Ep. 03: Penn Cove

The story of the capture of wild orcas for human entertainment | For thousands of years, the Southern Resident killer whales lived in the inland waters of the Pacific Northwest, following salmon runs through the Salish Sea in tight-knit family pods that passed knowledge, dialect, and culture from one generation to the next.

Then, in August 1970, a commercial whale-catching operation drove more than 80 of them into Penn Cove on Washington's Puget Sound. Seven calves were taken and sold to aquariums around the world. Five whales died. The bodies were weighted and sunk in an effort to hide them from the public. Three months later, they washed ashore anyway.

What followed was a decades-long reckoning: landmark federal legislation, the end of live orca captures in Washington waters, and a cultural shift so drastic that SeaWorld—the company that built its brand on the back of captive orcas—announced in 2016 that it would phase out its theatrical killer whale shows. But the Southern Residents themselves have never recovered the numbers they had before the hunters arrived. One of the seven calves taken that day—named Tokitae—spent 53 years in a tank in Miami before coming home as ashes. 

Transcript

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In November of 1970, on a rocky beach on Whidby Island in Washington State's Puget Sound, the bloated carcasses of three killer whale calves washed ashore, weighed down by bellies full of rocks and chains wrapped around their tails. Someone had wanted to keep them hidden. More than half a century later, on August 18, 2023, a female killer whale named Tokate died unexpectedly at the Miami Sea Quarium after 53 years in captivity. She died alone in a concrete enclosure measuring 80 feet long by 35 feet wide by 20 feet deep, the smallest orca tank in the United States, further constricted by a central island that divided the space and limited how far she could swim in a straight line. At an estimated 20 to 22 feet in length, her own body spanned a significant portion of that confined space. She died some 2,700 miles away from her home in the frigid waters of the Pacific Northwest. What linked these whales together across time and space was the tragedy that befell the Salish Sea's orcas at Pen Cove on August 8, 1970, a singular event in a decades-long pattern of exploitation and abuses, targeting the region's most iconic species. Tokate was just one of an estimated 50 killer whales taken into captivity during the 1960s and 70s from her home in the inland waters of the Salish Sea, encompassing Puget Sound, Canada's Strait of Georgia, and the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The whales were tracked, trapped, and sold to zoos and aquariums around the world to satisfy a global fascination with these apex predators. Tokate's death also served as a reminder of the damage done by the capture of so many of her species 50 years earlier. Despite decades of research and advocacy in the time since, the Southern resident killer whales have never truly rebounded from that great loss. At the time of Pokete's death, the population had dwindled to just 75 whales, a significant decline from their estimated high of 110 from before the capture era began, or even from the more recent peak of 98 in 1995. That wasn't all. For a species with documented culture, language, and long-term memory, the harm inflicted during this time was enduring. Tokate was just one of the whales taken at Penn Cove during the largest capture event in the region's history. In the 53 years since Tokate and the others were taken from the cove, no Southern resident killer whale had ever returned to those waters. Not once. Tokate died as the last Southern resident killer whale in captivity, closing another chapter in a story that had begun more than 50 years earlier. The conclusion of that story, however, remains unwritten. Facing the threat of an uncertain future and grappling with the trauma of the past, the Southern residents remain at risk of extinction. Can human intervention reverse the sins of those who came before? Or was Tokete a warning of what awaits the rest of her kind? You're listening to Ecocide, a podcast about environmental disaster. Each episode investigates a moment when human activity collided with the natural world and follows what happened next and who was left to deal with the fallout. Before we begin, it's important to clarify the scope of this episode of Ecocide. As mentioned briefly in the introduction, the story of the Southern Resident Killer Whales is inseparable from the broader topic of captive marine mammals, a topic that is complex, highly contentious, and still evolving. Although we'll touch lightly on the history of marine mammal captivity, we won't explore it in depth here. We made this decision for two reasons. First, the subject deserves more attention than we could give it within the constraints of an episode that already has a different primary focus. Second, the discussion of the Southern resident killer whales and their ongoing fight for survival as a result of direct and indirect human actions is, in itself, a story worthy of its own spotlight. For this episode, then, we'll focus only on the history, condition, and ongoing conservation of the Southern resident killer whales, with a focus on the wild population. The broader conversation and controversy surrounding captive marine mammals will have to wait for, potentially, a later episode of Ecocide. The Southern resident killer whale population is a direct reflection of the unique conditions presented by the environment in which it evolved. Over two million years, glaciers, pinched between the dueling heights of the Olympic and Cascade mountain ranges, carved deep valleys and fjords into the northwesternmost corner of what is now the United States. When the last of the glaciers retreated some 12,000 years ago, they left behind a geographic mixing bowl, Pacific Ocean water colliding with fresh water draining from the rivers and streams. The result was the Salish Sea, a highly productive inland sea bursting with biodiversity. Exactly the type of place an intelligent apex predator is built to dominate. Killer whales, or Orchinus orca, are not actually whales. Instead, they're the largest member of the dolphin family, Delphinidae. They are found in every ocean on Earth, from the tropics to both poles, making them likely the most widely distributed marine mammal on the planet and the second most wide-ranging mammal of any kind after humans. One tracked individual traveled a non-stop round trip of over 5,800 miles. They weigh up to 12,000 pounds and measure up to 33 feet in length, with the male's dorsal fin alone reaching nearly 6 feet tall, the largest of any cetacean. They eat almost anything: fish, marine mammals, seabirds, and sea turtles. And they've adapted entirely different strategies for catching each one: washing seals off ice flows, coordinating in groups to herd fish, and in some populations, deliberately beaching themselves to grab prey off the shore. What links every population in every ocean is that combination, intelligence, adaptability, and a total absence of natural predators. In the coastal waters of the Pacific Northwest, there are two primary ecotypes of killer whales, residents and transients. An