MARINE DEATHS

Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc. The IRE Journal, Nov/Dec 2004 by Kestin, Sally

Ugly side of captive-animal facilities surfaces, showing neglect, lack of marine park oversight

Watch Flipper tail walk across a pool or Shamu propel his trainer into the air, and it's hard not to smile.

Marine parks are enormously popular, especially in Florida, where the first one in the country opened nearly 70 years ago.

Short of a few protests by animal rights activists that garnered a brief mention in the news, parks have enjoyed positive if not adoring press.

Media outlets both large and small covered the joyful birth announcements and wrote heartfelt obituaries when a sea star died, which made it all the more surprising when I got a call last summer about an orphaned dolphin calf found stranded near Cape Canaveral and named Rocketman by his rescuers.

The National Marine Fisheries Service decided Rocketman was too young to be released and sent him to a dolphin park in the Florida Keys. Healthy when he arrived, Rocketman died a month later from an infection.

Even more intriguing in the Fisheries Service records were the reasons the federal government had rejected other Florida marine parks as a home for Rocketman. One had a herpes outbreak among its dolphins. Another had inexperienced staff and questionable veterinary care. The very place Rocketman ended up had a "history of losing [dolphin] calves."

The conditions described in those records did not seem to match the idyllic public image of marine parks. We decided to take a closer look.

Obsolete computer files

The Fisheries Service had kept an inventory of all marine mammals in captivity for more than 30 years. After we asked for the inventory electronically, the government sent us a print version - more than 800 pages of the births and deaths of marine stars at large parks, such as SeaWorld, to city zoos to one-dolphin shows at a mall.

Page after page showed hundreds of dolphins, whales, sea lions and seals had died, many of them young. Causes of death included chlorine poisoning, heat stress, had fish, capture shock, and stress during transit.

We knew we needed the data electronically to do more in-dcpth analyses and spot trends. After three months of negotiations, the Fisheries Service allowed Sun-Sentinel staff researcher John Maines to come to its Maryland headquarters to work with the agency's obsolete computer files. It took Maines three hours to convert the inventory into an Access database.

The Sun-Sentinel agreed to give a copy of the database to the Fisheries Service, which until then had never been able to analyze the very information it collected for 30 years.

The data confirmed what we initially saw in the print records. A quarter of the marine mammals that died in captivity never reached age 1, and half were dead by 7 years old. One in five died of seemingly avoidable or preventable causes.

By then, it had become clear the story extended beyond Florida and even the United States. Swimwith-the-dolphins attractions had popped up all over the Caribbean. A thriving international marine mammal trade had developed, built upon the increasing demand for dolphins and whales worldwide.

Cuba had emerged as the world's leading exporter of bottlenose dolphins, capturing and selling at least 140 since 1995.

Like racehorses, marine mammals had become so valuable that parks took out life insurance on them. Killer whales were worth upward of $5 million each. Dolphins sold for $100,000 or more.

We knew this had become huge business, but just how big, no one would say. We wrote to 129 parks, zoos and aquariums - all those licensed in the United States and several overseas - and asked for their attendance and revenue figures.

Using information they provided, as well as Web sites and public records, we estimated that in the United States alone, marine parks each year attract more than 50 million visitors, who spend at least $1 billion.

With a better sense of the size of the industry, we wanted to find out how and why animals died and learn more about the industry's history.

We tracked down "collectors" who captured hundreds of dolphins and whales in U.S. waters. In the Pacific Northwest, they chased killer whales in speedboats and helicopters, dropping explosives in the water to herd them into nets. In Florida, they netted pods of dolphins, selecting young females because they were less aggressive, and hoisted them onto boats with foam pads and sprinkler systems. Dozens of animals died during capture, including the mother of the original Shamu.

The inventory proved only partly useful in determining why marine mammals died. In nearly 1,500 deaths, the cause was blank, unknown or too general - "old age" or "euthanasia" - to draw conclusions. Until 1994, the government used to require necropsies when an animal died. But at the industry's urging, Congress weakened oversight of marine parks.

We asked parks to provide the now-private necropsies. Only nine did. But those records provided rich detail for the stories: Sandy, a sea lion who suffered chronic eye blisters from lack of shade in her exhibit, and Splish, a harbor seal who died after swallowing a penny.