Sinking Image? : Sea World Navigates Rough Waters After Deaths of 6 Whales

When Bob Lavenberg called Sea World last month to say the second live megamouth shark in history had been captured off Dana Point, he thought he was making the San Diego theme park an offer it couldn’t refuse: the opportunity to house and study a species so rare that, until 1976, scientists weren’t even aware it existed.

So Lavenberg, the curator of fishes at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History, was surprised when Sea World officials declined. They told Lavenberg they lacked the expertise and the facilities to ensure the 15-foot megamouth’s survival. But as well as worrying about the shark’s health, Sea World officials seemed to fear for the park’s image.

“They said, ‘One of the things we don’t want to do is take this animal and have it die on us,’ ” Lavenberg said. “No. 1 was they did not have the facilities to take it, and No. 2 was there was a potential that it would die. They were very sensitive about this. . . . They did not want to have it die on their hands.”

In light of the park’s recent history, such sensitivity is not surprising. In 2 1/2 years, six whales have died at the San Diego park--including three killer whales, the park’s most popular attraction. Officials maintain that except for Kandu, a killer whale that died after an accident during a performance, all the other animals died of old age or of diseases that could have stricken them in the wild.

But the string of fatalities has cast a shadow over the private amusement park. Sea World officials acknowledge that the losses have taken a toll on staff morale. Others note that Sea World’s refusal of the megamouth might indicate that, to protect its reputation, the four-park chain is trying to distance itself from death--a charge Sea World officials flatly deny.

“I don’t think we would ever step back away from helping animals just because we were concerned that somebody was going to start taking (shots) at us,” said Brad Andrews, a Sea World vice president and assistant zoological director based in Florida. How decisions are made about housing animals “boils down to what’s best for the animal,” he said.

“No one likes to accentuate the negative,” said Bob Gault, president of Sea World of California, who says he recognizes that people come to the park “to escape the day-to-day hassles of life,” not to confront them. But Gault asserts that, especially since they were bought by Anheuser-Busch in 1989, the parks have dealt more frankly with the passing of their animals.

“We’re not like Disney, where a ride breaks down, and they can just go plug in another one,” Gault said. “In life there is birth, and there is death, and at Sea World we experience both of them.”

Recently, however, questions have arisen about how deaths may affect future births--specifically the captive breeding of killer whales. This September, Kanduke, one of the chain’s two remaining male killer whales, died unexpectedly at its Florida park. Since then, Sea World veterinarians have been reshuffling breeding plans to manage what some experts say is a poor gender ratio.

Without federal permits to capture killer whales in the wild, the four parks--in San Diego, San Antonio, Tex., Aurora, Ohio and Orlando, Fla.--depend largely upon newborns to stock their exhibits and shows. But, among them, the four parks have 12 females and just one male: Kotar, an orca that resides at the Texas park.

“That’s certainly not optimal,” said Tom Laughlin, a marine biologist with the National Marine Fisheries Service in Seattle. “Biologically, one wants to have heterozygosity in the gene pool--more than one male contributing. The more vibrant the strain--the more diverse--the more resistant offspring is to disease.”

The necessity of breeding healthy young is heightened by Sea World’s economic dependence on killer whales. From elephants to penguins, newborn animals are a big draw at any zoo or park, public or private. But as well as being the star attraction in Sea World’s “Baby Shamu Celebration” show, killer whales are the centerpiece of the park’s marketing campaign.

Sea World visitors are invited to shop for Shamu-embossed gifts, from sweat shirts to jewelry, and to pose for $4 framed snapshots with a stuffed orca at the Shamu Photo Stand. The name “Shamu,” which is used interchangeably to refer to whichever whale is performing in the 5-million gallon Shamu Stadium, is a registered trademark. Even the Sea World logo depicts a tiny orca riding a two-tone blue wave.

“They’re one of the key elements in the draw,” said Harrison Price, a consultant in attraction management and development who is also a former Sea World board member. “Without them, it would have less attendance, that’s for sure.”

Shamu is Sea World’s Mickey Mouse--with one crucial difference. As Laughlin of the Marine Fisheries Service noted, “Mickey Mouse doesn’t die.”

Whales do. And, especially since 1988, San Diegans have been hard-pressed to avoid that fact.

A National Marine Fisheries Service inventory of all Sea World’s marine mammals, living and dead, shows that, over the park’s nearly three decades of operation, scores of animals have died largely unnoticed by the public.

But, when an animal has a name and a public identity--when it is what Gault calls a “high-visibility animal”--its passing attracts attention. For that reason, Gault acknowledges, the past 2 1/2 years have been especially difficult.

In September, 1988, Orky sank to the bottom of his pool and died just three days after a calf he fathered was born--Orkid, now commonly known as Baby Shamu. Estimated to be 27 to 32 years old, Orky was the oldest killer whale in captivity at the time, and a necropsy conducted by Sea World showed he had died of acute pneumonia brought on by old age.

