#pro captivity

Unfortunately, Lori Marino et. al is back at it again publishing self-referenced, biased papers claiming that cetaceans are better off in sea pen environments - "sanctuaries" (which currently don't exist and that Lori Marino actively profits from the idea of)

Dr. Jason Bruck (who, full disclosure, is a close friend and mentor of mind) discusses how this scientific malpractise is occurring due to a weakening of the peer review process (thanks late stage capitalism) and the rise of unethical "pay to play" scientific journals publishing papers that are more likely to get media attention.

As Jason says - we have the means to do habitat preference testing with bottlenose dolphins! We both worked at a facility that would be ideal: it has a internal lagoon connected by a tunnel that goes out into the open ocean.

And, consistently, only a few dolphins actually want to go out there! No matter how much fish we gave them to do it!

Hi. I'm sorry for not answering right away, I was still at my externship when I got your ask, and I wanted to be able to sit down and give you a proper answer. So unfortunately, I don't think what I say will satisfy you. I don't expect to change your mind, nor is that my goal here. I only want to explain why I believe the way I do, so that you or others reading this can at least understand that it's not a position I take lightly, nor do I think it's infallible.

(Long post below the cut):

In 2018, Dr Ingrid Visser was asked by the plaintiffs to serve as an independent expert in the legal case ‘Anderson v. SeaWorld’.*

As an expert, Dr Visser studied SeaWorld’s internal records and submitted a report on 8 February 2019 discussing her findings based on those records and on published research.

The report is detailed and comprehensive; SeaWorld criticized it as follows in one of its court filings: 

“Dr. Visser submitted a 328-page report, along with a 76-page, single-spaced list of ‘materials considered,’ listing hundreds of scientific and other publications and thousands of pages of deposition transcripts and documents produced by SeaWorld. The Report also included 19 separate spreadsheets and other schedules containing information purportedly in support of the opinions offered. This sprawling tome attacks virtually every aspect of SeaWorld’s care and maintenance of its killer whales, literally from birth to death since the inception of the operation more than 50 years ago.”

Dr Visser also prepared a rebuttal report (in response to SeaWorld’s expert reports) which was filed on 19 April 2019.

Both of these documents are now publicly available (albeit with redactions) and include reference to the orca held at Loro Parque (as they were owned by SeaWorld at the time of the case being filed).

The case is being held in the USA (Northern District of California) and is heard by Judge White.  In September 2019, the trial was bifurcated (split into two parts), with the first part (the plaintifs standing) being heard on 9 March 2020.   The second part (where the expert witnesses, including Dr Visser will be heard) is to start on 27 April 2020.

As this case is still ongoing, the Free Morgan Foundation can make no further comments about the contents of these reports.

From the Free Morgan Foundation’s website, posted 29th Sept 2019, and shared via Ingrid Visser’s Facebook page.

I would like you to do thorough research instead of relying on “top 10 things seaworld doesn’t want you to know!” and Blackfish and taking them for granted. Why? I’ll tell you why - as long as anyone who sees this remains civil and, in case they want to argue, can bring up valid points with proof, just like I will.

(using negative tags to bring up the attention of my targets)

Almost no one who throws sh!t at SeaWorld EVER acknowledges other marine parks or the situation of orcas in the wild. “It’s all the same”, they think, but they couldn’t possibly be more wrong. They paint SeaWorld like the hell it is not, make videos and rants ONLY about it, masking the truth out there. Today, I will gladly explain to you what other parks are like:

In Miami Seaquarium, Lolita lives in isolation in one of the smallest tanks ever (still much bigger than her late partner’s, Hugo; he killed himself driven crazy by the lack of space), and has not seen any other orca in decades. The park allows people to walk straight to the glass of the tank, and Lolita has shown aggression to guests peeking in, signaling stress. She is overly sensitive to change, so any change in schedule makes her anxious. With that behavior and her 52 years of age, she cannot be moved elsewhere without risking her mental and physical health.

In Moskvarium, three orcas were pried from their family when they were around 5 and 6 years old instead of 1 or 2, which is the usual age of capture. They are full-blooded transients and at that age would have already participated in hunts, which is why they are very aggressive toward one another, as they’re not even from the same pod and have no defined social structure. The oldest female, Narnia, has been put out of shows and public view altogether several times and people suspect it’s due to disease or even pregnancy. These are very large animals (10 year old Nord is almost as big as any adult orca you see at SeaWorld) and the park will have problems with their behavior as they grow.

