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After 50 years in the Miami Seaquarium Tokitae is finally coming Home! [1]

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Date: 2023-03-30

An Orca 'Spyhopping' in the Salish Sea

After fifty long years Tokitae the Orca is coming home! She was captured just off of my adopted home town of Coupeville, in 3.75 mile long Penn Cove, during a less enlightened era when Orca were still called ‘Killer Whales’. In those days relatively little was known about Orca or their extended families, called pods. Her captors stretched a fishing net across the shallow mile wide cove cutting off Tokitae’s route back to Saratoga Passage and it’s deeper water.

From the Guardian:

Tokitae, the oldest orca in captivity, has path to freedom after 50 years By Katharine Gammon More than five decades after being captured in the waters off the Pacific north-west, Tokitae the orca has a plan to return home, delivering a victory to animal rights advocates and Indigenous leaders who have long fought for her release. news release indicates that the joint effort is “working toward and hope the relocation will be possible in the next 18 to 24 months”. On Thursday, the owners of the Miami Seaquarium where Tokitae lives announced a “formal and binding agreement” with a group called the Friends of Lolita to begin the process of returning Tokitae to Puget Sound. Aindicates that the joint effort is “working toward and hope the relocation will be possible in the next 18 to 24 months”. Tokitae is the oldest killer whale in captivity. Now in retirement, she spent decades performing at the Miami Seaquarium, where she went by the name Lolita. She lived in the smallest orca enclosure in North America, in a pool of water that made her skin infected and was fed fish that was occasionally rotten and led to intestinal issues. Over the years multiple groups, including members of the Lummi nation and animal rights organizations, have called for the whale’s release from the Seaquarium, with some staging protests outside the facility.

This comes from the Orca Network:

The Capture The adult female, dying of her harpoon wounds, opened her blowhole and dove, drowning herself. The calf was netted and hauled in to the pen, and given the name Shamu as a catchy name to go with Namu. But she was traumatized by the capture and her mother's violent death, and didn't get along with the orca or with Ted Griffin, the entrepreneur who owned and appeared with Namu. After a few months the little orphan orca was shipped to a new aquarium in San Diego called Sea World to become the original Shamu. That little orca died six years later, but by then many more young orcas had been caught and delivered to Sea World, where they were also named Shamu. The public was never told that each one was a replacement for a previous Shamu that had died young. Just over a year later the first large-scale capture took place. A pod was herded into a cove in Puget Sound with speed boats and bombs like M-80s, and surrounded with nets. Five young ones were taken away that time, and three drowned during the capture operation. A year later another family was trapped. This time two were removed. One of those, a three-year-old male, was named Hugo and sent to the Miami Seaquarium. The bombs and nets and ropes and yelling men became a recurring trauma and a tragedy that the whales had come to expect. Time after time family members were forced into slings and onto flatbed trucks, and were driven away. Lolita (first called Tokitae) was captured on August 8, 1970 in Penn Cove, Whidbey Island. She was one of seven young whales sold to marine parks around the world from this roundup of over 80 orcas conducted by Ted Griffin and Don Goldsberry, partners in a capture operation known as Namu, Inc.

Tokitae performing at the Miami Seaquarium

Tokitae’s small enclosure at the Miami Seaquarium was the equivalent of you or I being locked in a closet for 50 years. It was extreme animal cruelty, lasting half a century.

You still see ‘Free Lolita’ bumper stickers here on Whidbey Island.

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