How To Protect The Ocean
SUFB 053: Sea World vs Scientists
Sea World has been backed into a corner by animal activists and a little documentary called Blackfish; however, the basis of evidence that orcas in captivity have degraded health (physical and mental) is all about science. Sea World understands this and is now trying to discredit the people who are scientific experts on wild orca populations.
Listen to the podcast to find out who Sea World is attacking and why.
Shop for the Ocean:
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10 Ocean Tips to Conserve the Ocean:
http://www.speakupforblue.com/wordpress/sufb_optinpdf
Show Notes:
http://www.speakupforblue.com/session53
Welcome to the Speaker for Blue Podcast, session 53. Man, if you would read some of these blog posts that these bloggers are putting up about SeaWorld versus the "activists and scientists," it's getting kind of crazy and we're going to talk about it today here on the Speaker for Blue Podcast, stay tuned. Welcome back to another episode of the Speaker for Blue Podcast, your voice for the ocean. My name is Andrew Lew and I am your host. I am founder of SpeakUpForBlue.com, marine ecologist and self-proclaimed oceanpreneur. That's right, everything I do is for the ocean as an entrepreneur, I work and I make money, but I make money and I support ocean conservation all over the world here at SpeakUpForBlue. And today we're going to talk about SeaWorld versus the scientists and I'm going to tell you something, I'm a little frustrated, not because of the subject matter, well, I am a little bit because of the subject matter, but for the fact that this is my third time recording this, I'm having a little trouble, software trouble, I record on a screencasting kind of software and I think my computer is kind of full up and so it's not allowing me to save a lot of data, so I have to restart my computer to save this. So this is the third time I'm actually recording this podcast, it's one o'clock in the morning, I should be in bed right now, but I want to get this podcast out so that when you wake up in the morning you can listen to it. So I hope that, I hope you appreciate the effort that I put in because I do it for you guys, I do it, I enjoy doing it, but I like to get the SpeakUpForBlue podcast out in time for when you guys get up in the morning or if you're on your walk in the morning or run or whatever you want to do, walk the dog or just put it on and listen, I appreciate it. I thank you for you guys, for your loyalty and listening to the podcast day in and day out and downloading it, but thank you to say I appreciate that, so thank you very much. But before we get into today's episode, I want to ask you a question, do you guys ever feel overwhelmed when you listen to the podcast in the morning, when you're walking your dog or you're reading SpeakUpForBlue.com or you're hearing stories about ocean conservation about climate change about El Nino and you just feel that overwhelmed where you're like, man, there's so many things going on with the ocean. I don't know if I can keep up with it or if I can help. I feel so small in this big world and this big ocean and I don't know if anything I do will help so I'm just not going to do anything or I just don't know where to begin. SpeakUpForBlue is here to help you find a way to start and we've come up with a bit of a way to help you start and I've started a shop, an online store, to sell merchandise. Now it's not for me just to make money and sustain myself. The idea is to help ocean conservation in two ways. So when you go to the store at SpeakUpForBlue.com/shop, you can shop a variety of merchandise. You have shirts, you have travel mugs, you have at-home mugs and you have phone cases, cell phone cases. Each one of them has a saying on them. It'll have some sort of ocean conservation. I have two shirts, it says keep calm and conserve the ocean. We have keep calm and protect whales, keep calm and save whales, same with sharks and so forth. When you buy, every time you buy a shirt or you buy a mug and you use it around in the public or just around your family and somebody asks you a question about why you have that mug, why you're wearing that t-shirt or compliments you want it, you're starting a conversation. And that's what SpeakUpForBlue is all about is starting that conversation, making people aware of what's going on with the ocean, the issues they're facing and how we can implement solutions. So you're starting that conversation. The other thing that you're doing is right away when you buy any kind of merchandise at the store, you are automatically supporting our partner, Sea Turtles Forever, which is a small charitable non-profit organization that's based in the US that does work all around the world. They focus especially on Central America, protecting sea turtles, believe it or not. They have a big impact there where they work with local communities to protect sea turtle nests from, on the beach, the sea turtles come in, they nest on the beach, they lay about three to four hundred eggs, they go back out in the ocean. Those eggs can get poached. So what they do is they protect the eggs from getting poached. They work with local communities to implement