In Mundo Marino, Kshamenk is in a situation all too similar to Lolita's. He lives in isolation, accompanied only by a couple dolphins and secluded in a small tank. The show pool is pretty small for an animal his size, however he is often kept in a circular back pool where he can barely swim in a straight line - as a large bull orca, it’s anything but healthy for him. Mundo Marino always claims he was rescued during shows, even though he was actually captured. Argentina refuses to move him anywhere.

In Marineland Canada, 42 year old Kiska is kept alone in a fairly large tank, though she doesn’t even have the company of dolphins - only her trainers. All her calves have died, and she has been alone since 2011. She no longer participates in shows as the park claims she is “retired”, even though other orcas her age and older (namely SeaWorld’s orcas Ulises, Katina and Corky II) are very athletic. She has been seen bleeding from her tail and rake-like marks were spotted on her body, which should be enough to tell she scratches herself on walls and not with the intention to relieve an itch. In this park, Kandu 7, a deceased male that sired all the calves there, was often put in a literal fishbowl where he refused to even move.

Oh, but enough talking about orcas - that is another thing people do that bothers me. Dolphins, belugas, pilot whales, hello? No love for them? Are they not pretty, smart and interesting enough for the backlash? Sometimes, they have it worse, especially considering the Taiji hunts.

In Parc Astérix, Femke, a 32 year old dolphin, is just floating lifelessly and nobody pays attention to her. During shows, she just lounges around, motionless. The trainers do waterworks with the other dolphins, and you can see them just crashing into Femke without a care in the world. Like she doesn’t even exist. Her body is also very deformed, so much that even her dorsal collapsed, and I have never heard of any staff at the park doing anything about it.

There is a marine park which I unfortunately do not remember the name of (the footage I saw came from a channel that was deleted, so I can’t check) that holds a small beluga pod, and one of the animals is heavily bullied by the others. Its skin was all torn, and all throughout the video it was bleeding from its mouth and other wounds, cowering away from the other passing belugas. This is the kind of aggression that should be acknowledged. I don’t have more background on this, however.

In Marineland Mallorca, and hang on because this is the worst of all in my opinion, they use their own... “unique” methods to train dolphins. All parks use positive reinforcement to train their cetaceans: give them a signal, guide them, and give them a treat if they did it correctly - just like training a dog. Here, however, the dolphins are beaten. The “trainers” don’t give a f*ck about the animals and treat them like slaves; the kind of abuse you see in circuses. They scream profanity at them and smack them if they don’t do as told, and they get little to no rewards during training.

We also have the opening marine parks in China and Japan, two countries which are now capturing wild orcas older than at least 5 years old much like Russia. These are kidnapping transient orcas, another worrisome issue, and don’t seem to plan on stopping soon. China wants the orcas, not for the purpose of entertainment only, but for the purpose of breeding and selling the newborns to other parks.

Not long ago, they illegally captured almost 100 belugas and 11 orcas in Russia and are keeping them in tiny, frozen tanks in what’s known as the “whale jail” - one orca died of skin disease because of the cold (a 1 year old male, Kirill). These will be released soon, but it’s a taste of what’s to come.

Earlier this week, one of my favorite topics of discussion came up and was very casually debated among ourselves during our weekly seminar: the issues associated with cetacean captivity.

We’ve all heard the Blackfish arguments, and the advocacy for retiring and/or releasing captive marine mammals back into the wild. While there certainly is discrepancy among scientists and between marine park curators, biologists, and the general public on the ethics, complications, and realities of rehabilitating captive cetaceans, let me preface everything I’m about to say with the following:

Whether or not captivity is stressful or inherently damaging to the physiological and psychological health of marine mammals is not up for debate. There is simply too much evidence that supports the claim that captivity results in maladaptive and otherwise abnormal behavior, including self mutilation, stereotypic behavior, hyperagression, and increases the chances of reproductive complications, rejection of offspring, disease exposure/contraction, harm from element exposure, and increases heightens mortality rates in most species of marine mammals commonly maintained in captivity, notably orcas, bottlenose dolphins, belugas, pilot whales, pacific white-sided dolphins, and false killer whales (DeMaster & Drevenak, 1988 ; Perrin et al., 2009 ; Jett & Ventre 2011).

In the wake of documentaries like Blackfish, what now becomes of captivity? Has it truly lost all its value? Is there anything we can benefit from or learn by attempting to maintain these complex and demanding animals in captivity, all commercial purposes aside?

