Hugo & Lolita returning to Penn Cove in spirit.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Lolita, also called Tokitae, even if freed, had no known family or home to return to
GREENBANK, Washington––What if almost everything you ever thought you knew about the orca whale Lolita turned out to be false?
That would not make Lolita a false killer whale, a member of the lookalike genus Pseudorca, including one living species and two that are extinct.
The finding would, however, call much into question about the 28-year “Free Lolita!” campaign, predicated as it may have been on a long series of misidentifications and misassertions beginning practically from her capture.
See The orca whale Lolita, 57, spent 53 years in prison without killing anyone.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Died after 45 years in solitary confinement
The “Free Lolita!” campaign ultimately failed when Lolita, 57, died on August 18, 2023 at the Miami Seaquarium, 53 years after she was hauled out of Penn Cove, Washington.
Forty-five of those years were spent without an orca companion. She did at times have dolphin companions, but had an unfortunate history of killing them.
Initially dubbed Tokitae upon capture, Lolita was also known as “Toki” to handlers and campaigners for her return to Puget Sound.
But was Puget Sound even her original home?
Russ Rector with Lolita & dolphins.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Russ Rector was skeptical
Former SeaWorld trainer turned marine mammal freedom advocate Valerie Greene on July 29, 2024 forwarded to ANIMALS 24-7 a stack of documents strongly suggesting that Lolita was never actually the whale the world thought she was, and was likely not even a member of the same orca subspecies.
Greene collected the documents that Greene sent through doing what she calls “Russ Rectoring,” in appreciation of Rector, arguably the original instigator of efforts to spring Lolita from the Miami Seaquarium.
Dolphin Project founder and former Seaquarium trainer Ric O’Barry, however, picketed the Seaquarium on Lolita’s behalf even before Rector did.
Rector died on January 7, 2018 after 24 years of trying to have the Seaquarium closed for multiple Animal Welfare Act violations.
Linda & Russ Rector.
(Beth Clifton collage)
The Russ Rector papers
This was a legal approach to freeing Lolita that Rector believed was erroneously sidetracked by lawsuits filed by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, the Animal Legal Defense Fund, and the Orca Network, based on the theory that Lolita was an improperly held member of an endangered “distinct population segment” of a threatened species.
Greene remembered the documents she sent to ANIMALS 24-7 while helping Linda Rector, wife of Russ Rector for 47 years, to curate his voluminous collection of information gathered through Freedom of Information Act requests from every agency with relevant jurisdiction.
(See Russ Rector, “the feared activist feared even among activists,” dead at 69.)
Ric O’ Barry & Hugo at the Miami Seaquarium.
Hugo
About 18 months before Lolita was captured, a young male orca named Hugo was captured in Penn Cove by the same team: Seattle Aquarium builder Ted Griffin, 90, reportedly living in Tacoma, Washington, and fellow speculator in captive marine mammals Don Goldsberry (1935-2014).
Hugo was sold to the Miami Seaquarium; Lolita arrived as his intended mate.
Don Goldsberry circa 1980 and shortly before his death in February 2014.
Griffin & Goldsberry
Using the Penn Cove Shellfish dock in San de Fuca, built when the shellfish farm started in 1964. Griffin and Goldsberry captured and sold 47 orcas from Puget Sound between 1965 and 1973, using explosions and other sonic devices to drive them into a circular sea pen.
Griffin and Goldsberry on August 8, 1970 herded an estimated 80 orcas into Penn Cove. Only one observer, Mike Bigg (1939-1990), ever paid any attention to which pods the orcas came from: at the time, only Bigg actually knew yet that orcas lived in distinctly different family groups, and he was still trying to document his theory.
The former orca capture dock at Penn Cove, Washington, built in 1964 and still used by Penn Cove Shellfish. (Beth Clifton collage)
Weak documentation
As the total orca population of Puget Sound has hovered around 80 to 100 ever since the captures, it is possible that Griffin and Goldsberry rounded up and drove multiple pods when Lolita was caught, amounting to almost every orca then in Puget Sound.
The limited existing photographic and video documentation does not show enough markings to permit precise pod identification. Even Mike Bigg was still just beginning to develop the data base needed to tell orca pods apart.
Recited freelance writer Erika Parker Price, in a January 16, 2008 Seattle Times feature summarizing practically everything said about Lolita ever since, “The capture nets closed in on her family of orca whales,” but maybe it was not her family at all, just a crowd of unfamiliar orcas she had been driven in among.
