A ship passing within a few hundred yards will commonly cause orcas to end their foraging dives. Presumably, they intuitively understand that when so much other noise is raging around them, trying to hunt with intricate beams of sound is pointless. Females are especially sensitive and halt their hunts more often than males, likely because they have offspring to look out for. Nonstop disturbances while they’re trying to forage could mean females go hungry and struggle to produce enough milk for their young.

Compared to the lingering legacy of toxic chemicals, a much simpler solution for noise pollution can be implemented. When ships slow down, they immediately quieten down. Trials of voluntary reduced speeds in parts of the Salish Sea have successfully reduced the background volume in orcas’ foraging grounds. When ships passing through are slower and quieter, orcas spend more time hunting and feeding.

A few Southern Resident orcas haven’t experienced the growing volume and toxicity in the ocean because they were taken away from it. In 1964, a young male from the community was the first orca to survive in captivity for more than a few days. Collectors had planned to kill him and use his carcass as a mould to sculpt a replica for the Vancouver Aquarium, but amazingly the orca survived, even after the harpoon fractured his skull and damaged his brain. Mistaken for a female, he was given the name Moby Doll and put on public display in a sea pen off a beach in Vancouver for just one day, and thousands of people came to see him. From then on, out of the public eye, his keepers struggled to work out what to feed him, and after three months in captivity, Moby Doll died. His short life was enough to demonstrate that it was possible to keep orcas in captivity and, more importantly, that the public was keen to watch them.

After that, around one-third of the Southern Resident community was captured and sold to aquariums and theme parks, including a young female originally known as Tokitae. She was around four years old when she was taken from her family in 1970 and sent to Miami Seaquarium in Florida. Tokitae was trained to leap and do stunts. For performances she was renamed Lolita and paired up with an older male from the same community called Hugo. For a decade, Tokitae and Hugo were kept together and performed tricks for the crowds twice a day in the smallest orca aquarium tank in the United States.ⁱ They mated many times, but Tokitae never gave birth to a live calf. Hugo died in 1980 after incessantly ramming his head against the side of the tank. Thereafter, Tokitae was kept in isolation from her species. She was the last Southern Resident orca in captivity.^j

During the time of Tokitae’s confinement in the Florida aquarium, the tide turned against keeping orcas in captivity. A watershed moment came in 2013 with the release of the feature-length documentary Blackfish. It told the tragic story of Tilikum, an orca captured in Iceland and then sent to SeaWorld in Orlando, Florida, where he killed several trainers, his aggression symptomatic of post-traumatic stress disorder induced by a captive life. The film triggered public outcry, attendance at SeaWorld slumped, and the American public became disenchanted with the unethical spectacle of confined, performing animals.

For decades, campaigners pleaded for Tokitae to be released from captivity and returned to her native waters. Among the most passionate advocates for her return were members of Washington State’s indigenous Lummi nation, who have cultural and spiritual ties to the Southern Resident orcas, known to them as qwe’lhol’mechen, the people beneath the waves.

In March 2022, Tokitae was retired from public shows. A year later, Miami Seaquarium finally agreed to release her. The plan was for Tokitae, or Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut, as the Lummi people know her, to be flown to the Pacific and transferred to an open-water enclosure in the Salish Sea, then perhaps one day allowed to swim free. There she would have found out how much her home waters had changed since she was taken away. She would have sensed the tang of unfamiliar chemicals in the seawater and in the fish she ate. She would have heard how noisy and crowded these seas had become. She might have heard calls she remembered from more than fifty years ago and known that her community was somewhere nearby. She may have even recognised the sounds of the elder female orca who is still alive in the wild and likely is her mother. And it’s possible Tokitae would have mourned the orcas from her community who are no longer there, the ones who like her were sold into captivity. But Tokitae never made it home. On August 18, 2023, she died while still in the same concrete tank she had been held in for fifty-three years at Miami Seaquarium. She was fifty-seven years old.

A few days later, hundreds of people gathered at Jackson Beach Park on San Juan Island, in the heart of the home waters of the Southern Resident orcas. Mourners laid flowers on a totem that in 2018 had been taken from the Salish Sea to the Seaquarium and back, and they listened to some of Tokitae’s last calls recorded shortly before she died. Lummi dignitaries and elders asked those present to remember not just Tokitae but the rest of her family, the seventy-five remaining members of the community who are struggling to survive in the wild.

