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Wednesday, October 11, 2006
Granny's Struggle: A black and white gold rush is on
A black and white gold rush is on
The story so far: Granny has escaped the bullets of fishermen and the military, but she and her family aren't so lucky when the nets of fortune-hunters close around them. (Read the previous installments.)
By the mid-1960s, Americans were tripping down U.S. highways in 76 million cars. Inside them, a new generation buzzed about four flop-haired Brits called the Beatles, about civil rights protests in the South, about the assassination of JFK, and about a war in Vietnam that was dividing the nation.
Some were also buzzing about Moby Doll, the lovable, captive orca whose popularity helped trigger a new gold rush in Puget Sound after his death in 1964. Soon marine parks were clamoring to have their own killer whales.
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 | P-I File | |
| Ted Griffin rides Namu, a killer whale, at the Seattle Public Aquarium. In 1965, he paid $8,000 for an orca that had been caught in fishing nets. As Namu was towed to Seattle, a female and two small calves followed the pen, calling out to their trapped relative. | ||
Bold men could make their fortunes trapping them.
How could Granny, matriarch of J-Pod, know that the big fishing nets she had so artfully dodged would soon encircle her?
The craze for Puget Sound killer whales took off in 1965, with the assist of an entrepreneur and raconteur named Ted Griffin, a 29-year-old with a nose for publicity.
Griffin had built the Seattle Public Aquarium on Pier 56 in 1962 to attract crowds attending the World's Fair in Seattle -- the seminal event that would put the odd, soggy city in the corner of the country on the international map.
The aquarium owner was obsessed with trapping his own "horse in the ocean." He had already been out hunting orcas with tranquilizer darts and rifles -- even a modified spear gun fired from a helicopter -- when he traveled to Vancouver, B.C., to meet Moby Doll. He fed the captive a cod, and that was it.
"It was electric," says Griffin, who now lives in Bellevue and rescues tropical fish. "From that point on, I knew I would risk everything, sacrifice everything, go to the end of the world to get a whale."
He didn't have to go that far. In 1965, two fishermen in British Columbia called to report that they had a big bull trapped in their gill nets near a little cannery town. Griffin quickly scrounged up some cash and headed north to wheel-and-deal.
For $8,000 the orca was his. Ignoring warnings of local Indians who said confining an orca would bring him harm, Griffin and his crew built a floating cage and towed the male orca some 400 miles to his Seattle aquarium.
The bull wasn't alone on his journey. A female and two small calves followed the pen partway south, calling out to their trapped relative, "mewing" and "cheeping," according to witnesses.
The aquarium owner named his orca Namu, and trademarked the name to sell records and novelties. Namu, he said, was his "closest companion," his "personal pet." He hand-fed the Canadian orca, taught him tricks, donned a black Neoprene wet suit and swam with him. In a 28-page spread in National Geographic, he touted the leviathan's agility and intelligence.
Soon he was selling rights for a Namu movie to United Artists. "They gave me $50,000 to sign, and $50,000 to keep my mouth shut and stay away," says the wry retiree, who did orca stunts for the heart-wrenching film, "Namu: The Killer Whale."
It pitted trigger-happy, orca-hating fishermen with a sympathetic biologist who worried that he was "losing his objectivity" about orcas.
Who wasn't?
The orphaned calf
Soon, Griffin and partner Don Goldsberry were in a chopper, on the hunt for a companion for Namu, armed with a shoulder-firing harpoon rifle.
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| Center for Pacific Northwest Studies / August 1970 | |
| Orcas trapped inside a pen in notorious Penn Cove off Whidbey Island were going for about $20,000 each. The roundups drew protests and the eventual end of captures in Puget Sound. | ||
The harpoon the whale hunters used wasn't supposed to kill, but the adult female they hit -- a member of Granny's J-Pod family -- was fatally wounded. She was listing, her breathing irregular, bubbles coming from her wounded side, as they towed her and the little calf that clung to her side to Rich Cove.