Nine months later, in June, 1989, a 15-year-old beluga whale named Little Girl died of cardiopulmonary collapse. On loan from the Minnesota Zoo, Little Girl had come to San Diego to accompany Big Mouth, a sick male beluga receiving treatment for an inflammatory bone disease. Big Mouth would die the next summer, as would an ailing false killer whale named Asia.

But it was Kandu’s death, chronicled in bloody photographs, that shocked San Diegans most. In August, 1989, in the middle of a performance, the 4,600 pound mother of Orkid charged into another whale, Corky, and broke her jaw. The impact caused fatal hemorrhaging of major arteries in the 14-year-old whale’s nasal passages, and Kandu bled to death.

Memories of that fatality--called a freak accident by Sea World officials--were still fresh when Knootka, a killer whale in her mid- to late-20s, died of a rare fungal infection last March. Knootka was the first death at the San Diego park since the Sea World chain’s new owner, Anheuser-Busch, had taken the helm, and officials were noticeably more open about the whale’s illness and death.

“It’s important to be up-front about it,” said Dan LeBlanc, who handles media inquiries at the San Diego park. He and his supervisors agree that the park’s previous owner, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, “severely” restricted what information left the park.

Sometimes those restrictions bordered on the ludicrous. One former park employee remembers that, when a female calf was born in 1986, trainers were told to say that Shamu was the father. In fact, a whale known as Winston or Namu had fathered the calf, which died just 11 days later of a respiratory virus. But, for appearances, trainers were ordered to use the trademark name.

“Shamu was Mickey Mouse--that’s why Shamu had to be the father,” the employee recalls. If Winston’s paternity had been publicized, “it would be like if Minnie Mouse had a baby and Mickey Mouse wasn’t the father. It would be bad news.”

When it came to talking about truly awful news, like the death of a well-known animal, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich officials had the parks’ spokesmen speak as little as possible.

“In zoos and aquariums for years, animals didn’t die publicly. That’s a trap that a lot of (parks) have set for themselves, Sea World included,” said LeBlanc, who says that is changing at Sea World. New management, he says, “has allowed us to communicate the way we want to communicate.”

That new frankness applies to birth as well as death. Andrews concedes that recent deaths have prompted some changes in breeding schedules--some of them that reach 15 years into the future. The lone male, Kotar, is not related to any of the 12 females, he said, so there is probably no genetic reason why he can’t mate with them all.

Barring any problems, Andrews said, the program--which has produced five healthy captive-born babies in as many years--is “still self-sufficient.” Recent blood samples taken from Keneau in Texas and Kasatka in San Diego indicate a “high likelihood” that both are pregnant by Kotar, he said. If all goes well, the San Diego park could be christening a new Baby Shamu by the middle of next year.

Whether the park’s new openness will affect public opinion is unclear. Sea World’s attendance, like that of most other Southern California amusement parks, is down this year from last year--a downturn Price, the consultant, attributes to a decrease in long-distance tourism. During the first eight months of 1989, nearly 3 million people visited the park--about 200,000 more than the same period this year.

For now, those who opt to pay the $21.95 admission price ($15.95 for children ages 3 to 11) will have trouble avoiding Shamu’s cheerful, toothy grin. As always, the little whale is the park’s best public relations symbol.

Gault says he and others who display marine mammals for profit share a concern about “being painted with the same brush as the whalers--which is absurd. . . . Certainly, we want to avoid that kind of imagery, because it’s false, and it’s negative.”

He continued: “We’re concerned about public opinion. But I think people have enough balance to realize animals are going to die from time to time.”

And, even when they die more frequently than that, said Doug DeMaster, chief of the marine mammal division at the Southwest Fishery Science Center in La Jolla, the public would be wise to weigh statistics carefully.

DeMaster completed a survival study of captive killer whales that found that the average probability of a whale surviving for one year in a park in this country is roughly the same as in the wild--90% to 95%. Counting how many captive whales die in a period of time, he said, is not a fair criterion for evaluating a park’s husbandry practices.

“If you had 20 whales, and they all lived 20 years, and they all died in the 20th year, you’d have 20 deaths in one year, and it would look bad,” he said, noting that the average life expectancy of a killer whale in the wild is believed to be 25 to 35 years. “But actually you would have done a good job. That’s why you have to be careful with numbers.”

In light of Shamu’s high profile, said Jan Schultz, a former Sea World president, “the fact that a series of killer whales died within a short period of time--I don’t want to use the word ‘disaster,’ but it is certainly a very, very damaging thing, not only in terms of Sea World reputation but also on the morale.”

Yet Schultz rejects the charge, often leveled by animal rights activists, that the deaths raise questions about the soundness of Sea World’s veterinary care and its public display policies.

“In each and every case, it was (the whale’s) time,” he said. “The fact this happened is like airplanes going down in threes. It’s very unfortunate, but it sometimes occurs that way.”

This month, Sea World opened a new whale exhibit that seems guaranteed to raise no new questions about how the park deals with death. The temporary exhibit features the 17-foot fossilized skull and vertebrae of a long-extinct species of right whale. The whale has been dead for 3 million years.