ecotype is an ecologically unique subgroup of a single species, a population that has adapted so specifically to its local environment that it becomes functionally distinct from related groups sharing the same waters. Evidence suggests that residents and transients split from a single common ancestor roughly 100,000 years ago, driven initially by a divergence in diet. Transient killer whales, also called Biggs killer whales, more on that name later, prey on marine mammals, seals, sea lions, and porpoises, to name a few. Residents are fish eaters and rely primarily on salmon. Tens of thousands of years ago, the waters of the Pacific Northwest were so rich with salmon that entire populations of killer whales thrived on fish alone, without having to travel too often. That difference in prey shaped everything else about them. Hunting marine mammals requires stealth. The seals and sea lions that transients pursue can hear underwater, which means that a killer whale that vocalizes while hunting announces itself and loses its meal. Transients evolved to be nearly silent when they're on the hunt, traveling in small, loosely organized groups, covering enormous distances, and communicating in bursts only after a kill is made. Residents evolved in exactly the opposite direction. Because fish can't hear in the same frequency range that killer whales use to communicate, residents had no reason to be quiet, and every reason to stay connected. They developed complex, highly specific vocal dialects within their family groups, traveled together in large, stable pods, and built the kind of tight social bonds that require constant communication to maintain. Where a transient pod might number three or four animals, a resident pod can number in the dozens. The two ecotypes look subtly different, too. Residents tend to have more open saddle patches, the gray marking behind the dorsal fin, while transient saddle patches are typically more solid and closed. Neither population interbreeds with the other. Despite sharing the same habitat for tens of thousands of years, they remain genetically distinct and socially invisible to each other, different cultures occupying at times the same water, separated by millennia of divergent evolution. The southern resident killer whales are an even smaller population of the broader resident ecotype in the North Pacific, distinct from the northern resident killer whale population frequenting the remote coasts of Northern British Columbia into Alaska. Associated with the Salish Sea, the southern residents migrate along the west coast as far north as central Vancouver Island and as far south as Monterey Bay, California, in pursuit of seasonal prey. The term resident comes from the population's historical tendency to spend a significant portion of each year in the waters around the Strait of Georgia, Puget Sound, and, in particular, the San Juan Islands, a remote archipelago located at the heart of the Salish Sea, now designated as core critical habitat for the population. In recent years, that residency pattern has been changing. As salmon availability has declined across their migratory range, the southern residents have been documented moving further and staying on the move for longer. Their transient relatives, meanwhile, have been spending more time in the Salish Sea, drawn by a year-round supply of seals and sea lions. A hundred thousand years of separation is enough to make two populations of the same species almost unrecognizable to each other. But the divergence in what residents and transients eat is only the beginning of what sets them apart. To understand the southern residents, you have to understand how killer whales live and what they stand to lose. Science has long held that complex thought is uniquely human, that among all of Earth's life, only we were capable of reason, language, and culture. In recent decades, that assumption has been dismantled by the study of non-human cognition. Humans are not the only intelligent life on this planet. Intelligence is difficult to define even within our own species, let alone across species. Every measurement tool we've developed carries the fingerprints of human experience because we tend to recognize intelligence that looks like ours. Researchers studying non-human cognition have had to build new frameworks entirely. Problem-solving tasks, social learning experiments, and long-term memory studies have all been used to probe the cognitive lives of animals that can't fill out a questionnaire. None of these tools is perfect, but taken together, they've built a compelling case that complex thought is far more widely distributed across the animal kingdom than science once assumed. The taxonomic group containing whales, dolphins, and porpoises, classified as order cetacea, is generally considered to represent an outsized proportion of highly intelligent species. Among toothed whales, the evidence is particularly striking. The sperm whale has the largest brain of any animal on Earth. Dolphins have been studied extensively over recent decades and have shown clear signs of pattern recognition, complex problem solving, and sophisticated communication. The cognitive demands of echolocation alone, processing detailed acoustic information at speed in three dimensions in real time, appear to have driven significant brain development across the group. Killer whales follow this same pattern. Studies of orca cognition, both in captivity and in the wild, have demonstrated an immense capacity for intelligent thought. They hunt cooperatively, establish societal trends, recognize one another as individuals, share collective cultural memories, and form deep social bonds that last a lifetime. In the Salish Sea, that social complexity takes on a specific form. Both the Southern and Northern resident ecotypes of killer whales develop not just different dietary preferences, but an entirely different way of organizing their lives. They evolved a habit of prey sharing to maximize group well-being, and formed tight-knit matriarchal family units that carry and transmit the knowledge of where to find food and how to avoid danger. Knowledge accumulated over decades, passed from one generation to the next. There are three pods of the Southern resident killer whale population, called the J, K, and L pods. These are three independent family lineages that behave differently, utilize their shared range differently, and vocalize differently, each pod carrying its own distinct dialect of the same language of groans, whistles, and clicks. Because of these elaborate social bonds and their evolved reliance on the group for both daily sustenance and long-range movement patterns, the older animals in each pod are irreplaceable. Female orcas can live to 90 years or more. That's nine decades of learning which salmon runs are reliable, which routes are safe, and which conditions signal danger. When those animals are lost, that knowledge goes with them, and the pod is diminished in ways that don't show up in a simple headcount. Any disruption to this social network would be catastrophic to the pod as a whole. So any threat posed to a single member of the pod is a threat to the whole family. As apex predators in any marine ecosystem they encounter, nothing in the ocean truly poses a threat to an adult killer