After she died, frothing at the mouth, the hunters weighted her carcass with an anchor and chain so it would sink. "I made the choice to conceal the loss," Griffin wrote in his book "Namu: Quest for the Killer Whale."
It wouldn't be the last orca sinking.
Griffin took the orphaned calf back to Namu, but the distressed youngster kept butting the bull, raking his sides with her teeth. She also rammed Griffin, cracking his ribs. "She was raising hell. I thought I was going to die," he says.
Griffin named the troubled 14-foot female Shamu and leased her to SeaWorld for $2,000 a month, for as long as she lived. Shamu was flown 1,066 miles to San Diego, and a waiting saltwater tank at SeaWorld. There she spent her first day sending distress calls in the J-Pod dialect that had held her family together for generations.
Did the orphaned orca circle the tank looking for an exit, a way back to her family?
She would survive six years in captivity, the first in a long line of trademarked "Shamus" at SeaWorld. Namu survived only one year. On July 9, 1966, the 17-year-old orca grew sick with an infection and died, tangled up in the steel netting of his captor.
Newspapers reported that the 7,520-pound, 25-foot long animal was sent to an area rendering works, his remains turned into poultry feed. His skull was saved in collections at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture. Griffin, who reduced aquarium tickets from $1.50 to $1 after Namu's death, was devastated.
In a letter to the P-I, he wrote a sad obituary, concluding: "Yes, I would do it again, and so would Namu."
One of them could, and did.
"I continued to capture whales, but my heart was never in it again," Griffin says.
'It was gruesome'
Two groups of resident orcas work the Salish Sea. The northern residents fish the waters of British Columbia, north to Frederick Sound in Alaska. The southern residents, Granny's community, fish south, from lower British Columbia down into Puget Sound, as far as Olympia.
Northern and southern populations keep their respectful distances.
When summer's on, fish are jumping and the living's easy, the three southern resident pods -- J-Pod, K-Pod and L-Pod -- often gather into a giant superpod for ritual, play and sensual delights.
Boaters in the San Juans have witnessed breathtaking spectacles as pods line up for a black-and-white formal "greeting ceremony." Two lines face one another, like kids playing Red Rover. As if on cue, they submerge all at once and arise in a milling, rolling, bumping, slapping, thrashing, all-age move-and-groove orca party, excitedly talking and socializing.
At least 80 orcas -- out of a southern resident population of about 90 -- were congregated off Whidbey Island in August 1970. Odds are good Granny was among them when the nets closed in at Penn Cove.
Across the nation, the '70s were a restless time. The Beatles broke up, National Guardsmen opened fire on students at Kent State, proceedings began over the My Lai massacre. Vietnam was getting messy.
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| P-I File | |
| Urging the release of Namu on July 28, 1965, the day he was towed into Seattle, are Marlene Gleeson and Lee Phelps. Milton Kairis, right, disagreed with the many sign-carrying demonstrators who protested the killer whale's capture. | ||
So were the roads, choked with more than 120 million cars. The president of General Motors promised to deliver "pollution-free" cars by 1980 and urged an end to lead additives in gasoline. When the government moved to make gas stations carry unleaded, a fuel additive manufacturer successfully filed suit.
In Seattle the population was in decline, spiraling down to 530,831 in 1970. Between 1969 and 1971, Boeing laid off half its workers. Pulp mills closed. A billboard went up asking: "Will the last person leaving Seattle please turn out the lights?"
One thing revving up in Puget Sound was the "green" eco-movement.
The first rumblings of a Northwest environmental movement occurred in the late 1920s, when oyster growers in the slow-flushing southern Sound went to the government to complain that trade waste from sawmills was killing their stocks. The mills settled out of court.
By 1945, the area's first pollution control board had been established, but it had little muscle. It wasn't until the 1970s that the movement caught fire. The Washington Environmental Council initiated shoreline-protection legislation. A coalition was formed to keep big oil tankers out of Puget Sound.
Suddenly, the planet mattered. All the creatures on it mattered. Orcas mattered. And the tide was turning on their captors. "Remember what happened to Captain Ahab!" protesters shouted at them.