ecotourism outfits that will help, that will help not only sustain the sea turtle populations that come in nests there, but it also brings in a sustainable income for that local community, which poaching eggs won't, because eventually those turtles will be gone. There are seven turtle species in the world. They're all endangered or at risk of going to extinction at some point, at some level. There's different levels of extinction or at risk species. So these are the threatened endangered or at risk of going extinct for all seven of those species. So they protect and they sustain that ecotourism sustains that builds those populations up and that the fact that those populations are getting healthier is a true testament to the ecotourism industry in Central America. So they do that. That's one thing. That's only one thing they do. There's a small organization. The other thing they do is they come up with an innovative tool for beach cleanup. So they actually have this tool that sifts through beach sand to grab microplastic. And this tool is so successful that state governments are buying these tools to use in their beach cleanup process. And what happens is when small microplastic particles get into the ocean, they get into fish. They get into the sea turtles, marine mammals, sharks, all the big fish, all the small fish. And what happens is bigger fish eat those small fish. It accumulates. It bio accumulates. All the toxins that are associated with those microplastics get into the system. They are toxic when marine mammals finally eat those, you know, all their fish that they eat, the volumes that they eat, it, or the mass that they eat, it just builds up that those toxins build up and they could die. It could be very fatal or they'll just, you know, other fish will choke on it. You know, it's just, it's just horrible. Anyway, so the fact that we can get them off the beaches, which has been a big problem, is great. And sea turtles forever, our partner is doing just that. So every time you buy a shirt, you get at least $5 goes towards the, those, that organization right away. Okay. That's all the proceeds we make on that. So by, by, by going to our shop, speak up for blue.com/shop, you actually support our, our partner organization and ocean conservation by raising awareness to the public. So great way to get started in ocean conservation. But let's get back to our show. Um, I hope this records, I really do, I hope this saves this recording saves. But we're going to talk about the debate and a bit of a, you know, verbal fight going on between people who support marine parks and orcas in captivity. We're going to just talk specifically about orcas today. And the scientists and activists that are trying to stop orcas in captivity, they feel that orcas in captivity are ruining orcas, they're affecting their health, they're affecting their sensitivity, their intelligence, they're affecting their overall behavior because the idea behind it, the science behind it is that in the wild, orcas are very social animals. And they need each other. They need to talk to each other. They need their space from each other. The males tend to sit on the outside of the pods quite a, quite a distance from the females. But the males will stick with their mothers all year round. It's SeaWorld and other marine parks. The animals have been taken from their mothers and they've been separated. The males are separated from the females because the males keep getting beaten up because the females want them away from them because they're used to having them away from them in the wild. So there's, there's problems with that by separating them and putting them in these small tanks or small relative to what they're used to or what they should be in, they're going sort of insane. They're kind of getting a little bothered by it because they're a social animal. They want to be around other animals. They want to, they're very curious. They need stimulation and they're not getting it in these, in these tanks. What has happened according to the documentary Blackfish is that there have been some incidences with trainers and their orca whales in terms of either injury or fatality. Now Blackfish is a documentary released in 2013. You probably have heard of it. If you're listening to this podcast, I've mentioned it before. In, in session 12, we talked to Dr. Naomi Rose about the science behind, that went behind Blackfish to expose what was happening at SeaWorld and what they were doing to hide the fact that SeaWorld had some incidences against their trainers. They were still doing shows with trainers in the pool, in the tanks with orcas. And there was some deaths that occurred from that, but they tried to cover it up. They tried to say that it's not because, you know, there was trainer error. They tried to blame the trainer. It wasn't the, the whales fault, but in all, you know, honestly, it's a, it's a massive animal that we don't know much about. And the movie really brought that out. And since then SeaWorld has been under a lot of pressure to stop its shows, to stop the captivity of orcas, to stop its breeding program. It has a big breeding program where it breeds the orcas that it already has and it actually