Lolita, her life and story
Update 2023-08-22: Lolita passed away four days ago, but I will let this article stand as the debate on her life will no doubt continue, and will be applied to other whales, present and future. I don't see any point in changing the article from present to past tense, just to give this acknowledgement that she has passed, and that the article will remain. May this precious animal rest in peace.
​
Lolita, or Tokitae which is her real name, is one of the oldest, and arguably one of the most controversial killer whales that has ever lived.
Anti-aquarium activists have petitioned and protested for her release for decades, yet she still lived in her home of over half a century.
What's her story?
​
Early history
​
Lolita, also known as Tokitae or Toki, was born in the waters off Washington to L-pod around 1966, making her roughly 57 years old now. Her mother is claimed to be Ocean Sun, who is still alive, but there is no solid evidence for this. Instead, DNA-tests prove the opposite, and that she's not an L-pod whale. Out of the roughly 70 whales that were alive when Lolita was captured, only Ocean Sun is still alive.
Lolita (not in the picture) was rounded up on August 8, 1970 in Penn Cove, with over seventy other whales. Five died as a result of getting stuck in the nets and drowning, seven were kept, and the rest were released again. The bodies of the deceased whales were sunk, but later washed up on shore. It was after this scandal that it became illegal to catch whales in these waters, and a few years later, no more whales in the Northeastern Pacific were taken.
​
The captured whales went to different places around the world - to France, Japan, Australia, England, and Lolita, to Miami. She came to Miami Seaquarium and joined Hugo, a male her own age who had already lived there for two years.
​
Lolita and Hugo performed together for ten years, mated (even to the point of suspending shows) and Lolita is rumored to have gotten pregnant several times but never gave birth to a live calf. Hugo then died in March of 1980 from a brain aneurysm. One of her trainers said in 1981 that Lolita would look for Hugo once in a while, and it’s been said (source unknown) that her sleeping patterns were disturbed after the loss, but she got over it and was even performing already the day after like normal.
Squiggle
The Whale Bowl
​
The pool she’s lived in since 1970, “the whale bowl”, is 60 by 80 feet wide, and 20 feet deep. I have read elsewhere that the minimum requirements for a killer whale pool in the United States is “at least twice the animal’s bodylength across, and half the animal’s bodylength in depth”, and that Lolita’s pool did not even fulfill that, by “nowhere being twice her bodylength”, and by being so shallow “she can’t spyhop without her tail scraping in the bottom”.
​
She is 20 feet long, so the pool is 3 x 4 times her bodylength, and exactly her bodylength in depth.
Her life at the Seaquarium
​
After Hugo died, Lolita has lived with multiple Pacific white-sided dolphins, “lags”. They, as well as the trainers that work and interact with her every day, have been her sole source of companionship for the past four decades. She also shared her pool with a long-finned pilot whale named "Cookie" for a few years in the late 1980s. She’s said to be extremely aversive to change, not even wanting her show schedule changed, and demanding her food be cut up into small pieces, or she won't eat it.
David dbking
Leonardo da Silva
Misguided compassion
​
Hardly any whale, save Keiko, has been under more attention from animal rights-activists, having had films made about her, and people campaigning for her release for years if not decades. The film Blackfish doesn’t even touch on her, or Miami Seaquarium, but has since 2013 rejuvenated and fueled the anti-captivity movement like nothing else, including the focus on Lolita.
​
My claim is that they are under misguided compassion. They see an animal trapped in a tiny pool, with no company of her own species, her mother is supposedly still alive where she was caught, and the choice seems just obvious to them. They believe that only their vision of what should happen to Lolita - to be put back in the waters off Washington - is in her best interest, completely disregarding the very complex case of this individual whale and her story.
​
As was described, Lolita was caught in 1970, around four years old at the time. She comes from one of the most threatened killer whale populations known, threatened because of pollution, overfishing, and dams that block their main food source, salmon, from moving naturally. They have an upwards of 50% calf mortality rate, and in 2012-2014, it was at 100%. In late 2014-early 2015, there was a bit of a "baby boom", which was very good news due to their late fertility in recent years, but it did not all end well. Out of 16 calves born between 2014-2019 (9 from J-pod, 7 from L-pod), seven are now dead.
Isabelle Puaut
It’s no secret that these whales are among the most contaminated marine mammals in existence, and some are starving to death because of lack of their main food source: Chinook salmon. The situation has only gotten worse since the mid-90s, long after Lolita left.
​
She has lived for 53 years in clean, constantly filtered water. To put her in her birth waters would be a terrible shock to her system, and there’s the question of whether she would even survive.
