Dr. Lori Marino - Changing the Scenery for Captive Whales: The Whale Sanctuary Global Movement

This lecture is being brought to you in part by the generous gifts of these sponsors. Well, thank you for that lovely introduction. I'm going to see if I can get the slides. There we go. Thank you for having me, everyone, and thank you for coming. Today I want to talk about something that I've been working on for quite a long time, and that is whales. But specifically, about a new movement that's happening globally called the whale sanctuary movement, and I want to tell you about why whale sanctuaries are so important. Now, this is my second time here. I am so happy to be back. So 2015 I was here and I gave a talk on dolphin brains, an alternative to complex intelligence and primates, and it was all about what we know about the big complex brains of dolphins and whales and how they compare to our own and what they are doing with those big brains. So today I'm here to tell you about some of the work that my colleagues and I have been doing since then.

I want to start off with this slide. This is Tokitae, also known by her stage name Lolita. Does anybody know who she is? Yeah, everybody knows who she is. She's known around the world, and she unfortunately passed away on August 18th at the age of 57 at the Miami Seaquarium. At the time that she died, there were a team of veterinarians and trainers who were trying to prepare her to go back to her natal waters in the Pacific Northwest, and that unfortunately was not to be. She had numerous conditions, numerous illnesses. They really tried, but it didn't happen. So I want to tell you what Tokitae means to everyone in this field.

Today I'm going to start by talking about killer whales, or orcas. That's who Toki was. I could stand here and talk about orcas till the cows come home, and you would all want to leave now, but I'll just give you a list, a sort of Greatest Hits list of some of the things about orcas that are just phenomenal. The thing that attracted me to them originally was their big complex brains. Their brains are two and a half times the size you'd expect for even an animal of that body size, and the complexity of their brain is really something to write home about. These are also cultural animals. Twenty years ago, to even talk about culture in other animals, you'd be laughed off the stage. Now we know many animals have cultures. They have dialects, different ways of feeding themselves, different ways of doing things, different cultural traditions. Orcas are like that. They have long juvenile periods. They spend a long time learning how to be a proper orca, and they are very bonded with their mother and their family and their social group. They have lifelong social bonds. In some groups of orcas, the males stay with their mom their whole life. So talk about not getting out of the basement, they stay with their moms their whole life. And if something happens to Mom, it's so serious that if he doesn't get adopted by another member of the pod, he might die of depression, and it's happened. So we're talking about very, very close-knit families. They're also matrilineal, and they have menopause. They think that this is so that the grandmothers who stop reproducing themselves can help with raising the grandchildren, and this has been observed. This all sounds familiar, doesn't it? They live in very complex social networks and they have very sophisticated communication abilities. It will be a while before we can figure out what they're saying, but with new techniques and AI, I think there may be some breakthroughs in the future.

Now to the issue at hand. Since I was here in 2015, there have been one, two, three, four, five, six, seven orca deaths at SeaWorld in Orlando, San Diego, and San Antonio. As you can see with the age of death, the highest is 39, and some are as low as three months or, say, 19, 21. These animals don't live long in marine parks. How big is this problem? What is the scope? How many orcas are in captivity around the world? Well, now that Tokitae has passed, there are 18 left in the United States. There's one in Argentina, his name is Kshamenk. He's the only orca there. There is one in Russia, only one because the rest of them passed—they all died. So we have a little 11-year-old female orca there who is now pregnant. There are—I have to revise this—Spain, well, four. No, now there's three. One died this week. There's a family of four held at Marineland Antibes, and one of them, who was kind of sickly his whole life, 12 years old, he died. In China there are about 15, in Japan about seven. We really don't know, but there are quite a few globally, probably 50 to 55 in captivity. And altogether there are about 3,500 cetaceans—dolphins, whales, and porpoises—held in marine parks in concrete tanks mainly around the world. On the left you see the beluga whale and on the right the bottlenose dolphin.