The answer: maybe.

We’ve all been there, and by “there” I mean Sea World, or Vancouver Aquarium, or Georgia Aquarium, or Marineland... you get the point.

I’ll be honest with you, my first encounter with a killer whale was in a captive environment when I was very young and impressionable and obviously ignorant to the complexities of ethics surrounding captivity. As I aged, I learned about the commercial whale and dolphin trade, and the problems that come with for-profit marine parks (*cough*) as well as the facilities that affiliate with them. It becomes an incredibly muddy and sensitive grey area to tread when one, especially a biologist, goes about listing the nuances and pros/cons to maintaining marine mammals in captivity. 

As I maintained earlier, my personal opinions do not necessarily reflect those of Cascadia Research Collective, so please bear this in mind as I go about offering my two cents here. Here we go...

Pros

Public attention / Exposure; Such as in my case, aquarium facilities can provide a wonderful foundation for the general public to see whales and dolphins up close and personal and, supposedly, develop an appreciation for them and foster a culture of love for the environment. Granted this is my own bias, I became acquainted with the orca and marine life at an aquarium. Later on down the line I also learned how that orca came to arrive at that aquarium (maybe some of you are familiar with Bjossa, a killer whale caught from Iceland in 1980?) and consequently shifted my interest in working with captive marine mammals to studying those in the wild. Today, I would never advocate for the deliberate capture of marine mammals for commercial purposes, ever, but when it comes to facilities that maintain rescued marine mammals, some animals cannot be successfully released to the wild given their circumstances and complicated social hierarchies. These individuals may remain in permanent captivity where they are used as ambassadors for their species and educational tools** to promote the conservation of wild animals and their natural environments. Personally, I would now prefer that people learn through documentaries and books, and maybe that’s unfair of me, but knowing what captivity does to these animals, I can’t bring myself to recommend it. **Personal opinions may vary on the ethics of doing this, and some may argue that nature should be allowed to take its course, as deaths in the wild are natural and normal and direct human intervention is unusual. It is common for captive cetaceans to experience chronic illness and be given constant veterinary attention in unsuitable artificial confines, and that begs the question of “what kind of life is that?”, but good God, is that another can of worms.

Research opportunities; In addition to developing improved husbandry techniques, which could lead to better veterinary care and general maintenance of marine mammals in captivity for the purpose of rescue and rehabilitation, there are still some research opportunities to be had in a captive environment. Some areas of study include examining the use of sonar echolocation in marine mammals, the results of which are intended to better our understanding of sound dynamics and perchance find ways to reduce the chances of entanglement in fishing nets and strikes by vessels. 

Rehabilitation and Release; short-term captivity for preparation for rehabilitation and eventual release is something I wish more aquarium facilities could refine and focus on. As it is, maintaining marine mammals in captivity is logistically and financially difficult to nearly impossible, depending on the species, but some respond better to captivity than others. Consider seals and sea lions for example at the Marine Mammal Center in California and at Vancouver Aquarium in British Columbia. Cetaceans can be more difficult to rehabilitate, again, due to the complexities in their biology and behavior and susceptibility to stress (Zagzebski et al., 2006 ; Simon et al., 2009), although it has been done! Springer (A73), a killer whale from the Northern Resident Community in British Columbia was found emaciated and orphaned in Washington back in 2002. She was taken into a seaside pen and released back to her family unit after a breif period of time in human care. She now has two calves of her own and is alive and well. Several successful releases of smaller oceanic dolphins after maintenance in short-term and long-term captivity have occurred as well (Gales & Waples, 1993 ; Balcomb, 1995 ; Wells et al., 1998 ; UNIST, 2018), but follow-up has been inconsistent in many cases.

Captive breeding; No, I don’t mean for the commercial trade. I mean captive breeding for the purpose of wild repopulation. Now, let me be the first to say that I don’t think this is the best concept to experiment with, especially with endangered cetaceans where it would be most logical for this type of intervention to take place. Take the recent last-ditch efforts to save the Vaquita porpoise. Acute stress as a result of capture was believed to be the cause of death of one of the last remaining critically-endangered Vaquita porpoises when it was captured for the purpose of captive breeding (Pennisi, 2017). The resulting offspring as well as its parents would have later been released back into the wild in hopes of boosting their numbers.  Because of stress associated with the capture of marine mammals, this is a practice that has barely been attempted, and maybe is best left a concept, although its a nice thought and often a better conservation effort when it comes to terrestrial or more adaptable animals.