whale. The greatest threat to the southern residents came from the land. The Southern residents' tumultuous relationship with humans started long before the Salish Sea was known by anyone but those who have called it home since time immemorial. The oral traditions of many Coast Salish people, a diverse group of more than 40 independent tribal nations in coastal Washington and British Columbia, tell us that humans and orcas have lived alongside one another in this region since the beginning. The Tulelep tell the story of brothers, famed for their skill in hunting seals, who went to live in the ocean and became killer whales. Later, when the Tulalip people were starving and the returning salmon were being devoured by seals, they called these brothers for help. The orcas heard the call and arrived to kill the seals, protecting the salmon and saving the people from starvation. A different story tells Tulalip tribal members that if you are in a canoe and killer whales come up to you, you can greet them like this killer whale, killer whale, your ancestors were also my ancestors. For the Lumi Nation, the killer whales are known as Kuwo'ol Machen, our relatives who live under the sea. For them and many other indigenous people who call the Salish Sea their original home, the Orcas are deeply respected kin, friends, and benefactors. For thousands of years, that relationship held. Then the Oregon Trail was established in the 1840s, opening the far northwest to caravans of covered wagons. The first settlers arrived slowly, and for a time the region's remoteness offered some protection to the land and to its people from the worst of what was coming. But the trickle became a flood. With the now famous trail crossing the western half of the continent, the pace of settlement accelerated. The region's vast wealth of natural resources, timber, salmon, valuable pelts from otters and beavers, and the promise of silver and gold, drew settlers over the cascades and into the deep green of Washington's coastal region. They brought with them the hunger of a growing nation, mass timber extraction, industrial salmon fisheries, dams and culverts, urban and suburban sprawl, all that resulted in the biological rearrangement of one of the most ecologically energetic ecosystems in Western North America. For the southern residents, these changes created a slow but relentless pressure on the health of their population, driven above all by the decline of their prey, salmon. The first signs of travel were reported as early as 1894, and the 1900s accelerated the trend. The commercial salmon industry was booming on the West Coast, pulling salmon from the ocean by the net full, with some historical estimates claiming peak annual harvests of 10 million pounds of salmon from the Columbia River alone. Further inland, timber towns were spreading across the landscape, and the Klondike Gold Rush of 1897 transformed Seattle into the gateway to the Canadian gold fields. What had been a struggling city of 80,000 in 1900 tripled to 237,000 by 1910. By 1960, more than 550,000 people were transforming the Emerald City into a bustling port. All of that development required energy. Seattle and the surrounding network of towns and cities turned to the oldest power source available, water. On the main stem Columbia and Lower Snake Rivers alone, nine federal hydropower dams were constructed within Washington State. The first, Bonneville Dam, was completed in 1938. The last, Lower Granite Dam, on the Snake River, was finished in 1975. Together, these dams provided electricity to a growing population and a booming economy. They also cut salmon off from thousands of miles of upstream spawning habitat. The results were and continue to be devastating. Today, up to 80% of all salmon in Washington come from hatcheries, a result of necessary supplementation to support the dwindling wild stock. The so-called June hogs, massive Chinook salmon known to weigh 100 pounds or more, were part of an early summer run that once returned to the Columbia River in enormous numbers each year. The installation of the Grand Coulee Dam in 1942 blocked access to their traditional spawning grounds in the upper reaches of the Columbia River basin. Those legendary salmon are now gone, replaced by smaller runs made up of much smaller fish. On the Olympic Peninsula, the Elwa River supported its own population of 100-pound giants, called the Taiyi in the local tongue, but those Chinook were also stopped by the Elwa Dam, cut off from the headwater spawning grounds their species had used for thousands of years. This story repeated itself across the region. Salmon ran up against everything from massive hydropower dams to small, impassable culverts installed beneath an ever-expanding lattice of roads and highways. For salmon populations, the decline was precipitous. With their prey disappearing, the salmon-reliant killer whales were forced to adapt by moving more and eating less. For an animal the size of an orca, the caloric cost of catching a salmon can only be offset by eating a lot of them. With less fish to go around, the population as a whole became malnourished. For the southern residents, however, this was just the beginning. In June of 1965, William LeCobit, a salmon fisherman in British Columbia, discovered a 22-foot-long orca trapped in his fishing net. The orca, a male from the C1 pod of the northern resident population, was sold for $8,000 to Ted Griffin, owner and operator of the now defunct Seattle Marine Aquarium. Namu, as this individual was soon named, was housed in a floating pen in Elliott Bay, just off Seattle's waterfront, and quickly became a celebrity. Thousands flocked to the bay to see him, and he even starred in a 1966 film called Namu the Killer Whale that drew audiences who had never imagined an orca as anything other than a bloodthirsty killer. Although Namu wasn't the first of his kind to be captured and kept in captivity, two came before him, he was the first to be kept and trained for long-term public display and performances. Namu became something of a species ambassador, challenging the public's preconceptions about these mysterious animals. A few months later, Griffin decided that Namu needed a mate. On October 31, 1965, his team found a female and her calf swimming together in Puget Sound. After a chase that lasted more than 17 hours, the mother was harpooned and died. The calf was netted and hauled into a pen. She was named Shamu, a name cobbled from she Namu, and spent only a short time with Namu before being sold to SeaWorld in San Diego, California. The original Shamu performed at SeaWorld San Diego for six years before dying in August of 1971 of a uterine infection and blood poisoning. She was approximately nine years old. Her name lived on as the stage name for every performing orca SeaWorld would ever own. In 2016, SeaWorld ended its orca breeding program and transitioned away from theatrical shows, replacing them instead with educational presentations. The orcas currently in SeaWorld's care are the last generation at the parks and will live out their lives there. No new orcas are being bred, meaning the existing population will gradually age out and eventually be the final orcas held at SeaWorld facilities. The capture and display of marine mammals for entertainment was not new.