While humans have turned them into captives and spoiled their world, orcas have shown they are capable of great madness and also great sadness. In July 2018, an orca known as Tahlequah was the first member of the Southern Resident Community to give birth to a live calf in three years. But the newborn lived for only a half hour. Why it died so soon, nobody knows for sure, but polluted waters were likely at least partly to blame. Neonate orcas have washed up on beaches in other places, and scientists have tested their bodies and found them loaded with PCBs and other dangerous chemicals. After her baby died, and for the next seventeen days, Tahlequah carried the small body with her as she followed her pod on what became a thousand-mile funeral cortege. Each time the dead calf began to slide into the deep, Tahlequah swam down and brought it back to the surface, balancing it on her nose. She was grieving, orca experts widely agree, and wasn’t ready to let her calf go.

It’s not too anthropomorphic to imagine that orcas can feel sorrow for their changing ocean, as they watch their calves dying far more frequently than before and grieve the lost ones. And some orcas, maybe, are witnessing their ocean changing around them and getting angry about it.

Off the coasts of Spain and Portugal, orcas have been behaving strangely of late. This is another highly endangered group, made up of at most thirty-nine animals. They visit the Strait of Gibraltar each year to feed on Atlantic bluefin tuna that swim into the Mediterranean to spawn. The orcas give chase until the exhausted tuna can swim no more. Some orcas have also learned to save their energy and pick off tuna from fishing lines in a local fishery. Then, in 2020, some of these tuna-hunting orcas began deliberately ramming into boats. Dozens of sailors have reported seeing groups of orcas swimming up behind their yachts and then slamming their bodies against the vessel repeatedly, for up to two hours at a time. The orcas bring the boats to a sudden halt and turn them in circles. Often their final act is to snap off the rudder, leaving the boat without steering. In most instances, the skipper and crew have radioed for assistance and a tow back to shore, but on several occasions, boats were rammed so badly they sank, although with no harm to the people on board.

This previously unseen behaviour has continued in Iberian waters, and scientists remain mystified as to why it’s happening. Many experts are keen to avoid labelling these as calculated attacks or projecting human-centric motivations on the orcas. Some think it could have been started by a few curious and boisterous orcas, and then others joined in until the situation got rather out of hand. The plot thickened in June 2023, when orcas from a different group, two thousand miles to the north of Gibraltar, repeatedly rammed into a yacht off the Shetland Islands of Scotland. How and why they developed a similar habit is yet another mystery. It’s possible highly mobile orca pods have been swimming long distances and passing on the idea of messing with boats, or the Scottish orcas could have started doing it all by themselves. And it’s possible one day they will all just stop. Orcas are known to pick up new habits, then drop them just as quickly. In the 1990s, one orca pod began killing fish and carrying them around on their noses; after a while, they stopped. Boat bumping could just be the latest vogue that started among the Gibraltar orcas and is catching on elsewhere.

But it’s not out of the question that something more complicated is going on. Several of the orcas involved in this unusual behaviour, the unruly ringleaders, were found to have recent injuries, likely from collisions with boats travelling at speed. These orcas may have finally grown fed up with living in a busy shipping lane and figured out how to deliberately slow boats down, targeting yachts because they’re easier to take on than larger craft.

a The others are short-finned pilot whales, belugas, narwhals, and humans.

b PCB compounds contain two rings of carbon atoms with multiple chlorine atoms attached.

c Organic in the chemical sense, meaning these are molecules that contain carbon atoms bonded to each other and to hydrogen atoms.

d In December 2023 the phrase “forever chemical” was added to the Oxford English Dictionary, a historical record of the English language that notes first use and meanings of words.

e One reason PFASs are so tough is because they contain carbon-fluorine bonds, one of the strongest chemical bonds in existence.

f C8 refers to the chain of carbon atoms in the structure of this chemical, perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA.

g This one is called 6:2 fluorotelomer alcohol, or 6:2 FTOH.

h Nanoparticles are between one and one thousand nanometres in size; there are more than twenty-five million nanometres in one inch.

i Their concrete tank was eighty by thirty-five feet and twenty feet deep; Tokitae measured twenty feet long.

j At time of writing, fifty-four orcas from other communities were kept elsewhere in captive conditions.

