Lolita is her stage name. Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut is the name her native family gave her. It means that she is a member of Sk’aliCh’elh, the orca family originating from the Salish Sea. Others refer to her as Tokitae, which is a Salish greeting meaning “nice day, pretty colors.”
She is the oldest living killer whale in captivity and has been swimming in circles at the Miami Seaquarium in Key Biscayne, Florida, for 51 years as of August 7th. Her home is the equivalent of a human bathtub, an 80-by-35-foot tank, dubbed the “Whale Bowl,” with a concrete platform down the middle—the smallest whale pool in the country. Three years ago, the Seaquarium underwent a multimillion-dollar renovation, adding in a new gift shop, interactive touch pools, and more. Lolita’s tank size remained the same: woefully inadequate.
The 7,000-pound whale is made to perform for visitors twice a day. For decades, activists have been trying to return Lolita to her native home, making arguments related to the Endangered Species Act and the Animal Welfare Act, but all legal challenges to help her get back to the Salish Sea have failed. In a 2015 interview with CBS This Morning, Miami Seaquarium curator Robert Rose said Lolita would die upon being released. “She’s not prepared to be released. She’s got a trained staff that takes care of her day in and day out. And now this group wants to take her in and have an experiment with her.” The real experiment began in 1970 when a group of seven orcas—Lolita among them—were captured in waters of Washington State and sold into captivity for entertainment purposes. She is the last survivor of the group. Lolita has not had any contact with another orca since 1980 when her tank partner, Hugo, died after repeatedly ramming his head into a wall.
Activists have been pushing to have Lolita transferred into a coastal sanctuary, in the waters of the Pacific Northwest, where she would be monitored and potentially reintroduced to other wild orcas—including her family pod and her mother. In 2019, Lummi Nation tribal members, Tah-mahs (Ellie Kinley) and Squil-le-he-le (Raynell Morris), invoked the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) and announced that they would sue the Miami Seaquarium if they did not agree to release the killer whale back to her family.
Lummi members consider her family and believe it is their sacred obligation to bring Lolita home. “She is my relative, our word for orca is qwe ‘lhol ‘mechen, which means our relation under the waves. She’s like a daughter to me. It hurts my heart that she’s been kept away from us and from her pod for so long. She needs to be back home, with family,” said Morris, and Kinley added, “We’re letting these corporations know that we’re serious. It’s wrong for them to be holding a living artifact that is so culturally and spiritually important to us. What happens to qwe ‘lhol ‘mechen happens to us. When they’re whole, we’re whole. She needs her family and her family needs her.”
In order to avoid future Lolita’s, we have to redesign the entire structure of marine entertainment parks. Elon Musk has already given us self-driving vehicles and is planning to unveil a robot that will use artificial intelligence to complete tasks, dubbed the “Tesla Bot”, sometime in 2022. In 2020, Edge Innovations, a company that has made robotic animals for Hollywood movies, paired with marine biologists to design hyper-realistic dolphins, with the hope that the robot dolphins can one day free live animals from captivity. The marine-park industry has been crippled by documentaries like “Blackfish” which fully illuminate the unethical nature of keeping wild-born animals in captivity.
In an interview with South China Morning Post, Edge Innovations creative director Roger Holzberg said, “The marine park industry has been consecutively losing money for the last several decades for a lot of reasons…Imagine what would happen if animals that could never be in large aquariums came there. Great white sharks, fantasy dragons that could come out of the water and spit fire. Jurassic animals that you could swim with and experience that world.” It’s the right time for us to make the move towards electronic zoos and aquarium parks. Not only will they help eliminate the need for real animal performers, they will contribute to animal conservation and even open a whole new potential of life-like extinct animals (think Jurassic Park, but less deadly).
On August 17th, The Dolphin Company, a Mexico based theme park company, announced that they were taking over the Miami Seaquarium. Unfortunately, according to Local 10 news, the change in ownership will not result in any change to Lolita’s predicament.
It’s been 51 years since a baby 4-year-old orca was stolen from her family and sold into captivity. It’s been 51 years since she’s swam in fresh water. The longest known time that an orca has survived in captivity is 54 years—which means Lolita has no time to spare. It’s time for Lolita’s forced career in show business to come to an end. Scientists have been carefully following her home pod, which includes several of her siblings and an orca they believe to be Lolita’s mother—an 86-year-old killer whale named Ocean Sun. And despite her long imprisonment, Lolita still speaks her native language, using and responding to the signature calls of the L-pod orcas—making her a great candidate for successful reintroduction. Five decades is enough—for Lolita and every other orca still in confinement. It’s time to empty the tanks.