sells very, very high. The actual sperm of the male whales actually sell for a lot of money in SeaWorld has been able to profit from that. What that's doing, though, is it's creating a line of orcas that are getting more aggressive, because it's using Tillicom as the main male, and he has become very aggressive. That could be passed on genetically to other animals, which have had some incidences where, you know, trainers have died in different parks. So, you know, there's been a lot of problems. If you haven't seen Blackfish, I highly recommend it. I also highly recommend you listen to Session 12 of this podcast. It's www.speakerforblue/session12. If you don't remember that number, you can always just go to the show notes here, which is speakupforblue.com/session53. And then you can access, we'll put a link into that podcast. And it goes over all the signs that went behind that. Now, of course, SeaWorld is not happy about Blackfish, because Blackfish basically said SeaWorld is the evil of all evils. They're keeping these orcas for profit. They're not really doing a lot of research on it. They don't care. They just care about the higher-ups care about, you know, about profit. Now, I have to admit, I have a feeling that the people who work with the orcas, hands-on, who are there all the time, the trainers and the people in the park, I do believe that they care for these animals. I don't think they know all the problems that are inherent. Maybe they do now because of Blackfish, and a lot of them have come across, have come out. However, I don't understand, I don't think they understand fully what is happening here. And that doesn't help the trainers that they have. They're not necessarily a marine biologist or a marine ecologist. That's a problem. If you don't have an understanding of wild oracle populations, you may not have an understanding of why they're behaving the way they're behaving in a captive situation. So there's a lot of inherent problems going on there. And then it's kind of come to a head in the last couple of weeks. So I'll try and keep you updated. But I did put on a show last week, I believe it was last Thursday, Thursday's episode, which was episode 44. So session 44. Speak up for blue dot com, session 44, where we, or sorry, not 44, 49, I'm sorry, 49 because right episode three, sorry, session 49, where SeaWorld came out and said, well, our attendance in San Diego, in California, at the California park, is down 17%. We've lost $3.8 million just this year because of lower attendance. Obviously, there's a lot of pressure to change up the show. So we're not going to have in 2017, we're going to phase out our entertainment show, our entertaining show, the show that they have on now. And they're going to go more towards a conservation message, more towards a show, still going to be a show, but not as jumpy and entertaining to show how these animals will be in the wild. So I don't know what that's going to look like. I have no idea what they have planned. I don't even know if they know what they have planned or what they are capable of. The problem is they're still going to keep these orcas in captivity. Now of course, trying to get them out of captivity, that's another thing. There was Keiko, the orca who they tried to release into like a pen in a bay that didn't go very well, that animal ended up passing away. That was really our first attempt at releasing a captive orca. And so of course it's everybody's hesitant to release another captive orca, you know, because, you know, we don't want to see these animals harmed, let alone die. However, a lot of people have the sort of thought process that it's better that they try to be in the wild and have at least some bit of being in the wild, rather than staying in a small tank and being miserable all day that they feel. So you know, the way I feel about these situations, okay, so sorry, last week, what happened? They stopped, they were going to stop the shows. There was a couple of bills passed and the Coastal California Coastal Commission banned the use of the breeding program for the San Diego park. So they cannot breed, they cannot import or export orcas. Now that is a huge hit on SeaWorld because they make a lot of money that way. Now their other parks will still have the shows. The parks in Orlando, their parks in San Antonio will still have their shows as of now. And they can still breed and they can still do everything. It's the California Coastal Commission who have banned importing and exporting of orcas and their breeding program. Now you have to remember though, San Diego is probably the big hub for all this activity. Now that will probably be appealed, I don't know if that will be one or not, but there are federal bills that are going into the government right now that are talking about banning these same kind of practices. So banning the breeding program, stopping the breeding program, and I'm assuming banning the import and export of orcas as well. This will be a huge hit to SeaWorld, they don't want this at all. So they're going to fight tooth and nail to do this. And in their process of fighting, they use other campaigns, other means, the interweb is a big way of doing things. If SeaWorld comes out