"The first objective is to provide her the highest quality of life we can," said Charles Vinick, a founder of the nonprofit Friends of Toki as well as executive director of the Whale Sanctuary Project. She would be released into an enclosure the size of a couple football fields within that sanctuary, where she would be under round-the-clock care. Plans call for bringing Lolita to a netted whale sanctuary of about 15 acres (6 hectares). There are 73 southern residents remaining. The whale believed to be Toki's mother is the matriarch of L-pod, one of three clans that make up the so-called southern resident killer whales, a genetically and socially distinct population that frequents the Salish Sea between Washington and British Columbia. Whales are intelligent, social creatures, and activists have long dreamed of returning Tokitae to her family. The 5,000-pound (2,267-kilogram) animal lives in a tank 80 feet by 35 feet (24 meters by 11 meters) and 20 feet (6 meters) deep. Last year the Miami Seaquarium announced it would no longer feature her under an agreement with regulators. Lolita, now 57, spent decades performing.
_ Lolita the killer whale during a performance. Outrage over the captures helped prompt the U.S.
The roundups reduced the Puget Sound resident population by about 40% and helped cause problems with inbreeding that imperil them today. Among those kept was 4-year-old Tokitae, later sold to the Miami Seaquarium.īy the early 1970s, at least 13 Northwest orcas had been killed and 45 delivered to theme parks around the world Toki is the only one still alive. Many orcas remained nearby, declining to leave as their clan members were hauled out of the water. Several got caught and drowned when opponents cut the nets, intending to free them. Griffin corralled dozens of orcas off Washington's Whidbey Island in 1970. Namu soon died from an infection, but Griffin had set off a craze for capturing the Pacific Northwest's killer whales and training them to perform, as The Seattle Times recounted in a 2018 history. That began to change in 1965, when a man named Ted Griffin bought a killer whale that had been caught in a fisherman's net in British Columbia and towed it to the Seattle waterfront.
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