Now I want to tell you a little bit about why I think it's so important that we get these animals out of the tanks. It's not an opinion, not because I don't like to see them there, it's because the science demands that we do something about this. Let's look at some statistics. SeaWorld has maintained that the maximum lifespan of orcas both in the wild and in the tanks is 35. That's untrue. Data from free-ranging populations off the Pacific Northwest show that females can live to 80 to 90 and males 50 to 60—maximum, not average. But maximum. Captive orcas of either sex rarely live longer than 30 years, and most die in their teens and 20s. So that's why SeaWorld likes to tell you they only live to 35, but they live a lot longer than that. 92% of orcas held at SeaWorld have died by the age of 25. Let's look at survivorship. What is survivorship? It's really just the probability of surviving to a particular age. In 2015 there was an interesting study that looked at the survivorship of captive orcas since 1985, and there have been improvements—more orcas are surviving to older ages—but the survival rates still remain poor compared to free-ranging orcas. Survivorship in the US is significantly better than in facilities outside the US, like in China and Japan. China and Japan are latecomers to this. They got on board because they saw how popular and lucrative it was to have dolphins and whales and marine parks, and now they've got one on every corner practically. There are something like 82 in China, and they have to populate them, and they typically populate them with dolphins and whales that they take from the ocean.

Now I want to take a look at infant mortality statistics. This is something I've been doing some research on. This is very interesting. Of 103 orcas who have been in captivity globally since 1985, 73 have already died, with 44 dying in their first year. Therefore, orca birth rates and infant mortality rates have been at best the same or only slightly better in captivity than in the wild. Now I want you to think about that. In captivity, there's no pollution, no ship strikes, you get fed every day, and you've got veterinarians taking care of you. But why isn't the captive orca infant mortality rate much lower in captivity than in the wild? It should be a whole lot lower, but it's not. In the wild, you do have problems with getting fed, pollution, ship strikes. You don't have a doctor on call. And yet the best marine parks can do for infant mortality is match that in the wild. That tells you something's not adding up here.

Let's take a look at the concept of welfare. It's very interesting. Everyone's got a different notion about it, but let's see if we can agree on a few aspects of welfare. The most widely accepted definition of animal welfare is that it comprises both the body and the mind and the extent to which its nature is satisfied. I like that because it recognizes that individuals of different species have different natures because of their evolutionary history, their adaptations. Your nature is different than that of a rhinoceros. So what you need to thrive might be a little different than what a rhinoceros needs to thrive. There's overlap for sure, but if I want you to be happy and thrive, I need to know who you are. In the past, welfare was defined by the absence of negative states. So people would go in and say, 'Is the animal hungry?' No, okay, check. 'Is the animal in pain?' No, okay, check. But more recently, scientists have begun to realize that welfare includes positive states. Your well-being is not just the absence of hunger or pain, it's your ability to feel joy, to bond, to play, to explore—all of these things that make life worth living. And that's the same for whales. Feelings are central to welfare concepts. More progressive welfare ideas are starting to realize that not only do animals have feelings, but they need challenges, they need to exercise choice and autonomy. I always tell people, what if somebody put you up in the fanciest hotel in the world, somebody slipped your favorite food under the door every day, if you got sick the doctor came in and took care of you, but you could never leave? You'd jump out the window after a while, because there's nothing to do and no choice in the matter. And it's the same thing for these animals.

So there are three central questions about captive wild animal welfare that we should ask ourselves. The first one is, who are you? You can go to any place—a zoo, a marine park, a lab, a sanctuary, a shelter. The first thing you want to do is understand who are you, not only as an individual but as a member of your species. And then you want to ask, what do you need to thrive? From individual differences to the nature of the species. So what a whale needs to thrive might be a little bit different than what you need to thrive. There's overlap, but whales do not need to go to school, but they do need to be with their families, just like you and me. So there's overlap, they're similar and different both at the same time. And then the final question is, given who you are, given what you need to thrive, do you have the opportunity to thrive where you are? Does the captive environment afford you the opportunity to live like a member of your species, apart from anthropocentric biases? In other words, not what we think is a good life for an orca, but what does an orca think is a good life? You have to put yourself in the mind of the animal. It's not about us.

So now I want to tell you about the science of welfare of captive orcas. These are the things that happen to orcas in captivity. First, I'm going to talk about infections—systemic infections, opportunistic infections. Many of the infections captive orcas succumb to are opportunistic, meaning they are generally harmless but cause disease under certain circumstances. You know, if you get a cold during final exams, I always tell my students it's an opportunistic infection. You're stressed and you happen to get a cold at the same time. Well, imagine instead of getting a cold, you get pneumonia or sepsis or something like that. All of these are due to weakened immune systems, and I'll tell you a little bit more about that. Common causes of death in orcas are pneumonia, gastrointestinal disease, meningitis, sepsis, and candidiasis. Now, it's not that wild orcas don't get pneumonia, but why are they getting pneumonia in the tanks? Why so many? These incidents of death are correlated with antibiotic and antifungal resistance brought about by prophylactic overmedicating. What that means is that marine parks know these animals are not healthy, they don't want to lose them, so they pack them with antifungal and antibiotic medications. They put it in the dead fish and then drop the dead fish in their mouth. So what happens when they do get one of these diseases? They're often resistant, and that's one of the problems you see. It's something that I think probably happened to Tilikum at SeaWorld Orlando—by the time he was being pumped with all kinds of medications, by the time he actually got sick with pneumonia, they couldn't find anything to help him.

