Wanted -- Captive Female Orca -- Vancouver, B.C., Is On The Leading Edge Of The Environmental Movement To Save Whales, A Fact That Makes The City Aquarium's Search For Another Orca Particularly Touchy

VANCOUVER, B.C. - This fall, just weeks before Washington's Makah Indians won approval to kill their first whale in 70 years using harpoons and high-caliber rifles, a very different kind of hunt was commencing north of the border at the Vancouver Aquarium.

On a chilly October night, Finna, a playful 11,000-pound male orca, died of pneumonia. A poolside tribute drew a sizeable crowd, and the aquarium endowed an academic scholarship for killer-whale research in Finna's name.

Aquarium director John Nightingale then hit the road in search of a new companion for the aquarium's female orca, Bjossa.

Nightingale is conducting this hunt not with harpoon, but with faxes, e-mails, veterinary reports and frequent-flier miles that have taken him to marine parks from France to Japan.

Nightingale has pledged that the aquarium won't capture a wild orca, or obtain one caught recently by another facility. He says the aquarium won't buy a killer whale and will instead look for an animal that another facility wants to donate or move.

He is also navigating an ethical, political and financial whirlpool.

Public pressure has made it unthinkable for many North American aquariums to consider capturing killer whales in the wild. Now that same pressure is coming from some quarters to free a few of the four dozen whales in captivity.

Nowhere is the pressure more fervent than in Vancouver, B.C., birthplace for much of the original anti-whaling movement. Animal-rights groups picket the Stanley Park aquarium most summer weekends and condemn the search for a new killer whale as perpetuation of a "marine-mammal slave trade." Via the Internet, they urge allies around the world to protest against local marine parks that might send a killer whale to Vancouver.

At the same time, at least one U.S. aquarium and a handful of planned marine parks in Asia are also searching for orcas. One U.S. park was offered $1 million to sell an orca, Nightingale says; the offer was turned down.

"It's much harder to find a whale than 10 years ago," says Nightingale, a University of Washington-educated marine biologist who once worked at the Seattle Aquarium. "The stakes - p.r.-wise, politically and financially - have gone way up. The world has changed."

BIG-MONEY ENTERTAINMENT

Orcas, which are commonly referred to as killer whales but are actually dolphins, had never survived in captivity when the Vancouver Aquarium commissioned a search for one in 1964.

What the aquarium originally wanted was a dead orca for a museum specimen. But when the orca survived harpoon and bullet wounds, it was towed into Vancouver, given the name Moby Doll and placed in a 60-by-60-foot pen. It became a local celebrity before dying three months later.

(Only later, during the autopsy, did aquarium officials learn that Moby Doll should have been named Moby Dick - an example of how little was known about orcas at the time.)

A few months later, entrepreneur Ted Griffin brought an orca named Namu to a tank on the Seattle waterfront, helping launch an industry that transformed killer whales into big-money entertainment.

In the next few years, dozens of orcas were captured in Washington and British Columbia waters, sometimes in highly visible hunts that outraged watchers. Eventually a backlash formed.

By the time Finna and Bjossa were captured near Iceland in 1981, opponents sued to try to block the aquarium from bringing the killer whales into Vancouver.

In Vancouver, the fight has never abated.

Greenpeace was founded here, building its reputation by harassing whaling boats. Vancouver is now one of North America's only major cities without a zoo, thanks to 1994 referendum in which residents voted to shut down the city's old zoo rather than expand it.

Opponents of the killer-whale exhibit have repeatedly taken their fight to the aquarium's landlord, the Vancouver Parks Board. Every time the aquarium submitted any kind of request, whether for a ticket-price increase or for a coffee cart, foes turned Park Board meetings into debates on killer-whale captivity.

Last year, the board refused to hold a public referendum on closing the exhibit. But it did forbid the aquarium to keep any killer whale caught in the wild after 1996.

"Almost all the `free the whales' agitation is on the West Coast. You do a show in Ohio and they think a whale is a big fish," says Angus Mathews, who ran marine parks in Victoria and Niagara Falls, Ontario.

"Vancouver's program has survived on the rationale that they're on the leading edge of the environmental movement to save whales. But now that position is being challenged by political circumstances."

The Vancouver Aquarium's critics credit it with avoiding the kind of shows that turn orcas into circus performers. They sympathize with Bjossa's need for companionship and even praise the aquarium for the whale research conducted there.

But they still oppose bringing in a new killer whale.

"The welfare of Bjossa is not at stake here. The aquarium's financial situation is," charges Annelise Sorg, head of the Vancouver-based No Whales in Captivity. "It's time to phase out the whale trade. The truth is there are never going to be enough whales to go around."

VERY FEW ORCAS IN CAPTIVITY

Nightingale's search actually started 2 1/2 years ago.

When Bjossa's third calf died shortly after birth, the aquarium made her the first orca ever put on birth control. They also sought to swap Finna for a female killer whale. Nightingale says the aquarium was near a three-way exchange involving an American and Japanese park when Finna died.

With no killer whale to trade, the search has become more difficult - and not only because Nightingale has restricted the search to females whose bloodlines trace back to the same Atlantic waters near Iceland as Bjossa.