and says something directly, people will be like, well they're biased, they want orcas in captivity because they make money out for orcas in captivity, even though they know that the health of the animal, even though science is proven that the health of the animal is at risk. So if SeaWorld comes out with that, then people are not really going to take that seriously. However, if a website comes out, a website, say called awesomeocean.com, and says these activists are wrong, and Blackfish is worth nothing, and they're all lies, and this and that, people might believe it. The problem is, is awesomeocean.com is either partly or fully funded by SeaWorld. So it gets, so these are, it's a pro Marine Park pro SeaWorld site that really goes at and attacks, sometimes personally, and sometimes professionally, attacks the scientists and activists that are involved in keeping, and trying to release, and trying to stop the captivity of orcas, and basically try to shut down SeaWorld the way they work, the business model that they work at right now. So it gets, it gets interesting, when you read some of these articles, I was on the site today, and I was reading some of these articles, and mostly articles were written by Eric Davis, and there's a guy Stanfield that, that also writes some of these articles, and what was interesting is, one of the articles, they talk about these activists, two in particular. One is Ingrid, Ingrid, oh shoot, Ingrid Visil, let me just pull up my article here. Here it is, Ingrid Visir, I'm, I'm sorry, I mispronounced the name, Ingrid Visir, who's a New Zealand scientist, who has 20 years of field research on orcas. Probably one of the most world-renowned New Zealand scientists devoted to saving orcas and researching these wild populations, and Dr. Naomi Rose, who is on the show, of course, session 12, and who's also a field researcher that studies wild orcas populations, and works for an animal rights group, and has been in the media, has been under attack from, with her position of science-based information on what is happening with orcas in captivity. Now, one of the articles on AwesomeOcean.com, this Sea World Back website, had talked about Naomi, and talked about Ingrid, but called them activists, not scientists, called them activists, and they go on and they, they cite a two papers, one paper that was written by two X Sea World trainers, who are now speaking out against Sea World, and about orcas in captivity, who wrote an article basically comparing the life expectancy of captive whales versus wild orcas. All right, so captive orcas versus wild orcas, and then notice that the wild orcas actually had a longer lifespan than captive ones. Now this goes against, this is huge, because this goes against what Sea World is claiming, is claiming that they are saving these orcas because they are putting them in captivity, putting them harm's way of bad water quality, climate change, all this kind of stuff, and then they actually have a longer lifespan. Now there's another article with about four or five scientists who state that the life expectancy in captivity for orcas is longer than the one in the wild. Now I remember specifically from session 12, Naomi talking about this, this study with these four scientists, and what she said they did is they took out the higher aged orcas that were like 70 or 80 years old, they took all those samples out and they just used the basic range, the other range, so a lower range, which when you compare, actually has either the same or lower, you know, rate of life expectancy, then, or mortality rate, then, then, then the captive orcas. So, you know, there's a bit of a bias there. And of course, this awesomeoceans.com is saying, you know, these were the second article, the one that says the captive orcas last longer or live longer. We're all scientists and they've had 30 papers before and 10 papers before and peer reviewed scientists and science journals, and then the other ones were XC world trainers and they don't have a science degree. So right then and there, you're all of a sudden you're like, oh, well, they're not really backed by science, so, you know, we think that this is a bad thing, so they're just full of it. Well, it's interesting how they never talk about Naomi and Ingrid as scientists in that article. They talk about animal activists, which kind of takes away a bit of their credibility because they have, like, between the both of them probably have 40, almost 50 years of research on field orcas, field population of orcas. They know these populations very, very well, probably to the individual, in some cases, in most cases. So, you know, I guess my point is for this podcast is that with everything going back and forth in the terms of the debate, is listen to the science, figure out the science behind what people are saying, and critique it, critique all these articles, like I critique this one at awesomemotion.com, where, you know, they're not talking, they're not mentioning that there's any scientists on the free captive orcas side and the science side, and that's a big thing, because scientists make available decisions where policymakers can make informed decisions. So, they make available information, sorry, where