Oral stereotypies and dental disease are a big deal for captive orcas. What is a stereotypy? A stereotypy is a persistent, repetitive action with no purpose. It's associated with psychological distress and poor well-being. Examples are animals pacing back and forth, but also in human beings who may have mental problems or disabilities, you'll see them rocking or hitting their head or doing all kinds of things over and over again. One of the most common stereotypies in captive orcas is repeated biting on the tank surface and gates, just grinding and grinding their teeth on hard surfaces until they look like what you see in that picture. That orca's lower jaw—there are no teeth there, just nubs. Then you have to drill them to keep them clean, to prevent systemic infection, and you have to drill them all the time. So that's what a captive orca's lower jaw looks like. Over 60% of captive orcas in the United States and Spain have fractured mandibular teeth, and 24% exhibit major to extreme tooth wear down to the gums. You don't see this in the wild. The only time you see dental wear in wild orcas is in specific communities that happen to prey upon fish with very rough skin or scales, but it's not due to a stereotypy, it's just wear and tear from what they eat. These behaviors lead to chronic dental pathologies and provide a pathway for systemic disease.

And then self-injurious behaviors and other abnormal behaviors. As you can see, this orca was a young male at SeaWorld San Diego. His chin, his lower mandible, there's a whole chunk missing. He got into a fight with another orca, and that's what happens when you are stuck in a tank with someone you don't get along with and there's nowhere to go. So let's look at self-harm and hyperaggression. Unfortunately, this is not uncommon. On the left is Hugo. Hugo used to be at the Miami Seaquarium with Tokitae. He was captured from the wild, and when he was put in captivity, he kept bashing his head against the side of the tank and eventually died of an aneurysm. In the middle is Morgan. She's a female orca at Loro Parque in Spain. She's not in the water, she's on the side of the tank, because she's trying to get away from aggressive male orcas in her tank, so she beaches herself on the concrete because there's nowhere to go. And finally, Corky and Kandu. Several years ago, these two females were performing at SeaWorld and something happened. They ran into each other and Kandu bled out and died. She died in front of her calf. The poignancy of this is that Corky, who actually collided with Kandu, adopted Kandu's calf because she didn't have a mother anymore. But these are the kinds of things you see in the tanks that tell you something is wrong.

And let me ask you this. Shouldn't captive orcas be living long, healthy lives? They have food, they have fresh clean water 24/7, dental care. Shouldn't they be the ones living the longest, healthiest lives of all? Why aren't they? Well, some colleagues and I sought to answer this question. I think it's very interesting because the answer can be found in a mountain of studies on the effects of stress on the brain and physiology. Stress is an organism's response to a situation where you deviate from a state of optimal functioning, and then your body tries to correct that and get back to something called homeostasis. All of us sitting here today, all the animals in the world, they all have exactly the same brain and body mechanisms for dealing with stress. Why? Because it works so well. The stress response system works so well that there's no need to improve it. Every species has it, and it's shared across mammals and vertebrates. Orcas and other cetaceans share these same brain mechanisms involved in mounting a stress response. This figure is from a paper of ours from 2021 in which we did cross-section drawings through the brains of four different species: elephant, bottlenose dolphin, human, rat—from the big to the little. We color-coded some of the important structures involved with emotions and mounting a stress response, and as you can see, every single one of these brains has a gray area, everyone has a red, everyone has a blue, everyone has a green. They may be in different proportions, but they're all there. This is what's known scientifically as a highly conserved system, meaning it works and it works in everybody in exactly the same way. There's a mountain of scientific evidence for this.