There are only 48 orcas in captivity at 14 facilities around the world. Nineteen of the killer whales are owned by Sea World, an Anheuser-Busch-owned company with marine parks in California, Ohio, Texas and Florida. Sea World says it has no interest in either loaning or selling its killer whales.

And at least one U.S. park - Marineworld Africa USA in Vallejo, Calif. - is on a similar hunt. Vigga, one of its orcas, recently died.

Orcas, what some call the "Mickey Mouses" of the marine-park business, are big money makers. A 1992 study for the Vancouver Aquarium predicted that if the orca and beluga-whale exhibits were removed, attendance would drop by half.

"You have to understand, there are very few killer whales in captivity and they are very important for ourselves," John Holer, owner of Marineworld in Niagara Falls, Ont., which has seven orcas, recently told the Vancouver Sun. "We need all the killer whales we have."

There has been no capture of orcas in U.S. and Canadian waters since 1977, thanks to public pressure and lawsuits. Since 1989 no North American aquarium has been able to take an animal from Icelandic waters, source of most killer whales now in captivity, says Jerye Mooney, a California consultant to animal-rights groups.

Several aquarium directors, including Nightingale, say Russian groups have offered to capture and sell orcas. Even if such offers are genuine, most directors say getting an import license for a wild orca would be difficult and controversial.

North America's marine park industry is instead relying on its growing expertise at breeding orcas in captivity for its future, says Bruce Andrews, vice-president of zoological operations for Sea World. Twelve of Sea World's orcas, for example, were born in tanks.

But there is disagreement over whether captive breeding programs can meet future demand. Andrews predicts four or five parks might jointly seek a permit in the future to capture a whale in the wild, in order to broaden the genetic stock used in breeding programs.

The wild card in the orca market is Asia, where several new marine parks are planned. Animal-rights activists say there are far fewer legal restrictions and less public opposition against wild captures in Asia. Last February, the trapping and capture of 10 killer whales in a Japanese bay - three of them wound up in marine parks - ignited worldwide protests.

PUBLIC SENTIMENT CHANGING

The whale debate seemed a lot simpler back in the 1970s, when Greenpeace volunteers became folk heroes by placing themselves between whaling boats and whales in their successful crusade to halt most commercial whaling.

Things are fuzzy these days in the Northwest, where there are initiatives both to kill whales for the first time in decades and to free an orca that has spent all its life in captivity.

The Makahs, a tribe in Neah Bay on the Olympic Peninsula, this fall persuaded the International Whaling Commission to allow them to hunt and harvest four gray whales. Greenpeace stayed neutral, as the Makahs asserted that whaling could revive their traditional culture and rescue the tribe from 20th-century ills.

Meanwhile, on the Oregon coast, Keiko, the movie-star orca from "Free Willy," is being trained to live in the wild again after more than two decades of captivity - a step many of the Vancouver Aquarium's critics say should be taken with Bjossa. Retraining this single orca for life in the wild has cost Seattle telecommunications magnate Craig McCaw and other donors more than $10 million so far, with much dispute over whether the plan will succeed.

Nightingale acknowledges that if he were designing a new aquarium today, he probably wouldn't include orcas or other large marine mammals.

But he aggressively defends their continued presence at the Vancouver Aquarium. The captive whales have advanced research, he says, while both educating the public and stirring a passion for whales.

"Whales are exceptional at getting inside people's brains and switching on a light of awareness about the natural world and conservation," says Nightingale. "Our responsibility is to make sure they aren't in pain, they're free of parasites and they are responding socially. Are they happy? I have no idea how to tell that. Are wild whales happy?"

Seattle Aquarium director Cindi Shimota notes that the benefit of educating the 800,000 people a year who see Bjossa has come with a price: Many people inevitably feel troubled about the idea of keeping such magnificent animals in tanks. "Maybe these exhibits have done their job and it's time to move on," she says.

HIGH-TECH EXHIBITS INSTEAD?

These days, Bjossa shares her tank with a female Pacific dolphin named White Wings. Bjossa rolls over in a sleek motion, exposing her black-and-white tuxedoed belly, as she swims on her back. School kids visiting the aquarium squeal in laughter.

Flipping on her back is actually small-dolphin behavior, not orca behavior, an aquarium employee points out. Bjossa and White Wings, who once competed for Finna's attention with subtle sounds and glances, now get along so amiably that the massive orca sometimes imitates the dolphin.

No such reconciliation is in the works between the aquarium and its critics.

Even some Vancouver Park Board members want the aquarium to consider replacing its live whales with high-tech exhibits that could offer a sense of being out in the open ocean with free-swimming whales. The aquarium has set up "Orca FM," an underwater radio transmitter off the north end of Vancouver Island that eventually will relay the sounds of wild whales into the aquarium's visitor gallery.

Yet Nightingale insists having live whales remains justified, both by the aquarium's bottom line and its public-education mission. "If we didn't have whales, it would be as if GM decided not to make pickups anymore."

Jim Simon's phone message number is 206-464-2480. His e-mail address is: jsim-new@seatimes.com