THE SEVENTEEN ROYAL Canadian Mounted Police officers surrounding me were dressed in tactical gear—layers of textured black. Black belts, black helmets, black vests, black shoes, black pistols. I was a sixty-one-year-old woman dressed in jeans and runners. The rising southeast wind funnelled down Knight Inlet, the longest inlet on the coast of British Columbia. The Viktoria Viking, a vessel that delivers fish to salmon farms, was sidling up to the aluminum cages of the farm I was standing on. As soon as she was docked, her crew swung a large black pipe out over the metal walkway into the net pen suspended in the cold waters of the inlet, and young Atlantic salmon infected with piscine orthoreovirus, PRV, poured out of the boat into the pen. After seven years of studying this salmon blood virus, I knew how dangerous these fish were to the part of the world I call home.
“Step past us and you will be arrested,” one of the officers said. I slipped past him and approached the boat. The knot of men followed me, but none moved to restrain me.
The one who had warned me asked, “So how do you see this going?”
“Arrest me, put me in one of your black Zodiacs and take me to Port McNeill,” I replied.
The Musgamagw and ‘Namgis Indigenous people of the Broughton Archipelago, which stretches towards the northern tip of Vancouver Island along mainland British Columbia, had occupied two other salmon farms belonging to the same Norwegian company, Mowi, for sixty days. Even though they had been saying no to the fish farming industry for thirty years, the industry had only grown, the wild salmon in the region were in collapse and the First Nations no longer had wild salmon to catch. They had lost their most nutritious source of protein and, since salmon permeates their culture to the point that they are not Musgamagw without salmon, they were losing themselves. Winter was on us and I feared for the young women who were occupying the other aluminum salmon farms, big as football fields, as storm-driven waves crashed through the pens. Mowi, which used to be called Marine Harvest, had laid charges against me for trespass the previous year, because I boarded one of their farms with members of these nations as they performed a cleansing ceremony, and took underwater video of their fish. Those charges were still before the courts, but I decided that unless I took the same risks as the people of this land, I was not doing everything I could to bring the standoff to a productive conclusion without anyone getting hurt. The nations were demanding that all the salmon farms be removed from the territories of the Musgamagw Dzawada’enuxw, Mamalilikulla, Kwikwasut’inuxw Haxwa’mis and ‘Namgis.
Several RCMP officers moved away from me to huddle with employees of Mowi, then the officer who had talked to me returned. “There will be no arrests today,” he said, and I nodded, walked up to the ship and laid my hand on it as it loomed several stories above me. Next I scooped up hundreds of the scales that had been knocked off the fish as they tumbled down the pipe and were drifting in the water. I would send these to a lab to document the presence of the virus in these fish as they arrived fresh from the hatchery. This is how I confirmed that hundreds of thousands of Atlantic salmon infected with an Atlantic blood virus were pouring into the pens in an inlet that once supported millions of the five species of Pacific wild salmon.
Once the fish were unloaded, the ship backed away and the police departed, following it down the inlet in their black Zodiacs. I messaged my friend John Geraghty, who had dropped me off on the farm, that since I hadn’t been arrested I would be staying the night. He pulled up in his boat and threw me a garbage bag stocked for what lay ahead of me: sleeping bag, heavy Cowichan sweater, water and granola bars. Without trying to talk me out of it, for which I remain grateful, he left. I can’t say I was happy to be occupying this salmon farm, but it had to be done.
I had tried everything I could think of for over thirty years to protect this part of the BC coast from the impact of industrial salmon farming. Everywhere in the world that this industry operates, wild salmon stocks vanish, with devastating impacts on whales and many other species, as well as on human communities. I had done seventeen years of research, co-publishing findings in the journal Science and elsewhere that predicted the collapse of the pink salmon of Knight Inlet due to the sea lice that were spreading from farm salmon and eating young wild salmon to death. I was the scientist who published the first paper on the arrival of the Atlantic Ocean virus, PRV, into these Pacific waters, which could only be explained by the introduction of millions of Atlantic farm salmon into the province. I’d travelled to Norway to speak to Mowi’s shareholders, trying to persuade them that the impact of their industry was unacceptable. I took the industry and government to court four times to try to stop the harm it was doing, and never lost. I had done a lot more too, as had the allies and First Nations.
None of these things convinced government to protect wild salmon from the flow of pathogens from these industrial marine feedlots into the ocean, which has mystified me for the whole time I’d been involved in trying to get them to stop. When it comes to the oceans, it seems that anything goes.
Whales were the creatures that brought me to this point.
From the moment I decided to follow Jane Goodall’s path and study language in a large-brained animal, I had to make a choice: primate, elephant or whale?