So what happens when you're stressed—not just you, but an orca, a rat, a cat, a dog? When you are in a stress situation, brain mechanisms cause a physiological response known as fight or flight. What happens is that a part of the brain called the hypothalamus sends chemicals to the pituitary, and the pituitary sends chemicals out of the brain to the adrenal glands sitting on top of your kidneys. Those adrenal glands send out stress hormones—adrenaline and cortisol—and these hormones allow you to deal with the immediate stress. You're walking down a dark alley and someone approaches you, this kicks in. After that acute stress, the system ramps down through a series of feedback circuits. But what if the stress doesn't go away? What if you live with that stress day after day after day? The system stays ramped up, eventually causing damage to the brain and the immune system. What are the effects? Behavioral dysregulation, stereotypies, and opportunistic infections—just what we see in captive orcas and other cetaceans. We know this from decades of experimental work with rats and mice and other animals where they actually did the studies that showed that this mechanism kicks in and if the stress continues, it has very predictable effects on the body and the brain.

So the question is, can adaptation to 52 million years in the ocean be circumvented by an artificial, anthropocentric environment? That's really the question we have to ask ourselves. It's not about 'Oh, those guys over at SeaWorld, I don't know what they're doing, or they're evil.' It's not about that. It's about the simple question: can any body circumvent 52 million years of evolution? Can we do better? You bet we can. We can do better in general by recognizing and respecting the nature of these whales. Do not try to fit a square peg into a round hole. It doesn't fit, it never will. That causes chronic stress. Adopt the perspective of the whale, not the human. Some people who have orcas and other whales in captivity, they feed them and say, 'Look how fortunate those whales are, they don't have to hunt anymore.' They want to hunt! Their brains evolved to have that stimulation, and you've taken that away from them. They're not like us. They don't want to have their food served to them. They want to go after it, work with each other to find ways, and they want that challenge. Sometimes they don't get the food, and so then you figure out a better way next time. That's what they live for, not having their food dropped into their mouth. And prioritize the whale's needs over that of humans, which is something you can't do in a marine park because people come expecting certain things—to see the animals, to see them doing tricks, and in the case of dolphins, maybe even to ride on them.

That is why for the past six years I have been involved in the sanctuary movement. In 2016, I founded the Whale Sanctuary Project. I looked around and said, elephant sanctuaries, primate sanctuaries, dog and cat, big cat, bears—it works for them. How come there aren't any sanctuaries for dolphins and whales? Nobody had ever done this before. So I got a bunch of people together who know how to do stuff like this, and we started planning it. And that's where the Whale Sanctuary Project came out of. Sanctuaries are a way to create a more positive future for those animals who are in the sanctuary. But as a teacher, I can tell you that I think it's just as important that it's a way forward for the next generation of kids. You want your children, your grandchildren, to grow up really understanding nature, respecting nature, having compassion for nature, and having their education about animals and nature being authentic.

This year was the culmination of two years of work with the National Aquarium in Baltimore, Merlin and Sea Life Trust, and the Whale Sanctuary Project. We got together and said, what would a whale sanctuary look like? What would it have to be? Because there are a lot of places that call themselves sanctuaries, but they're not. If you can ride on a dolphin, it's not a sanctuary. If they're breeding the animals, it's not a sanctuary. If they bring out a baby fill-in-the-blank, it's not a sanctuary. So we wanted the public to be able to distinguish between true, authentic sanctuaries for whales and dolphins and ones that just say they are. We also wanted to lay out the guidelines for accrediting these organizations. The Global Federation of Animal Sanctuaries goes around to sanctuaries all over the world, they visit, they have a checklist, and they accredit—or sometimes they don't, or sometimes a place loses its accreditation. It's the only accrediting organization for sanctuaries, and now they have accreditation guidelines for cetacean sanctuaries. So I guess we're going to have to build them.

What's an authentic sanctuary? It's a place to live—not just a place to live, but a place to thrive. I think that's really important. It's not enough to say the whale is eking out an existence. You want him to be thriving. You want the residents and their lifetime care to be the priorities, not visitor experience or anything else. For once, it's about them. No performances, no breeding, no unnecessary research procedures. A promotion of life as natural as possible, where you can do authentic education and conservation. A sanctuary is still captivity, don't kid yourself, but it is orders of magnitude better than a concrete tank by its very nature. If you look at marine parks versus authentic sanctuaries and compare the benefits, well, feeding—SeaWorld and other places feed their animals very high quality fish. Sanctuaries can do that too. Veterinary care—they have some really good vets; sanctuaries can have some really good vets. Protection—they're protected from ships and things. The same is true in a sanctuary. But where you have to stop for marine parks, you can continue with sanctuaries because you can offer all of that in an ocean environment with lots more space, stimulation—fish, organisms, plants, whatever the open ocean offers—and autonomy and choice. So authentic sanctuaries are not a trade-off with marine parks. They offer a lot more, including all the good things of human care.

