Returning orca Lolita to Northwest is risky | Hacker News Reader

Returning orca Lolita to Northwest is risky

abcnews.go.com

31 pointsbrudgers16 comments

This is a no-win choice. The real mistake was done 50 years ago. Now there are two bad choices, both with potential unacceptable outcomes, and only hind-sight will prove one wrong or right.

In some respects, a return to the wild is a hail-mary. Is 5 years free better than another 50 of confinement?

I'm inclined to agree that it's worth trying regardless if the outcome. While fully understanding that the outcome can turn sour, there are valuable lessons to be learned - both in re-introduction techniques, and in the moral long-term aspects of capturing and using them for entertainment. Like Keiko, if this helps solidify the reasons not to capture again, then at least some good comes of it.

I'm not sure if I agree because you have good points, but I'm also hesitant.

If you were captured by aliens as a kid and then later "trained" on how to act human at 57, how would you judge your ability to remotely survive in your native society?

Personally I think it's way too late to try a 100% repatriation idea. Based on the observed behavior of other releases whales, she's going to require continuous human interaction and care until her death.

Let's maybe move her from Miami, but setup a scenario where she comes back to home base on her own. Let her interact with her old family pod if she wants, but still have people around when she comes back to port for food or interaction.

She got stolen from her family nearly 60 years ago, the least we can do now is to provide a bridge to make her comfortable.

I don't like how the article makes it seem like an all or nothing scenario.

But I barely know anything about the topic, so beware of the giant grains of salt on the road.

From the article I got the impression this was exactly the process they are doing.

This a commercial operation with tiny pools, not a natural sanctuary with a giant habitat for them to freely roam.

It’s not a choice between likely death after five years or a cozy life. It’s a miserable existence in solitary confinement in a tiny cell.

Man I'm mixed on this. I'm very happy that these creatures aren't being stolen from the ocean anymore for human entertainment.

But for an old lady like this, the odds of her re-adapting to a wild state are basically nil. Imagine being abducted by aliens at a youngish age and later, without ever being able to meaningfully communicate with your captors, and many decades later you're being moved to a distantly remembered place and set free. Hell, a popular sci-fi setting in movies and books involves a person living in similar circumstances and being sent back home decades later.

At least in this scenario the idea is to slowly re-introduce her and get her reacquainted with the area.

Anyway, without knowing more details than the article provides, I kind of am siding with the alternate idea of letting her live out her days with those dolphins she's lived with forever, plus her known human assistants.

Maybe it's not as fulfilling as Free Willy (who died soon after release), but at least she would be in familiar company and have more space to move around in.

>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. There are 73 southern residents remaining.

The naming conventions used in this article confused me for a bit, but if I am understanding this correctly this Orca's (read: Lolita/Toki's) mother is still alive and is still the Matriarch of that same Pod? I didn't realize these animals lived as long as 80 years (per Wikipedia).

The more one learns about other mammals the more furious one generally becomes about their treatment. Orcas are long lived animals in complex social groups (orca influencers are a thing!) that identify individuals, identify self, and appear to participate in cross-species communication.

It's a little enraging. I'm glad that Orca captivity has been, essentially, banned (at least in the United States). Is anyone working on using AI to develop some sort of translation method for communicating with these beings?

I have no affiliation and no idea what the current status of their effort is, or if they are working with orcas specifically, but this group has crossed my radar a few times:

https://www.earthspecies.org/

I think it's mostly wishful thinking -- the supposed mother, L25 Ocean Sun [1], is the oldest by far of the Southern Residents, and the only one living who could be Toki's mother. Most females don't make it past their 50s, and most males don't make it past their 30s.

[1] https://killerwhales.fandom.com/wiki/L25_Ocean_Sun

WHAT DID WE LEARN FROM KEIKO?

That the mindset 50 years ago to capture an orca because it apparently was a competitor for fisherman and putting it into an aquarium was not the smartest choice. Maybe we also learned to paying for shows where animals were trained to behave artificially is also not something anyone should support.

Gandhi said you can judge a society by how it treats its animals. We have truly failed the cetaceans to an embarrassing degree.

I'd say there are much better ways to judge a society. Gandhi is hardly a moral paragon, and it's not like vegetarians don't make war and lion tamers don't donate to charities. I guess it might hinge on whether or not you consider a dolphin to be spiritually similar to a human, and that's hardly obvious.

This is like throwing out a house cat into a forest 10000km away.

Entirely irresponsible and cruel act.

It's only a matter of time until sailors, take matters into their own hands and kill the whales attacking their boats. Either way, this will not end well

Why does this matter for the release of this whale kept in captivity and why should the sailors even try to? And of course, how would they go about it? [1]

Fortunately, the orca attacs were limited to what is believed to be a single pod off the coast of Spain. This is certainly a disturbing behavior, but fortunately, no humans were harmed. There was some significant damage done to some boats, only one is known to have sunk as a consequence.

Interestingly, when the sailers deployed and boarded their life rafts, they were not attacked by the orcas, despite life rafts being an even easier target. Also, the attacks mostly concentrated on the rudders of the attacked ships.

1: Besides that it would be illegal to try to harm the orcas and most sailors - we are talking about recreational boats being attacked - are quite peaceful, they wouldn't have any armament to even attempt an attack. Not to mention how counterproductive such an attempt could be.

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