AR-News: Houston Chronicle on Lolita

[Karen Dawn]

(The Houston Chronicle takes letters at: viewpoints at chron.com )

The Houston Chronicle

May 16, 2004, Sunday 4 STAR EDITION

A; Pg. 4

Activists want orca to have chance to become a mother

Seattle Post-Intelligencer

ROBERT McCLURE

MIAMI


MIAMI - In a concrete tank beside the shallow and subtropical waters of
Biscayne Bay, on a sun-drenched island dotted with coconut palms, lives a
one-time resident of the deep and cold waters of Puget Sound.

Her name is Lolita. She's an orca, and her biological clock is ticking.

A bicoastal band of activists is on a campaign to free the killer whale from
the Miami Seaquarium and bring her back to Puget Sound. Maybe it's not too
late for her to become a mom, they hope.

After nine years of failure, the activists have shifted tactics. This
Mother's Day was the first since the late 1990s that the groups didn't
organize a protest outside the theme park. Instead, they're aiming straight
at the heart of the Seaquarium, a Miami institution for half a century.

Lolita has whirled and twirled and waved and splashed for millions of
Seaquarium tourists since she was plucked from the waters off Whidbey
Island, Wash., in 1970.

Nearly a quarter-century after her capture, amid the Free Willy craze of the
mid-'90s that saw another one-time aquarium orca freed in the North
Atlantic, Washington Gov. Mike Lowry and Secretary of State Ralph Munro
launched the "Free Lolita!" campaign. Supporters dreamed of an IMAX movie.

But today, the folks who run the Miami Seaquarium say the notion of taking
Lolita home is ridiculous. This is home, they say.

"She's a member of our family, and we're not going to experiment with her
just for a vocal minority," says Andrew Hertz, general manager of the theme
park on Key Biscayne, just east of downtown.

But activists still push, as Lowry puts it, to let Lolita "retire as a
citizen of Washington state."

"People are not her family. That ought to be obvious to everyone," says orca
scientist Ken Balcomb, who helped Lowry and Munro launch the campaign.
"Certain people who are taking care of animals feel like they're family, but
they're wild animals."

That is the nub of the dispute, really. How wild is Lolita? How wild could
she again become? Could an orca caught at about age 6 re-adapt to life in
the ocean after 34 years? Would she cavort with her whale family?

It happened once before when Springer, an orca from Canada who strayed into
Puget Sound, was taken back to her family in 2002.

Despite the challenges, orca advocates are undeterred.

"It's been a very long shot from the beginning, but as long as she still
breathes, there's still a possibility," said Howard Garrett of the Orca
Conservancy, Balcomb's half-brother, who spearheaded much of the campaign.

In recent years, scientists have come to understand that orcas have
remarkable abilities, including their own sort of culture, Garrett notes,
with rituals that apparently are handed down through the generations.

Garrett tried hard to persuade the Seaquarium to let Lolita go.

Thousands of Puget Sound-area residents and tourists signed petitions.
Schoolchildren scrawled crayon drawings in protest, including a child on the
Everett-based Mosquito Fleet whale-watching boats who wrote: "We saw
Lolita's family today. Please send her home."

Now the activists are changing their approach. Mother's Day vigils and
disrupting the Lolita show with bullhorns or banners have given way to
getting the government on their side.

On the heels of Miami-Dade County building inspectors came those from the
federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

Activist Russ Rector, a former dolphin trainer, also tried, without success,
to convince the federal Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service that
Lolita's tank is too small to meet regulations.

Robert Rose, the Seaquarium's curator, states emphatically: "Lolita is not a
candidate for release. She does not meet the criteria for release."

Rose says the Free Willy example proves his point. Keiko, the orca released
in Iceland after languishing in a Mexican attraction, never did take up with
other orcas, instead preferring to hang out around people.

Keiko died last year in Norway.

Alone.