By 1970, Ted Griffin was wearing a bulletproof vest and carrying a concealed weapon.
He said he and his family had received numerous death threats.
Griffin's orca-hunting skills had grown increasingly sophisticated. He and Goldsberry used light airplanes and helicopters for scouting, along with sophisticated underwater detection equipment they obtained from the military. They'd sold two killer whales to the Navy in 1968 to train for torpedo recovery.
The going price for an orca was nearing $20,000.
The hunters' prey was often the youngsters. They were easier to maneuver onto stretchers, fit on flatbeds of trucks and less expensive to ship. Less weight meant cheaper freight.
'I was crying'
John Crowe was one of the captors at the legendary Penn Cove roundups. The scuba diver was in the water assisting as one of the last young orcas was separated from its kin, netted, tied fore and aft to a boat and taken to shore.
The older orcas were released then, but family members lingered, talking with the calf as it was put in a cradle and lifted out of the water with a cherry picker.
Its shrill little squeaks and shrieks were unnerving. They got to the diver. "I didn't stop working, but I was crying," says Crowe, now in his late 60s.
Crowe remembers a dozen demonstrators showed up at Penn Cove to "flip us off."
 | ||
| P-I File | |
| By the following May, Namu was performing in front of crowds at Pier 56. In two months, after less than a year in captivity, the 17-year-old orca would be dead of an infection. Although devastated, Ted Griffin, Namu's captor, concluded in a letter to the P-I, "Yes, I would do it again." And he did. | ||
Maybe it was the protests that convinced captors to deal with a nasty bit of business under the cloak of night. Several young captives had died, entangled in nets. Their corpses could be a publicity nightmare, and a financial disaster. Dead orcas were supposed to count as part of the captors' state permitted "take." That cut into profits.
Crowe says that late at night, at his bosses' request, he and two other divers slit the dead orcas' bellies open and put rocks inside, then anchored the tails to make the corpses sink. When the decomposing bodies of the juveniles washed ashore several months later, newspapers started asking questions. All hell broke loose.
Crowe would eventually turn state's evidence against his employers, who at first denied responsibility for the illegal dump. The incident would help convince state legislators to end whale captures in Puget Sound. Crowe was already convinced. "What I was doing was really wrong."
The whales thought so too. One adult female, as he was taking a baby to a sling, went charging after him, her mouth open wide. Crowe's buddies quickly grabbed him by the tank, and dumped him upside down and backwards in their boat.
Could the angry female have been Granny?
Photographs put her inside the nets during at least one capture. But it's likely she was captured more than once, separated from the desirable calves, and released.
Did she, too, linger at net's edge, trying to comfort her young relatives as they were lifted into the air?
Captors and scientists had assured the public that taking a few whales wouldn't hurt anything. A University of Washington professor said the idea that captures would harm the orca population was "absurd."
But by the end of the capture era, as many as 100 orcas in J, K and L pods had been trapped, many herded into Puget Sound inlets with boats, seaplanes and helicopters, frightened by underwater explosions.
"Scores and scores of explosives went off. They were like huge firecrackers," said former Secretary of State Ralph Munro, who witnessed the final Puget Sound capture near Olympia in the spring of 1976. Goldsberry, working for SeaWorld, led the hunt. Griffin was out of the business by then.
Munro still remembers the mournful sounds of the trapped animals in that last roundup. "You could hear the orcas screaming to each other. It was gruesome."
He raised hell. Within a year, state politicians had pushed through legislation banning the captures.
By then, almost 50 killer whales from the southern pod had been taken to marine parks, some as far away as Japan, Australia, Germany, France and England.
At least a dozen more were killed in the process.
Granny's family, the family she'd held together for so long, was dwindling before her eyes.
TOMORROW:
Granny's home grows noisy and crowded.
ORCA PRIMER
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Part One:
Over some 90 years, Granny has dodged bullets, escaped captors' nets. Can she survive the contamination of her home -- and her body?