I picked whales. Sometimes I wished I had picked elephants, because most of the time spent studying whales is just staring at the surface of the ocean waiting. When whales do surface, all you usually get to see are their fins and backs. Terrestrial biologists can observe a wealth of information: facial expressions, hackles, body posture, body condition, intimate interactions. The study of scat, alone, provides detailed information on diet and health. Terrestrial animals leave tracks, nests and trails. You can set up observation platforms and sit quietly and learn.
Watching whales means travelling constantly in boats that are tossing about in every kind of weather. I once met a government biologist who in his spare time studied Sasquatch, the legendary super-sized, human-like primates that may exist along the coast of the northwest American continent. As I listened to his stories of the evidence he had accumulated but never confirmed, I realized here was someone who had chosen an animal that was even harder to study than whales. However fleeting my observations, I could see them.
Whales can never build a nest or curl up in a cave, since they have to return to the surface of the ocean for every breath, no matter whether the water is calm or rising in mountainous swells. Their life at the dynamic boundary where air meets water means that a whale’s only home is their family. With drones as a new tool, we now know that whales touch each other often. Orca travelling abreast will leave a space for members to fill as they rise to the surface to breathe. They use sound to stay in touch in the near darkness in which they live. A mother rounding a point of land will charge back calling to her three-year-old who has strayed out of earshot, relaxing when she re-establishes acoustic contact with her little one.
Whales don’t have the thick pelts of sea otters, seals and sea lions. They have to maintain a thick insulating layer of fat to stay warm. Their huge brains, about five times the size of ours, are built with the same information-rich network wiring as human brains, an expensive piece of biological machinery to maintain for an animal that spends much of its life holding its breath. Brains require an abundant and steady supply of oxygen, and so do muscles. Because whales have to use their muscles continuously from the moment they are born or they will sink and drown, their brains and muscles compete for every breath that they hold in their lungs between surfacings. If whales were not using all of this massive brain, evolution would have produced a downsized model that was more oxygen-efficient to run. Whales were clearly thinking with those great big brains, and I was drawn to try to figure out what they were thinking about by studying their sounds.
In the grip of urgency to begin my research, I skipped the last year of high school, winning early acceptance into the American University in Washington, DC. After I graduated with a Bachelor of Science, I headed west to the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, closer to the ocean. An academic adviser suggested I start with studying communication in a smaller species that would be easier to work with, suggesting fish in a tank. I balked and chose, instead, to begin my studies with captive dolphins. I’d missed several prerequisite courses for graduate work in my undergrad degree, and so while I attended those make-up classes I began my research at Marineland of the Pacific just south of Los Angeles.
Marineland gave me the permission to lower an underwater microphone, called a hydrophone, into the dolphin tank. While I was in the process of figuring out how to study the steady stream of clicks, buzzes and whistles uttered by the ten bottlenosed dolphins zooming around that tank, the female orca at the park gave birth to the first whale conceived in captivity. The curator asked if I would move my gear to the whale tank and record the sounds of the newborn whale. I eagerly agreed, and this is how I came to know Corky, the female orca, and Orky, the male, both captured off the coast of British Columbia when they were about five years old, in 1968 and 1969.
When their first calls came over the headset, I drew in a long breath. They were so beautiful. Unlike the dolphin sounds, these calls were squarely within my hearing range, which meant I could listen in real time, instead of having to play back the tapes at a slower speed. The calls completely captured my attention, hitting a resonant frequency throughout my entire being. I knew instantly that orcas were the animals I wanted to spend the rest of my life with.
When humans greet each other we utter specific sounds: variations of “hello” in every language. We make a different set of sounds when we part ways, eat or tuck our young into bed. Matching the sounds whales made to identifiable behaviours, like playing, greetings or feeding, seemed a good place for me to start trying to understand the orca. Human language is a portal to our thoughts; since orca are so vocal, I hoped that correlating their sounds with their behaviours would allow me to start the journey into their world. I wanted to know what they were thinking about, what was important to them—what was going on in that huge Cadillac of a brain of theirs. As I watched Corky’s eight-foot baby whale, I felt extremely lucky. I would study how this newborn learned the language of whales and I would learn with her.
To my untrained eyes everything looked normal. Corky was very attentive to her baby. She taught the infant how to breath, adjusting her own oxygen needs to those of her newborn. The baby learned correctly to open the blowhole on the top of her head when she heard the whoosh of Mom releasing a lungful. This meant the baby only breathed in when her blowhole was above the surface of the water so she wouldn’t choke or drown.
Along with the marine park staff, I waited for the moment that the baby would nurse, absolutely crucial for her survival. But it never happened. The tank was small and circular. This meant Corky and her baby could never swim in a straight line. While the little one was learning how to steer she slammed repeatedly into the wall, opening and reopening a wound on the tip of her lower jaw. As Corky repeatedly rushed to get between the baby and the wall, protecting her, the little whale became fixated on Corky’s white eye-patch and tried to nurse on the crease of Corky’s mouth. It seemed to all of us who were watching that the baby had been born with an innate set of instructions to locate a white patch and nuzzle there. She had found the wrong white patch.