policymakers can make informed decisions. That's what scientists do. I'm a scientist. That's what we do. We do the scientists. We do the science. We send them. We do get the results. We make it as unbiased as possible because that's the whole point of science. We get it critiqued. We get it reviewed. It's a very rigorous process. We either publish it in a paper, or we send it off to policy people, and they make policies based on the results. So when you have websites like awesomemotion.com, you have to be careful of what they say and how they say it, and how they mix and match specific facts that don't really add up. So be careful of that. And I'm not saying that I do it all the time. I make mistakes. The other day, last week on the Speak Up For Blue page, Facebook page, I shared a video like I normally do, and it was a video of a tiger shark and a snorkeler, and the snorkeler had his, I guess he had a GoPro, and he was looking down, and he saw this animal, this shark, this tiger shark come close to him, and the tiger shark was being curious. He wanted to see what it was about. Came right up to him, the snorkeler just pushed him away, tiger shark went away. He came, the tiger shark came back, again got pushed away, and then he went away. Now in my sort of statement, my title of the post, I basically said, "Oh, close encounter," you know, or that was a close call. And somebody right away posted a comment saying, "Andrew, what are you doing? You're sort of glorifying the fact that these sharks are all about killing," and things like that. The shark was just being curious. It didn't do anything, no harm was done, leave it at that. And she was right. I made a mistake. I tried to glorify the fact that sharks are just killers, which they're not. They're very curious animals, and this was my opportunity to say, "This is an interesting encounter that we don't normally see." So I apologized right away, I went back, I changed the headline, and all was better. And it was a good lesson for me, because I have to be careful of what I say, and I have to be careful of how I protrude things. I have a lot of influence now. As this page grows on a lot of people like it, I have to be careful of how I share my information, share these videos, because that was a perfectly innocent video, it was actually a really cool encounter that you don't see all the time. So we had to be careful, and I appreciate the fact that somebody in the Speak Up For Blue community called me out on it, because right away I kind of perked up, I apologized, and I changed it, and that's how I should react. In the future, I should be very careful of how I actually do things. So I appreciate that. Everybody holds each other to a great standard, and we should all work at that great standard. If we need to be called out every once in a while, we need to be called out every once in a while, and that's just the way we do it. So I hope that you guys in the next little bit do the same thing with any article that you read, whether it be on Speak Up For Blue.com, whether it be a deepseanews.com, whether it be on Southern Fried Science, which are basically our friendly sites that really look at facts and whatnot, but also on other things like these awesomemotions.com. You've got to be careful of how these sites portray our science, or the fact that they twist the science for better gain and to position themselves better. So be careful of that. Really look at it through a science view and critique the hell out of it, out of everything, and make sure that we hold each other to a proper standard. So I'm done with the podcast today, with the episode, but before we go, I just want to remind you, if you really want to make a difference in ocean conservation, go to the site, go to our online store, speakupforblue.com/shop. You can buy any item, and right away, you've done two things for ocean conservation. One, you're raising awareness by starting a conversation by what you're wearing or what you're using as a mug, or what you put on your phone. Start a conversation of what's happening with the ocean, by all those different sayings. And then you're also right away, and once you buy, once you purchase it, you're helping sea turtles forever continue their message, you're making our partnership even better. We're going to help out with a lot of projects, so we're not only just going to financially help them and support them, but we're going to support them on science projects. And I'm really, really excited about this. We're going to report back to you guys to let you know all about that, and I'm going to have Mark Ward, who's the president on here to interview so that we can, that you guys can find out more about sea turtles forever and what they're doing. So anyway, so that's it for the podcast today. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you're having a great Wednesday. It's the middle of the week, and I hope this, I hope this saves. I really, really do, because it's 1.30 in the morning, and I can't do another one, not today anyway. But anyway, hopefully this will do it, and whoosh me luck. But you've been listening to the Speaker for the Blue Podcast. My name is Andrew Lewin. I'm your host, Happy Conservation. [Music]