I want to introduce you to our site. We spent two years in British Columbia and all over, in Nova Scotia and Washington, looking for a site to create a sanctuary for orcas and beluga whales. We finally found a very pretty site on the northeastern shore of Halifax, about two and a half hours north of Halifax, called Port Hilford. If anyone's been to Nova Scotia, it's beautiful land. We spent a lot of time meeting with people, asking communities, 'Do you know a good bay where we can have a sanctuary for whales? Is this something you'd like?' We'd get out of the car, scramble over the rocks, asking 'Could this be a place? Maybe not.' We did that for two years and finally found it. This is Port Hilford Bay, Nova Scotia. What you're looking at is from the ocean. There's the shoreline, and this is called Barra Island. That's very important because Barra Island protects them from really bad weather. We've been there in two or three hurricanes. It's amazing—this Barra Island buffer zone. The wave heights are not that bad. So we know this is a really special spot. This is the same thing from another point of view. Here's Barra Island coming out. We would put a net here, from the tip all the way out to an area called Rocky Point. The actual space would be out here—100 acres. Orders of magnitude greater than the biggest tank in the world. 14 meters deep, filled with fish, plants, eels, crabs, tides. It's open ocean. What we're going to do is create a mile-long net surrounding that 100 acres and provide a home for orcas and/or beluga whales—some combination, we don't know who's coming yet. If it's orcas and belugas, they'll be separated. There's plenty of room. This doesn't do justice to the vastness of 100 acres. If you were standing on the shore and there was a whale there, you wouldn't see them. That's why we'll have an observation tower and all kinds of underwater cameras and observational equipment. But these animals would be able to live their lives the way they want. We'll still feed them, still take care of them, there'll be a veterinarian on staff, they'll be protected. But for the first time in their life, they'll get to spend their days the way they want. They can chase fish, hang out with whoever they choose, no performances, no one gawking at them. We have enough space for about three or four orcas and about eight beluga whales and still provide space for them. What I'm really excited about is we're going to have underwater cameras and hydrophones so you can go anywhere and get a live stream of what an orca or beluga does when given the space to do what he wants. Imagine that—just seeing a whale being a whale. To me, that's really important, because when kids want to understand who whales are, they need to find out authentically. The only way they can do that is by either learning about them in their own environment or seeing them in an environment that promotes their autonomy.

I want to introduce you to some of the possible candidates we are thinking about for a sanctuary. We hope to be able to complete our sanctuary by the end of next year. We're right at the end of our permitting process. We've done all the environmental analyses. It's a tough road to hoe, let me tell you. Nobody thought it was going to take this long. But there are all kinds of regulations and tests upon tests, and we do what we have to do to put those nets in the water. We've been talking with various facilities. Up top there are some beluga whales from Marineland Canada. Marineland Canada in Ontario has about 30 to 35 beluga whales. Can they spare a few? They are supposedly selling the property. I don't know what they're doing, but there are a lot of beluga whales there, and in Canada the law is you can't breed them anymore, so they're stuck with them. We would like to work with them to bring at least some of these whales to the sanctuary where they can enjoy a semblance of a natural life.

Below that you see the family of orcas I told you about at the beginning. Wikie, Inouk, Keijo, Moana. Moana passed away this week, so now we have three—a mom and two others. They're a family. We have extended a request to see if they will sit down and talk to us about the possibility of bringing this family to the sanctuary. Right now they're slated to go to Japan, and they're going to be broken up. The family will be broken up, and the mother is going to be sold off as a reproduction machine. So we're trying to see if there's a path forward for them to stay together and live a life they deserve. What they really deserve is to be in the wild, but something better than what they have now.

We're talking with folks in South Korea. There are two little beluga girls there, about 13 years old, Bella and Louhi. They would like us to take them, so we've been talking with them for a couple of years about how that would happen. It's a long trip, but we know how to transfer these animals, and it's still possible that these two girls might come to us. There are also three belugas in Taiwan, and we have a member of our board who is very familiar with them, and they would like to bring them somewhere. And then there is one orca in Argentina named Kshamenk. He doesn't have any other orcas. I'm not sure if he's healthy enough or if he's even a viable candidate, but we want to keep him in consideration. If there's any path forward, we'd like to have him. So the fact of the matter is, they need us. These animals need us to do something for them. It's not working for them. And the kids that are coming up need us to show them a more compassionate path, a way to live more authentically with animals, a way to live respectfully with them. They're counting on us. So I want to thank you for your time, and I'll take questions.