(Center for Whale Research photo)
Did Lolita ever hunt salmon?
“Her days of swimming and foraging for salmon in Puget Sound ended abruptly,” Erika Parker Price said, though Lolita may never have foraged for salmon in her entire life.
“She was sold to the Miami Seaquarium to live out her days as a performer. That day, six whales were captured, and five were killed in the process,” Erika Parker Price recounted.
That much is indisputably true, as Goldsberry himself often admitted.
Hugo, an orca who killed himself in 1980 by ramming a wall at high speed, and Lolita, on a Miami Seaquarium post card.
Hugo & Lolita
The first hint that Lolita might not have been of the same orca subspecies as Hugo and the other orcas rounded up with her came at the Miami Seaquarium.
Hugo and Lolita shared a tank smaller than is allowed by the Animal Welfare Act, as Russ Rector repeatedly pointed out for the last 24 years of his life.
However, because the Animal Welfare Act was still a year from passage when Hugo and Lolita were captured, the tank was “grandfathered,” and the size regulation was never enforced on their behalf.
Hugo and Lolita performed together for 10 years, but never produced offspring. How could that have been possible among members of the same species, kept in such intimate proximity?
As Hugo grew and matured, he appeared to outgrow the tank, repeatedly bashing his head against the walls and windows. In 1980 he died of a brain aneurism.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Pod identification
Mike Bigg meanwhile produced the first tentative identification of the Puget Sound orca pods, dividing them into four families.
Three, the “southern resident” J, K, and L pods, are closely related. These three pods travel in groups, and are usually seen around the San Juan Islands, though known to range as far north as Alaska and as far south as Monterey Bay, California.
These “southern resident” pods are believed to feed almost entirely on chinook salmon.
The fourth group, called the Bigg’s killer whale, or the North Pacific transients, or simply T-pod, have been recognized as a different subspecies since 2010, and have been proposed for listing as a different species entirely.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Transient orcas are bigger
Summarized the WildOrca.org website in March 2024, “Resident killer whales forage in large groups, averaging 18, whereas Bigg’s rely on stealth, so their group sizes are smaller (2-6), and they are quiet while hunting intelligent mammals,” specifically seals, sea lions, porpoises, dolphins, and even other whales, “whereas residents are highly vocal, communicating with each other and using echolocation to detect prey.
“Scientists can readily distinguish between these ecotypes on sight,” WildOrca.org said, “e.g., size, dorsal fin shape, saddle patch (open vs. closed), and eyepatch pigmentation. Aerial photographs confirm that Bigg’s killer whales show significant differences in body length and condition. Bigg’s are longer and more robust than residents.”
(Beth Clifton collage)
Otherwise unknown hybrid?
Lolita, at 21 feet long, weighing 7,000 pounds, was near the upper end of the size range for “southern resident” orcas, but only about average for a mature “transient” orca female.
“Genomes show that these ecotypes shared a common ancestor,” WildOrca.org continued, and that Bigg’s diverged 200,000 to 300,000 years ago, while residents diverged later, around 100,000 years ago.
“There is no evidence of ongoing or recent mating between residents and Bigg’s in the last 10,000 years,” WildOrca.org said, though there is the unlikely possibility that Lolita was an otherwise unknown hybrid.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Photo identification
Ken Balcomb, 1940-2022, later founder of the Center for Whale Research,” located in Friday Harbor on San Juan Island, was hired by the National Marine Fisheries Service in 1976 to do a photo identification study of Puget Sound orca whales. The Balcomb study, building on Bigg’s work, established the present pod groupings.
“Efforts to bring Lolita home began in 1995,” Erika Parker Price asserted, apparently unaware that Russ Rector had already been pursuing the same goal from Florida, “when Ken Balcomb and then-Washington governor Mike Lowry first called for her return.”
Russ Rector as a trainer at Ocean World, 1968-1976. Ocean World closed in 1994.
Dolphin Freedom Foundation
“Russ started investigating Lolita’s tank in the early 1990s,” recalled Linda Rector to ANIMALS 24-7 in March 2023, “and I do have many articles and paperwork documenting that he got the Miami Seaquarium fined––but to no avail.”
Formerly an Ocean World dolphin trainer for seven years, and then a building contractor, Russ Rector started the Dolphin Freedom Foundation in 1992. Rector made closing Ocean World his first goal. Two years later, in 1994, Ocean World did close.
Howard Garrett & Ken Balcomb.
(Alisa Schulman-Janiger Facebook photo)
“Yelling ‘Free Lolita!’”
