"You're finally home!"
"Yes, mom. Sorry it took me so long."
Tokitae, also known as Sk'aliCh'elh-tenaut or Lolita, the lonely orca at the Miami Seaquarium, died yesterday at the age of 57. There were plans to get her to a giant sea pen where she could enjoy the rest of her life and just be an orca again, sadly, she didn't have enough time left.
Toki comes from the endangered Southern Resident population. She was captured in 1970 during the Penn Cove captures where hunters used boats, planes and explosives to drive a large family of Southern Resident orcas into the shallow waters of Penn Cove and then captured seven young orcas to sell to marine parks. Toki was brought to Miami Seaquarium where she shared her tank with Hugo, another orca. Ten years later, in 1980, Hugo died and Toki was left behind. Although she got various tankmates like a pilot whale, a short beaked dolphin and later pacific white-sided dolphins, she has never seen another orca again.
Her tank, damaged and rotting, is known as the "Whale Bowl" and only 80-by-35-foot (24 by 11 m) by 20 feet (6 m) deep. Toki was already 6m long herself. She spend 53 years in this tiny tank that was literally falling apart. And yes, it's the same tank she shared with Hugo, an even bigger male. They also performed in this tank. The park didn't retire Tokitae until 2022 (and they did it not because they wanted to but only because they would have had to build a new tank to be allowed to keep doing shows because the whale bowl was in a terrible condition), until then she had to do daily shows where she had to push trainers out of the water on her nose or beach herself on the concrete slideout.
Her mother L25 Ocean Sun is still alive. I wish they could have seen each other again.