​
Remember, out of her pod, only one is still alive from when she was captured. All the other (as of writing) 72 individuals were born after 1970.
​
While I normally think the anti-aquarium activists anthropomorphize too much, let’s do it for the sake of argument. If you had a child taken from you, and you met her again as a middle-aged or old woman, would you recognize her? How? How would she recognize you? That’s of course assuming whales remember like us, which we have no idea if they do. Humans remember faces and voices, which both change with age. One can assume killer whale remember faces (individual markings) and vocalizations, but no one really knows what would happen if two whales who haven’t seen each other since one of them was a calf, could recognize each other, let alone would want anything to do with each other.
​
Keiko was tested and matched with other Icelandic whales, who he met with on several occasions, and they wanted nothing to do with each other.
​
Lolita has lived almost all of her life with humans. Constant coddling by humans, conditioning by humans, feeding straight into the mouth by humans, swimming with humans. The anti-aquarium activists love to remind us of how intelligent these animals are, "how much like us” they are, but they keep forgetting that the more intelligent an animal is, the less instinct matters, and the more learning matters. Learning and memory, relationships, what that individual animal has been raised with for the duration of its life.
Dawlad Ast
Mark Simmons has spoken a great deal about the failed release attempt of Keiko, as he was one of the trainers involved in that process. And I think his words are very much applicable to Lolita:
​
We all know he lived in a sub-par facility in Mexico, and I don’t think you could find anybody who would argue that that was a good situation. He definitely needed some help and needed to have those conditions improved. But to make this leap to the idea that he could swim off into the sunset and rise to meet the challenges of a harsh and unforgiving wild after spending twenty years in the care of man, that’s where the disconnect is.
​
Lolita was older than Keiko when she was caught (~4 rather than 1-2), but she has been in human care - in the same pool - for more than twice as long as Keiko spent with humans (he was caught in 1979, was moved to a sea pen in Iceland in 1998, and fully "released" in 2002). He was only ~25 when he was released, Lolita is more than twice that age. And also, like him, she hasn’t seen another killer whale in many, many years.
​
Despite access to the wild, despite every attempt to integrate him with wild killer whales, he chose man. Now, why is that? It’s because that relationship was immensely positive. Not because it was punitive, not because it was dominion, not because it was food-based. It’s because that’s what he chose.
Andy Blackledge
Life in human care is different from the wild. It is not a lesser life, it is a different life. And an animal’s learning history really dictates what its capabilities are to survive in many different environments. So, Keiko, like all of SeaWorld’s whales, spent his entire life building relationships with humans, humans that coddled him, that loved him. Throughout the entire release process, he never, ever broke that resolve of seeking human attention and interaction. That’s what he knew, that’s what was familiar to him.
​
Lolita is an highly geriatric female (only <3% of wild killer whales reach her age), so she has nothing to bring to the population, genetically. Had she been 20 or even 30 years old, we might have been able to look at this differently, but she’s not. And as has been pointed out several times, she’s known nothing but humans for decades. Had she been much younger, that too, would have been somewhat different.
​
Her population is endangered, dying off from pollution and starvation - is that really something we want to put her through? Away from the humans and dolphins she knows and loves, put together with whales she doesn’t even know? Why? Because it would make some people feel better? And because it would “prove a point”, as the activists wanted with Keiko. And they sure proved a point, alright.
​
That is what I mean with “misguided compassion”. People grab for what’s right in front of them, the most immediate, knee-jerk reaction, not careful thought process and learning more before judging. While I question the motives of the “champions” in the anti-aquarium movement (I believe, from all that I’ve seen, that they are all about the agenda, not the animal’s actual well-being), the vast majority of people on the internet and at protests, I believe truly want what’s best for her.
It’s just that what they’ve been fed, simply isn’t reality.
​
Lolita should stay right where she is, or move to another facility with constant care and attention from humans, clean water and constant food, unlike her home waters. I don’t like her tiny pool any more than anyone else, but when an animal has spent enough time in a cage, they will not want to leave, no matter how terrible it might have been to put them there in the first place.
​
For better and for worse, it is her home, the only home she's ever known since she was a juvenile, and drawing from knowledge of how intelligent, sensitive animals function, killer whales and Lolita herself in particular, she would not want to leave if given the chance, not to the sea, not even necessarily to another facility. What she needs more than anything, is care appropriate to an elderly whale, and her beloved humans who have been her entire world for over fifty years.
Kerry Loggins (lower row)