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T. Barnum, famed American entrepreneur and showman, had paid for the capture and transport of beluga whales as far back as the 1860s, housing them in his American museum in New York City. Bottlenose dolphins had been a fixture of marine parks since the late 1930s, and their popularity skyrocketed in the early 1960s following the release of the film and television series Flipper. It's easy to see why cetaceans were so enchanting to those who encountered them. They're large and intelligent, and Masters of an environment humans can never inhabit. But anything with the power to fascinate people has the power to generate profit. And now that orcas were being introduced to the market en masse, the intensity of the captures rose to meet the demand. On August 8, 1970, more than 80 orcas were rounded up and driven into Pen Cove on the east side of Whidby Island, a narrow island in Puget Sound, just northwest of Seattle. The cove had been used in earlier captures because its geography made containment easier, allowing nets and lines to be stretched across its entrance. The operation was led by Ted Griffin and his partner Don Goldsbury, then running a commercial whale catching venture called Namu Inc. Using spotter planes and a coordinated fleet of boats, the team pushed the whales into the confined waters and sealed off their escape. Explosives were also deployed to disorient and separate pods as the capture phase began. Juvenile whales were selected and forced into slings, raised out of the water and placed on flatbed trucks to be transported away. They were bound for distant tanks far too small for animals that had spent their lives in the open waters of the Salish Sea. Five whales, including four juveniles, died during that capture. Griffin and Goldsberry ordered the bodies weighted and sunk to the bottom of the ocean, out of public sight. That decision would come back to haunt them. That day, Griffin and Goldsberry captured seven orca calves. Two were shipped to marine parks in Japan. Others went to Texas, the United Kingdom, France, and Australia. They all died within five years. The seventh calf was sent to Miami Seaquarium. She was named Tokate by a Miami Sequarium veterinarian, then later Lolita as a stage name by Sequarium staff. She would spend the next 53 years in captivity, only returning to the Sailor Sea decades later as ashes. We'll revisit her story later. Pencove was not an isolated incident. Time and again, killer whales were rounded up, captured, and shipped away, and the full scope of what was happening to the southern residents wouldn't be truly understood for years. Between 1962 and 1973, approximately 50 orcas were taken from the waters of British Columbia and Washington State and kept for display in aquariums around the world. They were the survivors of a far larger operation, one that rounded up or killed more than 260 animals across those same waters over that same period. Those that weren't selected for a life in captivity, and that didn't die during the ordeal were released back into the wild once the day's hunts were finished. Of those caught or killed, 48 were later identified as Southern residents, with many more going unidentified entirely. The removal of those animals represented the loss of a generation, young whales who would never grow into the experienced matriarchs in older males their pods depended on. The effects of that loss are still shaping the population's trajectory today. The Southern residents, in their own way, understood what had happened. After that day in August of 1970, no members of the population ever returned to Pen Cove. The transgenerational trauma passed through the social fabric of the pods, carried in the collective memory of those who survived the Roundups, and Pen Cove became a place to be avoided, understood as dangerous in a way that no whale would forget. By the mid-1970s, the public appetite for captured orcas began to change into something else, a desire to understand them, and a growing unease of what had been done. The cruelty of the captures, combined with the mounting evidence that these supposed bloodthirsty killers were docile and intelligent, forced a reckoning. In a grim irony, it would be this capture era that ushered in a new age of orca research and advocacy. In the days following the Pen Cove capture, Whidby Island residents started writing letters of protest to regional newspapers, anger over what they'd witnessed and what they'd heard. Then, in November 1970, three months after the capture, the sea gave back what Griffin and Goldberry had tried to hide. Three small carcasses washed up on the shores of Whidby Island near Pen Cove. They were calves. Their bellies had been slit open and packed with rocks. Their tails were still wrapped in chains and weighted with anchors. The bodies had been deliberately sunk to keep them from being counted, from being seen, from becoming evidence of what had actually happened inside that cove. Years later, a diver named John Crow, who had worked the Pencove operation and been put in charge of disposing of the bodies, spoke publicly about what he had been ordered to do. The outrage that followed was immediate and lasting. It didn't stop captures overnight, but it changed something in the public's relationship to these animals and to the industry profiting from them. The question was no longer whether orcas were dangerous, it was whether what was being done to them was something society could continue to tolerate. On October 21, 1992, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the MMPA, was signed into law by President Richard Nixon. The legislation was enacted in response to rising public pressure to conserve marine mammals that were threatened or at risk of being threatened by human activity. The MMPA covers all marine mammals, including whales, dolphins, porpoises, seals, sea lions, walruses, polar bears, sea otters, manatees, and dugongs. The MMPA established a ban on the taking of marine mammals. In natural resources law, the word take is an important term, a single word that carries enormous legal weight. It covers the full range of harmful human conduct toward a wild animal, harassing it, hunting it, pursuing it, capturing it, wounding it, or killing it. This single word acts at many levels, both preventing individuals from harming endangered species and holding corporations and other entities accountable for activities that harm wildlife and their habitats. For advocates working to protect killer whales in the Salish Sea, the passage of the MMPA was celebrated as the end of a bloody era of commercial captures. But it wasn't. Not