Returning Tokitae Home
Tokitae the orca whale was abducted from her pod in Puget Sound as an adolescent and was sold to a marine park in Florida. Plans for her return were officially announced in March 2023. While some are optimistic about her future, others have expressed concerns.
Southern resident orca whale breaches Puget Sound waters in 2017. // Photo courtesy of Erin Gless
June 14, 2023
Story by Isabela Alvarez
A boat rocks in the waves, surrounded by an entire pod of southern resident orca whales. The whale watchers gasp in awe as a several-ton orca breaches the water in a beautiful display of freedom; they’re lucky, it’s not too common to see whales propel themselves out of the water with such force.
This is no longer a common sight. Today, there are many nature enthusiasts in the Pacific Northwest who have never seen a southern resident killer whale (SRKW).
The oldest orca whale in captivity has new plans to be returned back to her home waters of Puget Sound. Tokitae, also known as “Toki” or her stage name “Lolita”, was abducted from her pod outside of Seattle at just four years old. After 50 years in captivity, many organizations such as Friends of Toki, are excited about her future journey home.
In 2017, the Lummi Nation Council unanimously passed a motion to join the collective efforts fighting for Tokitae’s retirement. Lummi took their efforts a step further in 2018, when they held a press conference in Florida, and again in 2019 when two Lummi women invoked the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. This act requires federally funded institutions to return cultural items and sacred objects to their affiliated Native American tribes.
The Lummi Nation also formally announced their intent to sue the Miami Seaquarium if they refused to help establish a plan to return her to the Pacific Northwest.
Toki’s veterinarians and care teams in Florida and Washington have a responsibility to ensure her safe relocation to the Puget Sound. While some experts have voiced concerns about reintroducing the whale to her home waters, others remain hopeful as they share their thoughts on what Tokitae’s life in the Pacific Ocean could look like.
“The biggest hurdle is getting her there,” said Joshua McInnes, a marine mammal researcher at the University of British Columbia. At Tokitae’s age and health, McInnes believes returning her to the Pacific Northwest is a dangerous task, and doing so in a timely manner is one of the biggest obstacles to a successful relocation.
Erin Gless, the executive director of Pacific Whale Watch Association, disagrees.
“Logistically, [flying her here] is the really easy part,” she said. “In 2023, I’d imagine that they have a lot more ways of making sure it’s done safely. That is the least of my concerns.”
Tokitae was born into the L-Pod of orcas, which is made up of over 30 whales who inhabit the waters of the Pacific Northwest. Although southern resident orcas are known for staying with their mothers and pod families for the entirety of their lives, Tokitae was separated.
One August afternoon in 1970 , Tokitae was cornered in Penn Cove by businessman Ted Griffin and his team from the Seattle Marine Aquarium. There, she and several other orcas were extracted from the water and sold to various marine parks around the world. Tokitae was still a calf when she was sold for $20,000 to the Miami Seaquarium. Then, she was flown to Miami and renamed “Lolita.”
She has remained there in captivity ever since, but her future is beginning to look brighter than her past. With the help of trained care teams, plans to return Tokitae to her native waters are set.
According to an operational plan by the Whale Sanctuary Project, Tokitae’s reintroduction is planned to take place in a large 600-foot by 400-foot sea pen. Located in a protected cove in Orcas Island, one of the San Juan Islands in the Puget Sound region, Tokitae will be under constant veterinarian supervision as she reacclimates to her natural habitat.
Map of Tokitae's journey home and proposed location of her seapen. // Map by Sof Dubois
While activists across the nation celebrate the news of Tokitae’s return home, skeptics remain unsure about the chances of her returning to the Puget Sound. Tokitae’s successful relocation hinges on planning between advocacy groups, Miami Seaquarium and the federal government organizations that are vital to this plan.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a regulatory agency within the federal government, must approve any movement of marine mammals. Following a March 30 press conference, Miami Seaquarium and Friends of Toki entered a binding agreement to bring Tokitae home. Currently, these organizations are in the consulting phase with federal organizations.
The Department of Defense is also a vital agency because they operate cargo planes large enough to transport Tokitae. For previous whale transportation projects, the DOD has used C-17 Globemaster III — a cargo plane that can carry up to 75 tons.
Other concerns regard Tokitae’s immune system as she is exposed to the Pacific Ocean after a lifetime in filtered water free from pollution or contamination.
“Our water is not exactly pristine,” Gless said. “We talk all the time about how Washington is dealing with contaminants, and that’s one of the biggest threats for wild southern resident killer whales; they’re exposed to all these toxins.”
Howard Garrett, president of the Orca Network, remains optimistic and does not believe the Pacific waters are worth worrying about.
“What polluted water?” he said. “The water around the San Juan Islands is pristine Pacific Ocean water. That’s not just my opinion, that’s the U.S. National Parks Service’s opinion.”
The sea water surrounding the San Juan Islands are rated class AA, indicating high water quality, according to the National Parks Service.
Jim Irsay, CEO of the Indianapolis Colts and avid proponent of Tokitae’s relocation, tweeted on April 30 that the goal timeline is between six to nine months, McInnes believes the longer the timeline, the larger the threat to Tokitae’s successful release.
“She’s on borrowed time every day,” McInnes said. Ideally, Tokitae would be introduced to her sea pen in Puget Sound before her estimated arrival in the next year or two.
Fears from the public don’t end there. Another concern is Tokitae’s ability to reconnect with her pod if she is released into the open ocean. Orca pods have their own languages with specific dialects, much like humans do. These languages can be made up of distinct clicking noises, whistles or other vocalization patterns that only members of each pod know.
Garrett believes that if she is able to retain memory of her pod’s language and dialect, there’s a likely chance they will recognize her.
Advocates for Tokitae’s release shared recordings of her practicing SRKW calls, which prove the whale’s memory of her pod’s language despite the many years apart from them, said Garrett.
Samantha Spurlin, a biology professor at Western Washington University with a background in marine mammal biology, also believes in Tokitae’s ability to acclimate to the natural environment since she was able to adapt to her enclosure over the last several decades.
“The fact that she was even able to stay selectively sane shows that she has been able to learn and adapt to her environment over the past 50 years,” Spurlin said.
Advocates like Garrett see her release into the habitat as a chance for redemption. We must do something right to combat what we’ve done wrong, and reuniting Tokitae with her family so she can spend the rest of her days in the open ocean can help us achieve that, said Garrett.
Garrett hopes that Toki’s release will bring awareness to the climate crisis.
“I think that she will be able to draw the attention and pluck the heartstrings of people to motivate restoration and attention to all ecosystems,” he said.
Rehabilitating a full-grown orca is no easy task. This will be a risky journey for a whale of Tokitae's age, but even if she only has a short amount of time left, researchers like McInnes still believe returning her home is the moral thing to do.
“It’s a very convoluted gray area,” McInnes said. “In this case, for me, I think it’s a better place for her to die in the wild rather than in captivity.”
Isabela Alvarez is a junior at Western Washington University who is majoring in environmental studies and minoring in sustainability.