Saving Luna

What should humans do when a wild animal tries to befriend us? It sounds like a fairy tale, but in 2001, in Nootka Sound on the west coast of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, it actually happened. A lone killer whale (Orcinus orca) nicknamed Luna was separated from his pod. Without the company of other whales, this highly social mammal sought out human contact.

Luna's solitary presence and his efforts to connect across taxonomic boundaries left both scientists and policymakers baffled. The Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) -- the Canadian government agency that manages marine mammals -- decided that Luna should have no contact with humans.

Photo: Roy and Sandy Bohn

People were threatened with $100,000 fines for interacting with Luna. One woman who patted Luna on the nose was charged with "disturbing a whale" and was fined $100 under the fuzzy law. But what does science say about human encounters with solitary cetaceans, and what can science learn from them?

There aren't many documented cases of lone cetaceans interacting with humans, but research indicates that human-cetacean encounters usually end in injury or death for the animal. Toni Frohoff, a behavioral biologist at TerraMar Research and the Whale Stewardship Project who has studied solitary cetaceans in the Pacific, indicates that, "the more contact dolphins and whales have with people, the more likely they are to suffer injury and death." That fact drove the policy of keeping Luna and people separate. Efforts to keep Luna and people apart were scientifically justified, but they didn't work.

The social needs of cetaceans have been described by more than 30 years of research conducted by Michael Biggs, Ken Balcomb, John Ford, Graeme Ellis and others on the Pacific coast. The data suggests that cetaceans are social animals, and orcas are possibly the most social of all.

Southern Resident killer whales -- the endangered community of orcas inhabiting waters off the Pacific Northwest into which Luna was born in 1999 -- form lifelong bonds within a matrilineal social structure. Males stay with their mothers for life. Their lives are defined by cooperation and consistent relationships. When an individual becomes isolated, that animal will seek relationships among other species.

Photo: Paul Laviolette

Thus Luna became intent on making contact with another highly social species -- humans.

We spent three years making Saving Luna, a film about the wayward orca. We spent a great deal of time observing Luna. Over one six-month period we documented hundreds of interactions between Luna and humans, and noted that Luna initiated the contact in more than 80 percent of those encounters. The Canadian government's policy was designed to keep people away from Luna, but it seemed impossible to keep Luna away from people. His drive to connect with other social mammals was likely embedded deep in his biology.

Management efforts continued to focus on keeping Luna and people apart. And Luna grew more persistent. He sometimes damaged sailboat rudders. He pushed small boats around, frightening people.

Some researchers had suggested intentional interaction with Luna as a viable alternative to ineffective attempts to isolate him. So in August 2005 we requested a permit from DFO for a scientifically-designed program to engage Luna in safe, consistent contact. Most of the cases studied by Frohoff involved human-cetacean interactions that were uncontrolled -- "chaotic," in her words. The key to our proposal was to eliminate the chaotic interaction -- which put him and humans at risk -- by providing Luna with controlled, scientifically designed, interaction.

But DFO would not issue the permit. It argued that such a program would further accustom Luna to humans. Ironically, that position was not based on data gathered in the field. Our behavioral data showed that Luna was interacting with people about 40 percent of his time, and our proposal did not increase that level of interaction. The idea was to replace dangerous, chaotic interaction with the 24-7 presence of an attractive and safe boat that would use human contact and other forms of enrichment to give Luna consistent interaction and provide a means to move him to areas where he might encounter his pod if it passed nearby.

In March 2006, Luna was killed by a tugboat propeller. He had approached the tugboat and was interacting with the crew just moments before he was killed.

Photo: Suzanne Chisholm

Science does not know why solitary cetaceans sometimes get separated from their family groups. But Luna's story is being replicated around the world. There are currently about a dozen cases -- belugas in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, bottlenose dolphins in Ireland, the UK, and France, and a lone dolphin in Israeli waters -- of social cetaceans living in solitude.

It seems important to help these animals survive, possibly by giving them the interaction they crave, but in a more careful way. If science can achieve that goal the animals may provide an opportunity for unparalleled scientific insights, and unique data could be gathered from wild cetaceans rather than captive or less social animals. Controlled interaction with a voluntarily cooperative wild animal could lead to studies of problem-solving abilities in the wild, the development and adaptation of communication, cognition, navigation, culture, and so on. An animal as cooperative as Luna could even be asked to bring back samples from the ocean floor or take cameras or other sensors into places or situations that are otherwise unreachable. The only caveat here is that the value of such animals to science depends on their freedom and wildness and thus any such programs would have to cope with the animal's decision to cease cooperating and return to its pod.

Cetaceans are certainly charismatic. However, humans should honor these social animals in two ways. First, we need to recognize their need to live their lives apart from us, so we should learn how not interfere with them when they choose to remain apart from us. Second, on those rare occasions when they do call on humans for companionship, we should learn how to give it to them safely and consistently with scientifically-designed programs that would eliminate the present pattern of chaotic interaction, replacing it with contact that benefits both species, educationally and socially.

If we can manage to build a productive relationship with these intelligent animals, science could develop a more robust knowledge base that would help humans learn how to coexist more effectively with the entire ocean ecosystem.

Saving Luna opens in Vancouver today (Dec. 5) at the Ridge Theater. Other cities will follow.

Suzanne Chisholm and Michael Parfit are British Columbia writers and filmmakers who specialize in stories of the relationships between people and the environment. Michael has written numerous articles for National Geographic and Smithsonian magazines, and he is the author of four books. Suzanne has produced other documentaries and stories for the National Geographic Channel and co-authored a book about weather.

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