yet. For four years after the MMPA became law, SeaWorld had found loopholes that allowed it to continue capturing orca calves in Pacific Northwest waters. Despite protests from advocates and scientists, they kept going. By May 1972, with regulatory pressure mounting and public tolerance for orca captures exhausted, Ted Griffin had seen enough. He retired from the capture business and sold his portion of the Seattle Marine Aquarium to his partner, Don Goldsberry, who promptly sold it to SeaWorld. A decade later, in 1982, he published Namu, Quest for the Killer Whale, an account of his time with Namu and the transformation of killer whales in the public eye. Around the time Griffin stepped away, Dr. Michael Bigg, a Canadian marine biologist working for the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans, was conducting the first systematic killer whale census ever attempted in the Salish Sea. The prevailing assumption was that the region's orca population numbered in the thousands. Big suspected otherwise. To test his hypothesis, he sent 15,000 questionnaires to boaters, lighthouse keepers, fishermen, and others who regularly traveled the waters of British Columbia and Washington, asking them to record all killer whale sightings on a single day. The individual effort needed to conduct this study was inspiring, but the results of the research itself were startling. The population, the data suggested, was at most 350 animals, a fraction of what had been assumed. Biggs submitted his report in 1976, concluding that the rate of capture from such a small population was unsustainable. The report prompted the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service to conduct its own survey, which reached similar conclusions. Big's research, paired with growing public frustration, added critical momentum to the push to end wild captures entirely. Big also began noticing something that no one had formally documented before. Alongside the large, familiar pods of salmon-eating resident orcas, he kept encountering smaller, more elusive groups, traveling closer to shore, rarely vocalizing, seemingly transiting through rather than staying. He and his colleagues eventually concluded those weren't strays or outcasts. They were a distinct population with different prey, different behavior, and different social structures. Big was the first to describe and document the differences between what we now call residence and transients. The formal scientific distinction and naming would come after his death in 1990, but the discovery was entirely his. In recognition of that contribution, transient killer whales are now known as Biggs killer whales. Still, despite the growing understanding of these animals by the scientific community, there remained a prized and lucrative quarry for those willing and able to capture them. Then, on March 7, 1976, a sea world crew chased a pot of Biggs killer whales down to the southernmost tip of Puget Sound and into a narrow finger of water called Bud Inlet, which bisects the state's capital city of Olympia. As the six whales were pushed deeper into the inlet, the SeaWorld vessel and the animals it was pursuing came directly into view of the state capitol building and into direct confrontation with the state government itself. Ralph Monroe, a staff aide to then Washington Governor Dan Evans, happened to be sailing in Bud Inlet that afternoon. He noticed a pot of whales approaching, and then the boat chasing them. He watched as the Sea World crew used boats, a seaplane, and underwater explosives to corral the animals. By the time the whales realized they were running out of room and turned to escape northward, the bay's mouth had been closed off with a net. The whales tried to push through, but they couldn't get out. Munro later said that what he saw and heard that day haunted him for the rest of his life. As the crew began separating calves from their families, he could hear the whales calling back and forth across the water. On the way home, he made a decision. This story was going directly to the press. The next morning, it was on page one of the Seattle Post Intelligencer. Meanwhile, Munro was working every political connection he had. He called Governor Evans and State Attorney General Slade Gorton, who assembled a legal team and got a federal judge to sign a restraining order prohibiting SeaWorld from moving the whales. Munro personally served the papers on Don Goldsbury, the same man who had run the Pencove operation six years earlier, approaching his boat in the middle of a dark, rainy night with the largest game warden he could find. SeaWorld fought back, appealing the order all the way to the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Demonstrators lined the courthouse steps in Seattle. In just over two weeks, it was over. On March 23, 1976, SeaWorld agreed to stop capturing orcas in Washington state. The Bud Inlet 6, as they were eventually named, were released back into the wild. This would be the last live orca capture ever conducted in Washington waters. The three officials at the center of it, Evans, Gorton, and Monroe, had gone to federal court and won. The chain of events that began with the Caucasus washing up on Whidby Island in November of 1970 had taken six years, a landmark federal law, and one chance encounter on a Sunday afternoon sale to reach its conclusion. Fifty years later, the Olympia City Council read a proclamation declaring March 7, 2026, as Bud Inlet 6 Commemoration Day. Don Goldsbury would keep working for SeaWorld, continuing to capture Orcos in the parts of the world where it was not yet outlawed. For his efforts, he was promoted the vice president of Animal Collections. The Southern resident killer whale population had, against all odds, survived the capture era. Scientists estimate the population stood at around 110 animals before the captures began in the 60s and 70s. A 1974 count found just 71, a loss of more than a third, concentrated almost entirely in young animals, the calves who should have grown into the experienced matriarchs and elder males that pods depend on. The post-capture years brought some recovery. By the mid-1990s, the population had climbed back to somewhere between 96 and 98 individuals. It was the closest the southern residents had come to their pre-capture numbers in the generation. It would also turn out to be as close as they would ever get. As the turn of the century approached, new and sinister threats were closing in on the Salish Sea. By the turn of the 21st century, killer whales in the Salish Sea had experienced over a hundred years of exploitation and the dramatic environmental change. Their native