Keiko News Update Sept 99 - Remains in his netted bay pen in Iceland...
discovery.com
A year after Keiko's triumphal return to his home waters of Iceland,
the famous killer whale has yet to complete his journey to the wild.
Keiko's odyssey began six years ago, when he jumped from the screen as
star of the film Free Willy and into the hearts of whale lovers around
the world. Last September, the former ailing aquarium resident dipped
his flukes into the North Atlantic for the first time in 18 years,
making him a serious contender in the sweepstakes to be the first
captive orca released into the wild.
He currently remains in his netted bay pen in Iceland, where he
continues to put on weight and thrive.
Steve Allison-Bunnell, who has carefully chronicled Keiko's epic journey over
the years, fills us in on the latest debate over the killer whale's future.
Why Keiko remains penned
=========================
Keiko lives within a heartbeat of the open ocean.
Since Keiko is healthier and stronger than he's ever been in captivity,
wild orca conservationists watching from the sidelines believe he is
ready to venture out this year. Those who look after Keiko daily,
though, say he's simply not ready yet.
The debate circles around the unknown. No one has released a captive
orca before, and there are still more questions than answers about how
exactly to go about it.
According to Howard Garrett, who leads the campaign to free Lolita, a
female orca held at the Miami Seaquarium, the problem is that the staff
of Ocean Futures ? the organization that took over Keiko's care from the
Free Willy Keiko Foundation last March ? is drawn almost entirely from
the marine park industry.
"In terms of taking care of Keiko, they've done a fantastic job," says
Garrett. "But in terms of judging his ability to be able to make it out
in the wild, they don't understand how whales live in the wild."
Garrett and others would like to see an expert on wild orcas included on
Keiko's release team. Keiko project manager and marine park veteran
Robin Friday believes Keiko's captive social and feeding behaviors must
be reversed by methodical reconditioning before he will want to leave.
"Because he has been conditioned in a public display facility, we need
to take the exact same courses to prepare him for what he has to go back
to," Friday says.
So the Ocean Futures staff is starting to "deprogram" Keiko, weaning him
off his dependency on humans for food and companionship, refusing eye
contact with him as they go about their chores.
"One of the obvious concerns for a long-term release protocol is that
you want to make sure that Keiko would not be apt to come up to boats
or to solicit any type of attention from humans," according to Friday.
Wild whale experts don't think Keiko is really that helpless or that
Keiko would prefer human company if given the chance to join his own
kind. In a recent interview with the BBC, Doug Cartlidge, executive
director of the anti-captivity European Cetacean Organization, said,
"We know that even second and third generation captive-born wolves still
retain hunting instincts. So you're telling me a killer whale [isn't] as
intelligent or adaptable as a wolf?"
Erich Hoyt, author of Orca: The Whale Called Killer, believes the
behavior modification model being followed for Keiko may be very useful
and necessary for training captive orcas, and even for helping captive
orcas in the early stages of reintroduction. But the approach, says
Hoyt, is going to "draw things out unnecessarily."
It was Hoyt who first suggested Keiko's Mexico City home to Warner
Brothers when the filmmakers were looking for a location to shoot
Free Willy. Seven years later, he feels a sense of urgency about Keiko's
release. "He has already survived near the maximum that male orcas
survive in captivity."
The staff of Ocean Futures says they're working as fast as they
responsibly can to ready equipment and training plans for letting
Keiko out of the pen.
"If we don't do our homework and convince the scientific community that
we've done a good job, then nothing like this will happen again," says
Jeff Foster, director of operations for Keiko's rehabilitation. "So we
have to be very cautious."
What lies ahead
====================
Although Keiko's keepers say he's ready to leave the confines of his
floating pen off the southern coast of Iceland, the orca will have to
wait for his human caregivers to catch up with him.
A summer of field studies of wild orcas and needed repairs to the bay
pen has busied the staff of Ocean Futures, the successor to the Free
Willy Keiko Foundation. Now several long-awaited and crucial projects
are going forward just ahead of the start of a nother brutal winter.
Over the next six weeks an Icelandic fishing net company will build and
install a net across the mouth of Klettsvik Cove where Keiko's pen is
moored, says Ocean Futures director of operations Jeff Foster. Then
Keiko can be prepared to leave the pen and ex plore the larger area as
weather allows this winter.
"After the beating the bay pen took last year," says Foster, the new
outer net will be "way over-built." The net will be woven from high-tech
fiber and anchored with 6-foot-long bolts sunk into the volcanic rock of
the surrounding cliffs. Its 8-inch mesh will allow fish and birds to
swim through.
Also finally in the works is a next-generation satellite-tracking
tag being built by Brad Hanson of the U.S. National Marine Fisheries
Service. The basic technology has been around for about 20 years,
according to Foster. But current models add too much drag to the
animal's body and their batteries last only a few months.
Using a wind tunnel, Hanson is testing more streamlined tag packages
on a model cast from Keiko's dorsal fin. A new switch that will turn the
tag on only when Keiko breaks the surface should make the battery last
as long as a year. When the tag is finished this winter, it will be
attached to Keiko's fin with surgical pins. This, Foster says, is "more
humane" than either a harness or an implant.
All summer, trainer Jen Schorr has been busy coordinating field research
programs with Icelandic scientists. Photo identification studies have
added new animals to the catalog of 400 known Icelandic orcas out of the
5,000 estimated to inhabit the North Atlantic.
According to Foster, Ocean Futures would like to chaperone Keiko out
to a selected pod of wild whales deemed less likely to "pick on him."
Howard Garrett, who has studied the wild whales of the Pacific Northwest
for many years and is now trying to win release for the Pacific Northwest
whale Lolita at the Miami Seaquarium, says it's unlikely Keiko would be
attacked by local whales.
He acknowledges that the Icelandic whales may not have the same social
structure as the well-known Pacific Northwest orcas. "Still, you have
to look at the bonding of the species, because that has worked for them
to be highly social. In the absence of actual data on that population,
we have to generalize from what we know of other populations."
Studies of how deep and how long wild whales dive will help trainers
get Keiko into condition. The Ocean Futures staff say that if Keiko's
release is rushed, they will miss a unique opportunity to gather new
scientific information about his progress. Analysis of the data
collected, however, won't delay his reintroduction, they say.
Keiko has not made acoustic contact yet with any of the orcas spotted near
his pen, according to Schorr, and it's not clear how he will respond.
Orca call expert John Ford of the Vancouver Aquarium says other killer
whales have remembered their dialects a fter long periods of captivity.
But Keiko has been known to imitate non-orca sounds such as dolphin
calls and police sirens. Using a computer program to compare Keiko's
calls to recordings of wild whales, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute
researcher Bill Watkins has confirmed that Keiko "still speaks North
Atlantic killer whale," Foster says.
Keiko's dialect resembles less that of Icelandic whales than orcas
recorded near the Faroe Islands, which lie a few hundred miles southeast
of Iceland. This may mean that the whales cover an extremely large
territory. It also makes it less likely that his family will swim by
the Vestmannaeyjar harbor anytime soon.
With so many plans on the verge of completion, wild whale advocates
and staff alike will no doubt chafe until spring for the next window
of opportunity for Keiko's release.
"It's like climbing Mount Everest," Foster says. "We've hit a couple of
false summits, but we're going to get to the top."
Copyright 1999 Discovery Communications Inc. |
