport may kill her."