range, once a sheltered, extraordinarily productive ecosystem, was now shared with two of the busiest seaports in North America. Vancouver to the north and Seattle to the south had grown into major urban centers, with booming populations driven by a thriving job market and the magnetic pull of the Pacific Northwest's landscapes. For the southern resident population, still recovering from the losses of the capture era, that growth introduced an entirely new set of threats. Conservationists and advocates had entered the mid-1990s with genuine reason for optimism. Since the late 1970s, the population had gained nearly 30 individuals, peaking at an estimated 96 to 98 killer whales by 1995. But the decline, when it came, was faster than anyone expected. From 1995 to 2001, the Southern residents dropped to around 80 individuals, a loss of nearly 20% in just six years. Although the numbers stabilized between 80 and 90 for a time after that, the trajectory was clear enough. In 2004, Washington State added them to the State Endangered Species List. In 2005, the federal government followed, listing them as endangered under the Endangered Species Act. That designation brought a new wave of attention and, critically, funding. At the nonprofit, state, and federal level, researchers went to work trying to understand what was driving this new era of decline and what could be done to reverse it. Three threats emerged. The first, as described before, was the decline of salmon. Populations throughout the Southern residents' core habitat and migratory range had been significantly degraded. Dams, overfishing, and general habitat loss had left only a fraction of the historical prey supply. What salmon remained was often smaller than wild fish had historically been, in part due to the infusion of hatchery stock DNA that had diluted the genetics of wild runs over generations. This meant that Southern residents, who rely on salmon for virtually all of their dietary intake, were working harder to find less nutritionally valuable prey. Malnutrition had become the reality for every member of the population. Photographs taken by researchers using drones revealed pods of emaciated whales, their bodies showing the distinctive peanut head shape that signals severe nutritional stress. The second compounding factor was boat traffic and the noise it produces. Vancouver and Seattle had developed into heavily frequented seaports, accepting massive commercial shipping and cruise vessels daily into the inland waters of the Salish Sea. Layered on top of that were the countless smaller private and commercial boats moving through the same habitat at any given time. All these vessels produce significant underwater noise. Killer whales use echolocation, projecting high-frequency sound to navigate and locate prey, and a complex system of vocalizations to communicate with one another. Vessels with loud engines and rotor blades churning through the water make both of those things substantially harder. Hunting, socializing, and simply moving through their habitat have become more difficult than it was a generation ago. The impacts go further than background noise. Studies show that southern residents are highly sensitive to vessel proximity as well. They significantly alter their behavior in response to boats within a few hundred yards, diving deeper, spending more time at the surface, and overall less time hunting. The effects are worse for females, and especially those with calves, who are far less likely to make a successful catch when vessels are nearby, or who abandon hunting attempts entirely. The third threat is perhaps the most insidious: pollution. The Puget Sound and the Greater Salish Sea are frequently contaminated by toxic runoff from the surrounding human development. It's in the stormwater, it's in the salmon they eat. It's buried in the seabed itself, waiting for any disturbance to release it back into the water column. The problem becomes particularly acute for females. When a killer whale reaches preproductive maturity, she begins storing fat reserves that will eventually feed her offspring in the form of milk. Those fat stores are built directly from the salmon she consumes, salmon that often carry toxins in their tissues. As an apex predator, through a process called bioaccumulation, a killer whale absorbs and concentrates those toxic pollutants across a lifetime of feeding. Then, once a pregnant female gives birth, she converts her fat stores into milk for her calf, unknowingly transferring all of those accumulated toxins directly into the newborn. This process is called toxic offloading, and is one of the main reasons the infant mortality rate for this population is so high. Researchers estimate that more than two-thirds of southern resident pregnancies fail to yield a viable calf. Of those calves that are born, only around half survive their first few years of life. The long-term implications are severe. Fewer surviving calves means fewer young whales, entering a population that is rapidly aging. The southern residents are becoming top-heavy. Older animals are dying without being replaced. One story highlights this tragic reality. In the late summer of 2018, a female Southern resident killer whale named Talliqua drew international attention to the plight of her kind. On July 24th, she gave birth near Victoria, British Columbia. The calf died within 30 minutes. Rather than allowing the body to sink, Talliqua began carrying it, balancing it on her snout and nudging it back to the surface each time it slipped beneath the waves. She carried her dead calf for 17 days and more than 1,000 miles through the Salish Sea. The image of a grieving mother and what it represented about the state of her species circled the globe. Earlier that year, Washington Governor Jay Insley had convened the Orca Task Force, 50 representatives drawn from local, state, federal, and tribal governments, the private sector, nonprofits, and the Canadian government. Their mission was to identify the policies and programs most needed to support the population's recovery. In the end, they produced 49 recommendations to guide regionwide efforts for the conservation of the southern residents. Tolakwa's grief underscored the urgency of their work. Despite decades of conservation effort, whales were still dying in the Salish Sea. The population was running out of time. Meanwhile, a continent away, another Southern resident killer whale, a member of the El Pod and the last of her kind in captivity, was languishing at the Miami Sea Quarium. Unbeknownst to anyone outside of that facility, Tokate's long life in captivity, thousands of miles from her home, was