PART THREE OCEAN REVIVAL

Chapter 6 Restoring Seas

In the Caribbean Sea, roughly halfway between Havana, Cuba, and Kingston, Jamaica, lies the island of Little Cayman. At ten miles long and a mile wide, it’s the smallest of the three Cayman Islands. Known best, perhaps, as a tax haven, these islands are also a haven for fish. During the winter months, when the moon is full, the sea off the western end of Little Cayman fills up with Nassau groupers. For most of the year these large predatory fish, one to two feet long, live solitary lives on the coral reef that fringes the island. But they know, when the time comes, to gather—maybe they sense the strengthening pull of the spring tide, or they notice the moon shining down—and they set off, intently swimming towards the same destination. On the outer shelf of the reef, in an area roughly the size of London’s Trafalgar Square, thousands of groupers congregate. The milling shoal can become so dense no water can be seen between fish. Then, a secret signal goes out, and a dozen or more groupers at a time pinch off from the group and rush towards the surface, aiming for a spot in the water above their heads. Their bodies form a brief, shivering huddle, and a second later they split apart, leaving behind a cloud of eggs mixing with sperm. This is how new groupers are made.

Flocking together in large shoals most likely boosts each grouper’s chances of reproducing successfully. Fish and their fertilised eggs are generally safer in numbers and less vulnerable to predators, which can’t possibly eat every last one of them. Timing is key for these events, coinciding with the strongest tides so the fertilised eggs are swept offshore, away from the reef and the many hungry animals that live there. After a month spent afloat at sea as tiny larvae, growing and learning to swim, juvenile groupers are ready to return to the reef.

Aggregations like this are now a rare spectacle, but they used to occur across the Caribbean. The first scientist to publish an eyewitness account of an enormous Nassau grouper spawning aggregation was C. Lavett “Smitty” Smith, curator of ichthyology at the American Museum of Natural History. In 1972, he visited Cat Bay in the Bahamas and reported seeing at least thirty thousand and perhaps as many as one hundred thousand groupers coming together to spawn.

On reefs and atolls in many Caribbean countries, Nassau groupers would periodically migrate to their spawning grounds, at the same places and times year after year, some of them swimming for hundreds of miles to get there. However, the predictable timing of these events made them easy targets for fishers. Nassau groupers used to be the mainstay of fisheries in the region year-round, but the biggest catches were taken from aggregation sites during the brief spawning seasons. As a result, breeding populations were run down until their numbers were so low the adult fish no longer showed up to spawn. Nassau grouper aggregations shrank, then one by one, they blinked out.

That’s what happened in the Cayman Islands. Several historic spawning grounds were wiped out, including one at the eastern end of Little Cayman that formed until 1993; then the fish stopped coming, and so did the fishers. But the Nassau groupers were not entirely gone. They have long lifespans, up to at least thirty years, and they can wait out many seasons without spawning, and then come together again when conditions suit them.

In 2001, fishers discovered the new aggregation forming at Little Cayman’s western end, where none had been seen previously. That year, around seven thousand groupers gathered, and fishers caught some two thousand of them in one week of fishing. The following year, when the remaining groupers came back to spawn, fishers caught another two thousand. At that point, local authorities stepped in and introduced strict regulations on fishing. Initially, a year-on, year-off rule was brought in for fishing the aggregation site, with a catch limit of twelve Nassau groupers per boat per day. The aggregation continued to shrink in size, and in 2003, the regulations were strengthened to a blanket ban on fishing throughout the winter spawning months. Now it’s illegal to catch, own, or sell a Nassau grouper between December and April anywhere in the Cayman Islands. The rest of the year, people are still allowed to catch them, although not using spearguns, and with a daily catch limit of five fish per boat.

As Nassau grouper populations began to collapse throughout the Caribbean, other countries introduced protection measures, but so far only in the Cayman Islands is their recovery obviously underway. The aggregation at Little Cayman is the largest known spawning site for the entire species, and it’s growing.

Diving scientists have been conducting yearly surveys, measuring individual fish with laser dots projected onto the sides of their bodies and tagging them to see how often they come back to spawn and to estimate the total size of the population. Over the course of fifteen years, the numbers of Nassau groupers at Little Cayman has gradually increased—not a smooth and consistent recovery, but over time the population has tripled in size, returning to an abundance approaching that before the fishing spree began at the start of the century. There are also signs of recovery at a spawning site on the nearby island Cayman Brac.