Good question. The question is how many orcas are there in the wild and do they migrate? There are probably tens of thousands in the wild. We don't know exactly. Do they migrate? They can. They definitely move around. Orcas are found in every ocean on the globe, so anywhere you go there are orcas. Cold water, warm water, off New Zealand, off Iceland, off Canada, off Washington, etc. They are a very cosmopolitan species, and every single group is a different community with a different dialect and a different cultural history.

Very good question. Yes, orcas are the largest dolphins—they're actually dolphins in the Delphinidae family. Some of them are predators. In the wild they can eat fish, squid, other marine mammals, porpoises—it depends on their culture. All of these orcas will not even know that a live fish is food. They will have to learn that because they have been fed by having dead fish dropped in their mouth. If we have orcas and belugas, they will be in separate areas so there will be no possibility of anything happening.

That's a very good question. What percentage of orcas in captivity now were captured in the ocean? In the United States, there's only one left, and that's Corky. She's a member of the northern residents in British Columbia and was captured there when she was a baby. Tokitae was the last southern resident. All the others had been born and kept in captivity, and none of them would be candidates for going back because there's no back to go to. There is a sanctuary effort in British Columbia being created, and just in case there's a possibility that Corky can go back home, she would stay in the sanctuary, but she'd be in her natal waters.

That's a great question. It's not like everything is hunky-dory in the wild either. It's about the fact that they have at least the opportunity to live an authentic life in the wild. Most orca populations are doing extremely well in the wild. There's really only one that I know of having a hard time with their prey, and that's in the Pacific Northwest, due to a lot of different reasons, including the fact that their culture is 'we are the Chinook salmon eaters,' and there are very few Chinook salmon left. Now these guys in Portugal—this is like a gang of teenage orcas. They go out and they bump the boats, they might take the rudder apart, things like that. I try to tell people this is not an attack. It might seem like that to you, but believe me, if an orca wanted to attack you, you would know the difference. These, in my view—and I don't know this population—are teenage orcas doing what teenagers do. I don't mean that facetiously. They're smart, energetic, exploring animals. They're curious, they like to play, they're cheeky. This is fun for them. I hope people realize that, so they understand that the idea of 'revenge of the orcas' is garbage. These are just a bunch of orca teenagers doing what teenagers do.

Yes. Orcas have rammed boats before, and like you said, it's difficult to study because when it happens, it just happens spontaneously. Most of the time when they ram boats, there is either a reason—you might be in the way of something important they're doing—or they're just playing. But consider the fact that not a single human being has ever been killed by an orca in the ocean, and several people have been killed by orcas in tanks. Consider also the fact that when these baby orcas, the calves, were captured and taken away from their mothers and their pod, those pods never aggressed towards the hunters. You can imagine an animal of that size mad at you, you're taking her baby away, and she could easily dispatch you if you're in the water, and it's never happened. So there are a lot of mysteries about these animals—why they don't do certain things, why they do others. Sure, they've rammed boats before. There's probably a range of reasons why, but not a single human has ever been killed by a free-ranging orca.

I think what you're talking about here is something really important—examples of individual whales authoring their own life, exercising their autonomy. Nobody trained them, nobody captured them, nobody confined them. That dolphin, that whale, is just doing what he or she wants to do. Those kinds of scenarios might be a way to get closer to something resembling a richer life for dolphins and whales who are currently trapped in concrete tanks. Lots of them make the decision to go. Lone, solitary beluga whales show up, leave their group, hang out for a while, go somewhere else. Why they do this, it's just something that occurs to them. They're very interesting animals, and an open environment like that could work under certain circumstances.

Thank you for that. We'll be able to take one last question.

Yes, we are. That's a great question we always get. First of all, belugas don't jump. This net will go from just above the surface to the floor. Belugas don't jump, so they're not going to jump over it. Orcas can jump, but they never do. It's really interesting. There's something about their perception or cognition—they don't like nets and barriers. They don't like to jump over things. When you see a dolphin or orca performing and jumping through or over in a marine park, that has to be trained like crazy because they don't want to do it. They don't even want to go through a gated area. They're kind of like, 'What's on the other side?' We don't think that's going to be an issue. We will have 24/7 security and all kinds of contingencies just in case something happens, but I don't think that'll be an issue. It sounds counterintuitive, but they just don't jump over nets.