approaching its conclusion. In the years and months before her death, an ambitious plan, organized by an unlikely coalition of advocates, was beginning to take shape. For decades, the Lumination had been working to facilitate the release and transport of Tokate, whom they called Skali Chuktanut, back to the Salish Sea and back to her family. They were joined in that fight by the Center for Whale Research, a nonprofit based in the remote San Juan Islands that documents and studies the lives and populations of the region's killer whales. The center's founder, Ken Balcom, had spent nearly five decades building the scientific record that made the case for Tokate's return possible. He died in December 2022, eight months before she did. Close enough to see the momentum building, but not close enough to see how it ended. As Tokate's story gained national attention, a nonprofit called Friends of Toki entered into talks with the Dolphin Company, the Miami Sea Quarium's parent company, about releasing her. Progress had been slow for years. What changed the equation was money. Indianapolis Colt's owner, eccentric billionaire philanthropist Jim Ursay, committed to backing the move financially, and suddenly a plan that had seemed almost impossible began to look like it might actually happen. Preparations for the move began to take place at a feverish pace. Advocates for Tokate's relocation were feeling real momentum for the first time in decades, but a vocal minority was sounding the alarm. Truth for Toki, a group made up of former Miami Seaquarium trainers and veterinarians who had spent time working with and caring for Tokate, believed that attempting to move her all the way back to Washington at her advanced age could kill her. They suggested instead that she be moved to a larger tank, which they believed could better accommodate her needs. For those with a hardline dedication to seeing this formerly wild animal return to her native habitat, this was an unacceptable alternative. Two groups, both concerned for the long term well being of one individual animal, were now locked in a war of perspective. On August 18th, Without any warning to those outside of the park, Tokote was pronounced dead. In a statement posted to social media by the Miami Sea Quarium, it was revealed that she'd been showing signs of gastrointestinal discomfort over the previous two days, prompting immediate medical intervention. She died that afternoon at approximately 4 p.m. during a scheduled medical procedure from which she never stabilized. Many viewed this moment with suspicion, and rumors swirled as to the whale's true condition in the weeks, days, and hours leading up to her death. A necropsy was ordered, and the causes of death were determined as a progression of multiple chronic conditions, including renal disease and pneumonia. Activists continued to vocalize their doubts, instead, pointing the finger directly at Miami Seaquarium's employees and management. To this day, those doubts still echo throughout the orca conservation community, especially amongst those who had fought for years to prevent this inevitability. In the weeks that followed, members of the Lemmy Nation traveled to the University of Georgia, where Tokate's body had been taken for necropsy. There, they prepared her ashes according to their cultural and traditional practices and brought them home themselves. Her remains arrived in Bellingham, Washington on September 20th, 2023. Shortly after, in a private ceremony closed to the public and protected by the U.S. Coast Guard, Lummi tribal members took Tokate's ashes by boat to a sacred spot in Bellingham Bay and returned them to the water. It wasn't the homecoming anyone had planned, but it was a homecoming nonetheless. Tokate, Lolita, Skalichuktanut had come home under the most difficult of circumstances. Her death and the life that preceded it brought long overdue attention to the situation of wild and captive marine mammals and helped shape some of the most consequential conservation policy in American history. For many in the Southern resident conservation community, and there are hundreds, if not thousands, of them, the fight to save these animals can feel at times impossible to win. The threat of the capture era had given way to more diffuse, more daunting challenges of a modern age. Problems without a single villain or a single solution. Then, on November 3rd, 2024, something happened that nobody expected in a place nobody could forget. For days prior, El Pod, Togete's Pod, had been seen moving through Puget Sound, in and around the Saratoga Passage, between Whidby Island and its eastern neighbor, Kameno Island. That day, they were spotted heading north through that narrow strip of water before suddenly turning west and moving directly into Penn Cove. The pod passed the mouth of the cove, where, decades earlier, ropes and nets had been used to trap them. They traveled halfway in, surfacing and breaching in full view of those watching from shore before turning around and heading south. The next day, they came back. This time they went all the way in, grouping into what appeared to be a resting formation deep inside the cove. For the first time in 54 years, the southern residents had returned to Pen Cove. Nobody can say for certain what triggered it. One theory holds that the whales had followed salmon into the cove, though it isn't known to host much prey compared to other sites. Another suggests the wind conditions that day had driven them to seek shelter in the cove's protected waters. And then there's the theory that requires no particular mechanism at all. The inevitable passage of time, blunting the sharp knife of trauma that had sliced through this family and the population as a whole. Research into orcineurology offers some context for that last possibility. In a landmark 2004 study, neuroscientist Lori Merino used MRI imaging to produce the most detailed anatomical analysis of a killer whale's brain. What she found was striking. The killer whale brain is extraordinarily convoluted, more so than any other animal, including humans. And, tucked within that cortex, Merino identified something that stood apart. Alongside the limbic system, the structure that processes emotion and memory in all mammals, cetaceans possess an additional region called the paralimbic lobe. It sits adjacent to the limbic system and merges with the cortex in a way that has no equivalent in the human brain. Merino described it as highly elaborate in Orcas and other cetaceans, and essentially absent in other mammals, including us. She concluded that this region appears to integrate emotional processing with higher cognitive