The Nassau grouper is one of many coral-reef fish species that congregate in huge numbers to spawn and have historically been targeted, overfished, and extirpated. The message from the Cayman Islands is that recovery of these endangered populations is possible, but it takes commitment, patience, and time.

A lot of ocean animals are in trouble because humans are overexploiting them to the point that the survivors can’t replace the lost ones fast enough. Without human interference, wild species are killed and eaten by other animals, and while populations naturally fluctuate, in general a balance is struck between predators and prey so that neither explodes nor collapses. Humans add to the predation pressure, and as long as they are not too greedy, prey populations can keep pace and maintain themselves. And if the numbers of targeted prey animals begin to dwindle, there are simple steps to take to avoid their extirpation. Reduce the number that are hunted, fished, and extracted, and populations should recover and restore.

At times, this has happened rather by chance. A little over a century ago, on beaches along the Pacific coast of California and Mexico, commercial sealers crept up on northern elephant seals as they were lined up like so many giant, furry sardines, the titanic, fifteen-foot-long males fighting each other, raising their bulbous-snouted heads and bellowing at the sky. While the seals were trying to mate and rear their young, sealers killed them for their blubber to render down and burn in oil lamps. The slaughter only stopped when there seemed to be no more seals to kill, and the species was presumed to be extinct. Then, in 1892, scientists from the Smithsonian Institution visiting Guadalupe Island, 150 miles off the coast of Mexico, found nine elephant seals alive and well. The species wasn’t extinct after all—but the scientists didn’t help the situation. Presuming the seals were on their way out anyway, they killed seven to take back to the museum.

In the following decades, more scientific expeditions went to Guadalupe Island and found the elephant seals were still not quite gone, and they carried on catching them. Some seals were kept alive and displayed at public aquariums, where generally they died after a year or two. More were killed and stuffed for museum exhibits. Fortunately for the seals, the commercial trade in blubber was moving on as fossil fuels were replacing animal fats and oils, so pressure from sealers was reduced. Despite scientists showing up now and then to grab more seals, their numbers gradually began to increase. In July 1922, when a survey counted 264 elephant seals on Guadalupe Island, the species was finally deemed worthy of protection. That same year, it became illegal to hunt elephant seals in Mexico, and soon after in the United States.

An American zoologist from the San Diego Natural History Museum, Laurence M. Huey, went on several trips to Guadalupe and witnessed the early days of the seals’ recovery. In 1930 he wrote: “Let us trust that it may continue, that again this largest of all seals may inhabit its former hauling grounds and prevent at least one black deed from entering the annals of man’s wanton destruction.”

Huey would surely have been happy to know that elephant seals have continued to make a good recovery. All that was needed to save the species was for people to stop hunting them. Now, to see a northern elephant seal no longer requires a boat trip to Guadalupe Island. At certain times of year, along California State Route 1, the highway that skirts the Pacific Ocean, drivers can call in at several beaches and watch elephant seals snoozing on the sand. The total number of northern elephant seals, ranging from Castle Rock in Washington State to Isla Natividad off Baja California Sur,^a is now estimated to be in the region of two hundred thousand.

Helping ocean life to recover is relatively effortless when commercial industries have given up hunting threatened species and moved on to something else, as the sealers did. It’s much harder to find ways of killing fewer animals when they’re still in high demand, but it can be done. In October 2020, off the coast of Cornwall, where England dips its foot into the North Atlantic, surfers witnessed, for a few brief, implausible moments, a massive fish leaping from the sea. The giant bluefin tuna jumped again and then a third time, as if to say, “I am here. We are back.” For decades, the spectacle of bluefin tuna had been missing from British waters. They had been gone for so long, most people had no idea they were ever there.

Commonly growing to between six and ten feet long, Atlantic bluefins are the biggest of the three bluefin-tuna species. The other two live in the Pacific Ocean. They all look like they’ve been cast from polished steel into a teardrop shape, painted indigo along their back, and given an elegant, crescent tail, and pectoral fins that fold away into slots in the sides of the body to improve streamlining while cruising at high speed. As they swim, bluefin tuna keep their body stiff and push their tails from side to side, in the classic thunniform style.^b To breathe, they open their mouths and let water flow over their gills, supplying oxygen to the ruby-coloured muscles that power their long-distance endurance swimming.