Soon after that, Rector emailed to ANIMALS 24-7 in 2017, “I was contacted by Ken Balcomb and his son Kelly. Howie [Howard Garrett, cofounder of the Orca Network and half-brother of Balcomb] was still a mailman and was not involved at all. We had a very long meeting at a mutual friend’s house.
“During that conversation with Ken,” Russ Rector said, “I gave him the benefit of what I learned while closing Ocean World. I told him not to start yelling ‘Free Lolita!’ because as they did at Ocean World [in reference to dolphins] all they would do was say she’ll die, and that ends the conversation.
“I told Ken to go back to Friday Harbor, get a place for her set up, and have it running, so once I could prove that Lolita’s tank was too small and she must be moved to a compliant situation within 30 days, Ken could then raise his hand and say, ‘I have the solution.’
“Instead he went back to Friday Harbor and started yelling ‘Free Lolita!’ to every news organization that would listen.”
(Beth Clifton collage)
Endangered Species listing did not help
The “Free Lolita” strategy advanced by Balcomb, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals [PETA], the Animal Legal Defense Fund, and the Orca Network appeared to enjoy some success when the Puget Sound orcas were in 2005 federally recognized as an endangered “distinct population segment” of Orcinus orca, the species name used since 1758.
But the Endangered Species Act listing, like most Endangered Species Act listings, excluded animals in captivity.
PETA, the Animal Legal Defense Fund, and the Orca Network then sued to have Lolita included in the “distinct population segment.”
They won that part of their case in 2015. The National Marine Fisheries Service, however, ruled that adding Lolita to the “distinct population segment” had no bearing on whether she could remain at the Miami Seaquarium.
Magdalena Maya Menchaca Rodriguez, Miami Seaquarium veterinarian.
(Facebook photo)
Magdalena Rodriguez testifies
Meanwhile, on May 23, 2014, the Miami Seaquarium and veterinarian Magdalena Rodriguez, who attended Lolita at the Seaquarium for 23 years, acting as an individual, submitted to the National Marine Fisheries Service a substantial accumulation of evidence that Lolita, though captured with “southern resident” orcas, perhaps from all three “southern resident” pods, was never herself a “southern resident” orca.
The Miami Seaquarium testimony and that of Magdalena Rodriguez might be dismissed as simply serving their own interests, but the same might be said of the evidence submitted by PETA, the Animal Legal Defense Fund, and the Orca Network, and––as Russ Rector agreed––the science appears to stack up on the Miami Seaquarium/Magdalena Rodriguez side of the issue.
Argued Rodriguez six years earlier, in a 2017 peer-reviewed paper presented to the International Association for Aquatic Animal Medicine, “The genealogy for [the ‘southern resident’ killer whales] was analyzed and documented over a thirteen year span. ‘Southern resident’ killer whales were divided into three pods, J, K, and L, and then further categorized into sub-pods with familial relationships.
(Beth Clifton collage)
“No kinship” to other orcas
“In the data set is an individual labeled Lol,” short for Lolita,” Rodriguez explained. “This individual Lol did not have any kinship to any of the other whales.
“Legendary stories,” Rodriguez said, “portray that L25,” an L pod female, “is her dam,” or mother. “However, published papers scientifically show that she is not related to L25’s daughter, L23, nor her grandson, L14.”
Genetic data for L25 herself was unavailable.
“We do not know if L-pod whales were captured on the day Lolita was captured,” Rodriguez wrote, because Mike Bigg,” the only scientist using the J, K, and L pod designations at the time, “only reported that L-pod whales were sighted near the area.
“Morphologically,” Rodriguez observed, “her saddle patch does not readily match the majority of the saddle patches of the [‘southern resident’ orca] area, and it is not even close to her legendary mothers L25 and L12 [another orca sometimes proposed as Lolita’s mother]. It does, however, match the majority of the saddle patches of the Alaskan and Bering Straits residents.”
Then-SeaWorld Orlando trainer Valerie Greene hugs an orca.
(Facebook photo)
Different diet
Rodriguez further explained that Lolita did not have the same eating habits as “southern resident” orcas.
“We do not know if Lolita when in the wild in the 1960s preferred chinook salmon or something else,” Rodriguez wrote. “We do know Lolita’s diet at the Miami Seaquarium. Lolita has been on a diet of 55% pink salmon [a different salmon species] for four decades,” deboned and cut into small pieces before she would take it, Rodriguez explained and Valerie Greene later affirmed.