functions, and that if it's doing what analogous structures do elsewhere in the mammalian brains, these animals are experiencing the world in ways we've barely begun to understand. So, what does El Pod's return to Pencove mean? For the advocates and conservationists who have spent their lives working to protect the southern residents, it was perhaps a sign that their efforts weren't in vain, that resilience can be found even in the unlikeliest of places. For Tokate's legacy, it may resent the closing of a painful chapter in the story of her family, her pod, that began in August of 1970. She never made it back to her home waters alive, but her family is still out there, still adapting, still living in the Salish Sea despite everything that was taken from them. And now, for the first time since she was carried away from it, they have returned to the place where it happened. And, for the Southern residents themselves, for a population that evolved as a direct reflection of their environment, of the Salish Sea, its salmon, its geography, its rhythms, the return to Pen Cove could mean nothing more than the re-exploration of familiar territory. Or, for beings with highly developed intelligence, deep social bonds, and the capacity for emotional cognition that rivals our own, it could mean something else entirely. A reclaiming. As of the annual census conducted in July of 2025, the Southern Resident Killer Whale population officially stands at 74 individuals. That number may have changed since the census was taken. Births and deaths happen throughout the year, and the official count is conducted only once annually. J-Pod has 27 members, K-Pod has 14, LPOD has 33. On February 16, 2026, a newborn killer whale was spotted traveling with LPO. Given the high infant mortality in this population, its survival is not guaranteed. At the time of recording, the calf is still believed to be alive. The state of Washington has invested billions of dollars in actions intended to recover salmon populations. On March 29, 2013, a federal court issued a permanent injunction requiring Washington State to identify, repair, and replace culverts under state-maintained roads that were blocking salmon from reaching their spawning grounds, a decades-long violation of treaty fishing rights held by 21 tribal nations. The Washington State Department of Transportation has led the implementation. As of mid-2025, more than 650 miles of salmon habitat have been reopened under the injunction program alone, with the broader statewide effort pushing the total past 1,000 miles. Dam removal has also been a significant part of that effort. The Elwa Dam, which had blocked salmon from the Olympic Peninsula's Elwa River for a century, was removed beginning in 2011, with the process completed in 2012. The Glions Canyon Dam, a larger structure further upriver, came down in 2014. Already, surveys are showing salmon populations in the Elwa beginning to rebound, reconnecting a critical artery into the heart of the Olympic Peninsula. The removal of additional dams elsewhere in Washington is planned or actively being advocated for. On January 1st, 2025, the state of Washington enacted a new law requiring all vessel operators, including kayakers and paddle boarders, to stay at least 1,000 yards from Southern Resident Killer whales at all times. The previous requirement had set the minimum at 300 yards alongside and 400 yards in front of or behind the whales. The new standard setback is much larger than that baseline distance. This law, paired with improved education and outreach efforts for recreational boaters, is anticipated to reduce vessel noise and disturbance impacts on orcas throughout Puget Sound. State and federal partners, along with nonprofits and tribal entities, continue to develop new ways to support southern resident conservation. Voluntary slowdown zones and no-go zones have been established in areas known to be frequented by the whales. Commercial whale washing operations must participate in an additional licensing program conducted by the Department of Fish and Wildlife, ensuring adherence to proper viewing practices. These operations play their part too, helping to report southern resident sightings and modeling best practices for non-commercial vessels. Although the taking of killer whales and other marine mammals has been illegal in the United States since the passage of the Marine Mammal Protection Act in 1972, animals already in captivity at that time were permitted to remain there. California took further action in 2016 when Governor Jerry Brown signed the Orca Welfare and Safety Act, banning orca captivity, the import and export of orcas, captive breeding, and their use in entertainment. Canada enacted a permanent ban on dolphin and whale captivity in 2019. It is worth pausing on what captivity costs these animals and what it inadvertently contributes. The orcas held in marine parks across the world, including many southern residents taken during the capture era, suffered enormously. And yet, much of what we now know about orca cognition, social structure, and emotional depth, the science that ultimately made the case for protecting and returning animals like Tokate, emerged directly from research conducted on those captive animals. The institutions that caused the harm also produced the understanding that fueled the fight against it. That tension doesn't resolve neatly. It's part of the story. Southern residents, like threatened and endangered wildlife around the planet, face not only localized pressure, pollution, prey availability, and vessel disturbance, but the growing and still poorly understood impacts of climate change. Scientists are only beginning to map what a warming ocean will mean for this population and the salmon they depend on. The Center for Whale Research, founded in 1976 by the late Ken Balcom, conducts the annual census of the southern resident killer whale population and gathers detailed data on their behavior, ecology, and movement patterns. Their work provides critical information to the local, state, and federal agencies responsible for making decisions about this population's future. If you would like to support their work, visit whaleesearch.com or visit their office and visitor center in Friday Harbor on San Juan Island in Washington. To learn more about Washington State's efforts to protect and conserve Southern resident killer whales, visit EcosidePod.com/slash organizations. Ecoside is an independent narrative podcast. Each episode tells the story of environmental harm, who caused it, and who paid the price. These are stories about what humans do to the natural world and what it takes to reckon with it.