Cons

Chronic/Sustained Stress; as a result of capture and confinement to small spaces, as well as unnatural social groupings, cetaceans may experience heightened stress levels over the long-term from having certain instincts and natural behaviors repressed. As we know, stress can have a severe negative impact on the bodies of organisms, and cetaceans are no different. This can increase their susceptibility to disease and increase the likelihood of experiencing reproductive complications such as miscarriages, stillbirths, and calf rejection. (Perrin et al., 2009; Rose et al., 2009; Jett & Ventre, 2011)

Maladaptive/abnormal behavior and repression of natural behavior; cetaceans often exhibit abnormal behavior in captivity, including stereotypic behavior like floating motionlessly, resting for unnaturally long periods, circle-swimming, chewing on foreign objects, hyperaggression towards their handlers and tankmates, self mutilation. This can also result in skewed observational data when observing marine mammal behavior in captivity, as often times there is little natural behavior exhibited by cetaceans in captive environments. Additionally, because of the difficulties associated with replicating natural social structures and habitats in captivity, this disallows these animals to engage in natural behaviors such as deep-diving, (specialized) foraging behavior, dispersal, long-term social associations, etc. which can further exacerbate stress. (Perrin et al., 2009; Rose et al., 2009; Jett & Ventre, 2011)

Increased mortality; many cetaceans on average live drastically shorter lifespans in captivity than their wild counterparts, despite being kept in relatively sterile environments free of contaminants, predators, and other threats present in their natural environments. This is particularly noticeable in pilot whales, orcas, bottlenose dolphins, and belugas.  (DeMaster and Drevenak, 1988; Jett & Ventre, 2011; NOAA’s National Marine Mammal Inventory, 2016)

Expensive/logistically difficult to maintain marine mammals; Marine mammals require spacious habitats with powerful filtration systems to be properly maintained, however, even with these factors accounted for, it become difficult to satisfy the dietary, environmental, and social needs of cetaceans in particular in an artificial environment (Perrin et al. 2009). Some animals are incredibly specialized hunters, gregarious and sociable, or originate from marine habitats that can be difficult to replicate on the large scale (deep, pelagic environments, or dynamic coastal environments, for example). Some aquariums have attempted to incorporate kelp forests and natural substrates in aquaria, while maintaining multiple species of live, schooling fish (for example) to stimulate hunting behavior, but this is not a common practice across the board.

Stimulates commercial industry; the display of captive cetaceans can be the inspiration for developing countries and regions outside of North America to begin their own captive whale and dolphin trade for commercial purposes. Dolphinariums are popular tourist attractions that annually generate millions of dollars in revenue, and these marine parks and aquariums, as well as the fisheries that supply wild-caught animals, can help stimulate local economies. This is both a good thing and a bad thing, as developing countries can greatly benefit from job production and economy stimulation, but this can also put unnecessary pressures on wild stocks of marine mammals and may lead to the collapse of some populations of whales and dolphins such as in the case of the Southern Resident orcas of Puget Sound in the 60′s and 70′s when marine parks were rising in popularity across North America.

Sends the wrong message (Questionable ethics/“respect” for nature); Again, this is personal bias, but I think it illustrates the issues that surround public exposure to marine mammal captivity. When I first was introduced to whales and dolphins in an aquarium setting, I was not inspired to work with them in the wild, but rather wanted to train captive orcas and be in the water with them. When we view marine mammals in captivity (or at least, prior to Blackfish), we see a positive image of keeping these animals in captivity. It also masks the complications and dangers that are associated with their captive maintenance through the use of marketing and PR tactics to hold these aquarium facilities and marine parks in a positive light while ignoring some of the hard and blatant realities of this practice. My love for other marine animals like many of the great whales and oceanic sharks did not stem from seeing them in an aquarium, but rather from reading about them in field guides and watching them in their natural habitats through documentaries. Additionally, with today’s technological advances in the virtual reality and animatronics, as well as the use of films, preserved specimens and museum-quality replicas and models, one can create an educational and entertaining exhibition without the unethical and dangerous use of live animals in aquaria. Attitudes continue to change in the wake of public enlightenment regarding the captivity industry, and I can only hope we rightly shift our attentions from the animals in captivity to the ones in the wild where it really matters in the grand scheme of things. I’m not saying forget about the captives, in facts many still need our help when it comes to holding these facilities accountable for their husbandry practices and contributions to research and conservation. But we are at the risk of losing the world’s oceans, and we need to address that now.