“We have added herring and capelin to allow for different food sources,” Rodriguez testified, “unlike the [Puget Sound resident] population, who sometimes choose to eat only chinook, even when other types of salmon are present, and may choose not to eat at all if no chinook are present.”
(Beth Clifton collage)
“Swam away from live fish”
Lolita “is surviving very well on this diet,” Rodriguez said, “and exhibits consistent blood parameters, girth, and activity levels. Thus, we can state she is not dependent on chinook for survival.
“Lolita has never been observed or documented to forage, and her teeth were too young [at capture] to extrapolate from tooth wear” what she ate in the wild, Rodriguez continued.
“Lolita has been under human care for over 40 years. Not only has she not foraged in that time, but we do not know if she ever did and, if so, what her prey was. Live fish have been shown to be negative to her because she swims away from them.”
Rodriguez discounted Orca Network claims that Lolita recognized and responded to recordings of L pod vocalizations. Even if this could be verified, Rodriguez said, “distinct vocalizations may be learned and therefore are not good indictors of species status.”
Orcas (top inset) battered this Dall’s porpoise (bottom inset) to death circa October 26, 2017 in the Saratoga Passage, Puget Sound, Washington, near Penn Cove.
(Beth Clifton photo)
“Genotypes did not match”
Offered British geneticist Malgorzata Pilot, who did extensive independent research on the southern resident orca population, “One analysis indicated that Lolita and L79 were full siblings, but other analyses did not confirm it, showing instead that these individuals are not closely related.
“We can only rely on kin associations that are confirmed by multiple analyses,” Pilot explained, “because the genetic variability within each killer whale ecotype is very low, which may sometimes lead to erroneous associations. In this particular case, we in fact have evidence that L79 and Lolita cannot be full siblings, because we identified a mother of L79, and we can exclude her as Lolita’s mother, because their genotypes did not match.
“It is likely that L79 may be a distant relative of Lolita,” Pilot suggested, “but even if this is the case, it is not a sufficient evidence to assign Lolita to L-pod, because of the possibility of mating between individuals from different pods.
“We assessed kinship for every pair of individuals,” Pilot said, “so Lolita’s genotype was compared with genotypes of all other individuals sampled. L79 was the only individual who was indicated as putative kin.”
“We were not able to determine paternity for Lolita,” Pilot added, meaning that both her father and mother were unknown, as well as her pod assignment.
(Beth Clifton collage)
At least 57% transient
Research by Durham University geneticist A. Rus Hoelzel “assigns Lolita only approximately 20% to the ‘southern resident’ group,” the Miami Seaquarium explained to the National Marine Fisheries Service through attorney James H. Lister, “while assigning her about 45% to the southeast Alaska transients, about 12% to the California transients, and perhaps 8% to the Alaska residents, 8% to the Russian orca population, 5% to the offshore transients, and 2% to the Icelandic population.
“Thus, according to the underlying data,” Lister calculated, “one transient population is Lolita’s single largest genetic assignment (45%) and two transient populations together account for the majority of her genetic assignment (approximately 57%).
False killer whales.
(Beth Clifton collage)
“Predominantly not a ‘southern resident'”
“This data indicates that Lolita is predominantly not a ‘southern resident,’” Lister pointed out, even though Hoelzel put her in L-pod from lack of any other indication of her actual pod of origin.
Lister also noted that Mike Bigg, in 1976, reported “that August was (by far) the month of the year in which transients were most often seen off southern or eastern Vancouver Island (near or in ‘southern resident’ waters) in the years 1967 to 1974.
“Thus, transients appeared frequently near ‘southern residents’ in the late summer at the time of Lolita’s capture from southern resident waters in August 1970,” Lister pointed out.
(Beth Clifton collage)
So, who was Lolita?
Lister hinted, without actually saying, that Lolita may have been a southeast Alaskan transient, separated from her family by documented military sonar operations conducted in southern Alaskan waters in July 1970, shortly before her capture in Penn Cove.
At this point in time, we will probably never know.
What does appear likely, however, is that the narrative that Lolita had a family and friends in Puget Sound to return to is at best questionable, and at worst, a fabrication based mostly on wishful thinking.
Beth & Merritt Clifton.
Lolita’s true story, sad as the facts are as we know them post-capture, may have been sadder still, as an orphaned and lost little transient orca violently driven in among resident orcas previously unknown to her, before she was dragged into captivity.
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The post Lolita: not the orca whale activists thought she was. Her truth was worse. appeared first on Animals 24-7.