Corky was consumed with protecting her baby from breaking its delicate lower jaw against the concrete. There was no opportunity for her to glide and roll over and show the baby her mammaries, embedded in two slits near her tail. There was no attentive female relative to nudge the baby to the source of rich, creamy milk. Orky, the male, appeared to have no knowledge of what to do.
And so whales and humans watched together as the baby starved to death. Everyone said, Corky is a new mother, this was to be expected, she will do better next time. That sounded good to me.
Over the next two years, I spent twelve hours a day one month and twelve hours a night the next month watching and recording the whales. I divided their sounds into sixty-two different calls and gave each an alphanumeric code: A1, F2, C3, and so on. I labelled calls that were basically the same, but with different endings or beginnings, the same letter and a different number. I categorized the whales’ behaviours—unison swimming, spy-hopping vertically out of the water, resting, grinding their teeth on the submerged platform (the same way other animals respond to the stress and boredom of captivity by inflicting pain on themselves). For every hour I spent recording—288 hours in total—I spent two or more coding everything the pair said and did. The most fascinating calls were the ones I dubbed the F series, which the whales used to initiate and sign off each “conversation.”
I graphed all of this and saw that certain calls dominated specific activities. I assigned each sound a colour and transcribed whale conversations into ribbons of colours. Given that humans are predominantly a visual species, and orca an acoustic species, it seemed to me that it made sense to create visual representations of their calls to tap into the extraordinary pattern recognition capacity of the human brain.
It took time for me to slow down to the rhythm of whales, but once I did, I saw things that hinted at their rich culture. In the pale pink of a Los Angeles pre-dawn, Orky and Corky casually squirted mouthfuls of water against a spot on the tank wall as they swam past. When the sun rose over the bleachers that surrounded their tank, the spot they were dousing was always where the sunlight hit first. As the sun moved through the seasons, the whales adjusted for it. Once the bright streak of light appeared, the whales not only squirted water in the right place, they gently pressed their huge soft pink tongues against it.
During a rare lightning storm in the middle of the night, Orky raised his head above the water and drifted with his mouth open towards the brilliant flashes, making an eerie groaning noise. Every now and then during exhibition hours he picked a child to follow, swimming alongside them. The children caught on immediately and delighted in the attention of the whale. He even lifted his barn-door-sized pectoral fin inviting the child to touch him. I regret that I was too shy to approach the parents to ask for details about these children. Why did Orky pick them out of thousands? Were they special in some way or wearing colours the whale was attracted to, or was Orky simply in the mood to train a human every now and then and found the young ones easier to educate?
Corky loved sex, like many in the dolphin family, and she was a deft seductress. In the private hours near dawn she would swim past her sleeping mate, gently grazing him with her pectoral fin from his head to his tail. If he kept snoozing, she slipped under him and ran her fin down his throat, past his belly button, along his genital slit to his tail. If this failed to do the trick, she just rammed him so hard his dorsal fin shivered at the impact, and he would take off after her.
I loved the long hours with the whales, particularly when the park was closed and Orky and Corky did things no other human knew about. They were so exposed to me I could see and hear everything they did, and I did everything I could to absorb and learn from them. I was sure that if I watched long enough and analyzed enough data, I would crack the code and learn what they were saying. Sometimes they floated side-by-side at night and had long conversations, like a human couple talking in bed. Other times they practised behaviours in perfect unison, such as laying their tails on the training platform and raising their pectoral fins—something that dumbfounded the trainers when I showed them the pictures. I so wanted to believe that these whales were content, I missed the underlying message for years. And when at last it hit me, it hit me hard: everything was wrong with this situation.
Corky gave birth to one stillborn and six live babies and none survived. Some of her babies were taken from her while they were still alive in the hope that the park staff could force-feed them and eventually return them to their mother; others died in the tank with her.
I recorded the wispy newborn voices growing raspy and desperate as the babies slowly starved over a week to ten days. I recorded the call Corky made as her babies were guided into slings and winched out of the tank with large cranes. One moment the baby’s frightened calls filled the tank, and the next that little voice was gone forever as the baby was removed from the water. Corky’s response haunts me to this day. She suffered terribly. There was no other way to interpret her behaviour.
While she never hurt the people who entered the tank to guide her babies into the slings, she attacked the trainer platform with such force that the whole stadium shook. She flung her body again and again against the spot where humans stood to command her to perform jumps, wave her fin, give them a ride. Then, each time, she sank to the bottom and made the same call over and over for days, stopping only to grab a breath at the surface and then return to the bottom of the tank, where she lay on the drain. Orky swam alone on the surface. Every few hours he vocalized. I recognized his call as F1, pituuu. When Corky didn’t answer, Orky fell silent and resumed his circling.
