One Year Later, Keiko's Progress is Slow

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By By KOMO Staff & News Services

Summary

Even trainers admit, the killer whale is just as dependent no humans now as when he left Oregon.

Story Published: Sep 24, 1999 at 6:39 PM PDT

Story Updated: Aug 30, 2006 at 9:56 PM PDT

One Year Later, Keiko's Progress is Slow
WESTMANN ISLANDS, ICELAND - A year ago, high hopes and great expectations followed Keiko to Iceland. The flight went smoothly and his transfer to a sea pen in the Westmann Islands was flawless, but the year since then has been tumultuous in many ways.

Keiko’s keepers knew the Icelandic winters were harsh, but had no idea the storms that pound the island could be so fierce. A series of storms with winds in excess of 100 miles per hour pounded the pen. At one point, they thought the office attached to the pen would be ripped out to sea with them inside.

Work crews spent most of this short summer strengthening the pen and it’s anchoring system.

Then in early September, another storm hit -- a precursor for this winter -- ripping a huge hole in pen. A trainer had to dive into the water and nudge Keiko back inside. When the storm was over, one-third of the pen had been ripped away. A temporary net has been put up and repairs are being made.

The turbulence goes far beyond the weather. The Free Willy/Keiko Foundation, which moved Keiko from his cramped, too-warm tank in Mexico City to Oregon, is gone. It merged last March with the Jean-Michelle Cousteau Institute. The organization is now known as the Ocean Futures Society and Cousteau calls the shots.

The care staff was overhauled. Many of the trainers who had spent years with the orca whale departed and new caretakers have taken over. The basic philosophy of how to prepare Keiko for the wild changed. Instead of teaching him how to feed himself, they are now focusing on his conditioning -- making him stronger and faster. They believe the ability to hunt food will come instinctively.

But even the trainers admit Keiko is just as dependent on humans today as he was a year ago. Progress has been slow.

“The work that we are doing day to day with Keiko is the same as what has been done with him for 18 years,” said Keiko trainer Mark Simons.

Keiko still prefers his herring dead and does not hunt for live food even thought the walls of his pen allow fish to swim through freely.

Another disappointing development is that Keiko does not even try to communicate with wild orca whales. They have been spotted near the pen but they have not tried to communicate with Keiko and he has not tried to speak to them.

After two decades in isolation, Keiko may have forgotten how and if he can’t communicate with wild orcas, biologists say he can’t survive. Orca whales are pack hunters, often circling schools of herring as a team, packing them into tight balls before swarming in and feeding.

Sea mammal specialists like Scott Kraus say Keiko simply doesn’t have the skills to survive. Kraus is the only biologist to successfully return a whale to the wild after captivity.

“It’s not likely that humans can teach a killer whale how to be a killer whale. The ideal of course, of release into the wild where he can rejoin his family is extremely far-fetched,” said Kraus, who works at the New England Aquarium.

Kraus believes Ocean Futures may have wasted millions of dollars on the project. It has cost more than $13 million so far.

But Ocean Futures and its backers have said from the beginning that this is only an experiment. They plan to give Keiko only as much freedom as he is capable of handling and if that means he lives in the sea pen in Iceland until he dies, so be it.

One of Keiko’s big backers, Seattle telecommunications billionaire Craig McCaw puts it this way, “Our moral imperative was to do our best to achieve as much freedom for him as he wanted, or was capable of, after all these years in captivity.”

The next big step is to build a net at the mouth of the bay where Keiko lives, then release him from the sea pen. That will give Keiko more room to roam, exercise and build his stamina. Then trainers hope to let him go for “walks” out into the open ocean, after fitting him with a satellite transmitter. That could happen next spring.

If those “walks” are successful, full-fledged freedom may follow, but at this point, the odds seem to be against it.