Bluefin tuna in the Atlantic were being fished as long ago as the Stone Age. In a cave on the Rock of Gibraltar, archaeologists have found prehistoric remains of bluefin-tuna bones dating back more than twenty-two thousand years, which could have been left there by Neanderthals. Perhaps early hominids didn’t fish for bluefins but scavenged them from beaches after pods of orcas chased them onto shore. Farther to the east and thousands of years later, during the Mesolithic, on the small island of Levanzo near Sicily, people painted images in a cave that look a lot like bluefin tuna. Dated to around ninety-two hundred years ago, this is the earliest reliable evidence that people had started fishing for bluefins in the Mediterranean. To go to the trouble of painting them, people must have thought these fish were important.

Commercial fisheries for bluefin tuna got underway across the Mediterranean during the time of the Phoenician civilization and the Roman Empire.^c People caught bluefins in traps and beach-seine nets, preserved them in salting factories, and traded them in earthenware amphorae. Bluefins were one of the species that ancient Romans processed into the flavour-enhancing condiment garum, by laying out leftover trimmings, intestines, and blood to ferment in the sun. In fishing settlements from Turkey to Morocco, coins were minted with bluefin-tuna designs.

Archaeological remains show that bluefin tuna were also caught for millennia in the waters of northern Europe, and there, during the early part of the twentieth century, fishing effort increased. Fishers had known about the enormous tuna that swam into the region each year as they chased after smaller forage fish, like herring and mackerel, the same shoals that fishers themselves were after. In the early 1900s, in Øresund, the narrow strait between Denmark and Sweden, Danish fishers used bluefin tuna as scouts, following them to find and catch shoals of needle-shaped garfish. In the 1920s, Norwegian fishers complained about bluefin tuna ruining their nets by grabbing for any stray fish while the catches were being hauled in.

Herring fishers occasionally caught bluefins in their nets and traps and soon realised they could sell the huge fish for a good price. A photograph from 1910 of a German fish auction hall shows a dozen bluefins lined up on the floor waiting to be sold. Around the same time, fish markets in the northern French town of Boulogne sold bluefins that fishers caught over Dogger Bank in the North Sea. Canning factories began opening in Denmark and Norway to process the growing catches of bluefins.

While commercial fishers looked to profit from bluefin tuna, sport fishers also turned their attention to these giants. A Danish sport fishery for bluefins opened in the 1920s. In 1928, one fisher single-handedly caught sixty-two tuna in the Kattegat sea.

The Tunny Club opened in 1930 in the coastal town of Scarborough in northern England. Members of the aristocracy and movie stars, including John Wayne and Errol Flynn, motored offshore in search of bluefins in the oceanic equivalent of big-game hunting parties in Kenya and India. Men and women strapped themselves into reinforced harnesses and hooked bluefins on enormous rods, often with a team of professional fishers on hand to help reel in the catches.

A silent film from 1933 documents one such trip as people wrestled with the wildly thrashing fish. “And so closes a perfect day,” the caption card reads on-screen, followed by a shot of at least eight enormous tuna lying dead on deck, outsizing and outnumbering the smiling people on board. That same year, a UK record-breaking bluefin tuna was caught, weighing 851 pounds, almost twice as heavy as a mature male Bengal tiger.

Sport fishing for bluefin tuna also became popular in the western Atlantic along the US coast. Small bluefins were being caught along the coast as early as the 1850s. When stronger tackle was developed in the 1900s, anglers began battling larger animals. American author Ernest Hemingway was a big fan of hunting bluefins in the Bahamas.

Meanwhile, industrial fisheries in northern Europe were inventing more efficient ways of catching bluefins on an industrial scale. People started shooting them one by one at the surface with harpoon rifles. In Norway, fishers experimented with a new type of fishing gear, laying out a great loop of net to engulf an entire shoal of tuna in one go. At first, these early purse seines didn’t work well because the muscular fish shredded the nets when they were trapped. By the 1950s, Norwegians had developed sturdier nets and mechanical winches to drag them back on deck, and the new industry snowballed. In 1949, there were forty-three boats in the Norwegian tuna fishery. A year later there were two hundred, making it Europe’s biggest bluefin-tuna fishery.