After several days, he would get an answer from her, in the dark of night. Even though I was hidden, the whales kept track of everything around them. They knew I was there. I don’t know if they resented my presence, but I noticed that their most intimate interactions took place when there were no crowds, no trainers, no veterinarians. With only me as witness, Corky at last would respond pituuu and rise to the surface, where she moved close to Orky. Breathing in perfect unison, the two whales would call back and forth, pituuu, pituuu, as they circled the tank for hours. Later that day Corky would begin to eat again.
One morning, I arrived to find water pouring across the park, everything awash. Heart pounding, I ran to the whale tank, which rose three storeys high, with glass viewing windows encircling each level. I found Corky with a deep crease on the point of her face, her delicate rostrum, facing away from the window she had shattered. It was the window into the storage room where hundreds of stuffed toy baby orcas were stacked. I walked downstairs to where the stuffed whales were piled in drifts from the force of the water. The significance of Corky’s action doubled me over in grief. I sat on the wet floor and cried. Then I picked up a chunk of the broken, inch-thick glass and put it into my pocket to ensure I never forgot perhaps the clearest message I have ever received from a whale. There were dozens of windows around her tank, but Corky broke the one that separated her from the tiny stuffed replicas of her babies. Did Corky recognize their resemblance to the babies that she had lost? Did she long for her babies so much that she could not bear to see the stack of little whales sitting behind that window? We had no way to answer that question, but the park staff moved them out of her sight.
The last time I undertook a science vigil over the birth of one of Corky’s babies I had my own three-month-old child. My son fascinated Corky and she watched me holding him as I watched her. By that point I knew something of the depth of a mother’s love. I knew that everything I had observed suggested Corky felt an emotion at least as intense as the love I felt for my baby.
Shortly after the birth and death of this baby orca, I left Corky to go study her family, which I had found in Canada. At the time, I was so dedicated to not being an activist that, even recognizing agony in the whales I had come to know and care for deeply, I abandoned them. I was hell-bent on my research and was concerned that becoming an advocate would derail my science. Trying to save animals is so hard that it drains your resources, consumes your time and burns the bridge to science’s inner sanctum: the respect of your peers. Sleep is lost, you risk obsession. In my defence, I will say that it’s easier to draw hard lines when you are young. The blindness of having little past makes things appear simple.
Afterwards I learned that when SeaWorld bought Marineland some years later, Orky was taken away from Corky. He was a rare adult male orca in captivity, and SeaWorld’s owners wanted to use him as a breeder to make more whales for them to profit from. As with the babies, the water in the tank was lowered so the staff could manoeuvre a huge sling that was slipped underneath Orky. Corky knew exactly what was going down and tried to climb into the sling with him. Orky died shortly thereafter. We know from research on wild orca that the males rarely survive the loss of family. Corky is still circling tanks amusing people for profit, though now there are people working to persuade SeaWorld to allow them to bring Corky back to British Columbia for her retirement.
At this time in the late 1970s, Canadian researchers were just discovering that each pod or family of orca uses a unique set of calls—a dialect. The calls between closely related families are more similar than those between distantly related whales. Because I had spent hundreds of hours learning the dialect used by Orky and Corky, I hoped to find their family and continue my research on wild whales that used the calls I had become familiar with.
I knew Corky and Orky had been captured off the coast of British Columbia, and so I reached out to a Canadian scientist with Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO), Dr. Michael Bigg, who had been tasked by the Canadian government to find out how many whales could be captured annually to satisfy the demand by oceanariums without risking their population. Whales were viewed as another fishery requiring management. In the process of counting whales, Mike had made the remarkable discovery that every orca has a unique pattern in the grey whorl behind its dorsal fin. This meant that instead of estimating how many whales used the waters of British Columbia, he was able to count each one. As his research continued, he realized the whales were organized into highly stable families, or pods, and that these pods had extended communities of whales that used a very similar dialect and all exhibited predictable travel patterns. Mike collected all the photos he could find that had been taken during whale captures; since the young whales targeted by the marine parks stuck close to their mothers during the terrifying roundups. In this way, Mike was able to figure out where the captive whales came from and who their mothers were.
When I contacted him to ask if he knew what families Orky and Corky were from, Mike said he had no usable information on Orky, but that during her capture, Corky had shadowed a female who was clearly her mother. That female was now known as A23, or Stripe, and was a member of the A5 pod from the group of pods known as the northern resident orca. Mike generously sent me photocopied pictures of Corky’s entire family and said, “Go to Alert Bay in August and you will find them.” So in 1979 I did, and the summer after that I didn’t go back to California.