Part Two:
A young Granny grows from infant to mature female in a sea increasingly dirtied with human waste and poisoned with chemicals. To humans, she's a monster, a curse -- and, soon enough, a swimming target.
Part Three:
Granny has escaped the bullets of fishermen and the military, but she and her family aren't so lucky when the nets of fortune-hunters close around them.
Part Four:
Granny escapes the nets of captors, but she can't escape a world in change. Her seas grow noisy, crowded with boats -- and young relatives are dying.
Part Five:
Granny must adapt to a world that's noisy and crowded, an underwater New York City where orca mothers pass along human poisons to "crack babies." The world up top is as strange. The same humans who once feared her now revere her.
Part Six:
Granny is tough. She has dodged nets and bullets. She has swum in our garbage and pollutants for nine decades and survived. What she can't survive is a sea without prey.
All about orcas
A primer.
Part One:
Marine life is disappearing from Puget Sound, and fast
The causes are many: Politicians' broken promises, industries' resistance and the inability to convince people to live and work more gently on the shores of the Sound.
Although some species thrive, the feast is actually a famine
Shrimp and spot prawn appear to be thriving -- which may represent a serious imbalance in the Puget Sound ecosystem.
Some businesses find flouting laws is cost-effective
Environmental agencies are hamstrung by businesses that repeatedly fail to follow the rules.
In the battle between fish and farmers, orcas are the losers
The Skagit River is the classic example of how much people resist changes that are necessary to rescue the sound's sea life.
Part Two:
A rising tide of chemicals and sewage
Despite years of cleanups, bans on certain chemicals and increasingly stringent regulations, pollution in Puget Sound remains pervasive. Fish are bathing in microscopic bits of plastic, toxic chemicals, pharmaceuticals and caffeine.
The message in the (plastic) bottle is dire
A lot of the plastics -- bottles, bags, toys, packaging, etc. -- that we use are winding up in marine waters. It's a newly emerging threat to sea life as the items break down and make their way into the food chain.
Septic tanks suspected in threat to nation's manila clam harvest
Leaky septic systems are oozing sewage into marine waters and making shellfish unsafe for eating. But in many cases health inspectors can't get onto private property to pinpoint the culprits.
Part Three:
Toxic stormwater is one of the Sound's biggest threats
For years, government officials and scientists have known that polluted stormwater poses one of the greatest threats to the Sound. And they know how to fix it. But so far, no one has had the political nerve or money to match the threat.
Low-impact methods have high impact on ecosystems
Grassy ditches, rain barrels and green roofs are all innovations to close the tap on stormwater and can help save salmon and orcas.
Part Four:
Major oil spill presents greatest short-term threat to orcas' survival
Government scientists say a major oil spill is the biggest extinction threat for Puget Sound orcas over the next half-century. Even smaller spills irritate orcas' eyes and skin, and contaminate their prey.
An ounce of prevention won't clean up even a gallon of oil, activist warns
A gadfly has a warning about the preparedness for cleaning up a massive oil spill in Puget Sound.
Part Five:
Slaughtered orcas' DNA a chance to save the species
Odds are good that your grandkids -- or maybe even your kids -- could see the Sound's orca population shrink perilously low in their lifetime. The government has launched protections to save the orcas, declaring most of the Sound protected.
Saving Puget Sound could cost $12 billion
The cost of saving Puget Sound could exceed $12 billion and will require a holistic strategy that tackles the problems plaguing the entire marine ecosystem, according to an all-star advisory panel appointed by the governor.
Part Six:
Puget Sound is in trouble, but many still don't get it
The Sound is still in trouble and people still aren't getting it. Restoration advocates agree that getting the public onboard is key for raising needed funding and stanching the flow from the "death by a thousand cuts" sickening the Sound.
What the readers are saying ...
"The Sound of Broken Promises" readers were troubled to learn about the plight of Puget Sound and conflicted over who's to blame and what to do next, according to the dozens of comments logged on the P-I Web site.
Track the latest environmental news on Lisa Stiffler and Robert McClure's Dateline Earth.
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