Rescued Whale 'a Fighter,' Officials Say

By TONY PERRY

Jan. 14, 1997 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

SAN DIEGO — She still lacks a name but she is getting stronger and being described by her caretakers in admiring terms: inquisitive, intelligent, courageous.

“She’s a fighter,” Sea World veterinarian Jim McBain said Monday of the infant gray whale rushed to the theme park in dire condition Saturday night. “She has a strong will to survive.”

The whale calf, brought to Sea World after beaching herself on Venice Beach, is gaining weight, showing signs that her immune system is developing, and is becoming increasingly responsive to the veterinarians and others who are monitoring her every move in a huge tank of chilled seawater.

Officials are encouraged by her recovery but remained cautious in their prognosis and would not rule out the possibility that the whale’s health could take a sudden turn for the worse.

“I don’t think we can say she’s out of the woods,” said Jim Antrim, Sea World’s general curator.

If the calf continues to improve, the best opportunity to return her to the ocean would be in about 12 months, when gray whale pods are again making their southward winter migration off the Southern California coast, Antrim said. The big mammals make an annual round trip between the Bering Sea and Baja California.

In the meantime, it is doubtful the public will get a first-hand look at the whale whose plight has captured international attention.

Sea World is a member of an association of public and private organizations dedicated to rescuing marine mammals. The group has strictures against putting rescued or beached animals on public display, Antrim said.

Even if the calf survives, her biggest challenge lies ahead: returning to the ocean. The only gray whale successfully released from captivity was Gigi, released by Sea World in 1972 after a year’s study.

But the case of Gigi is markedly different than that of the current whale, so much so that Sea World officials consider this whale to present unprecedented challenges.

“I told the staff: We’re walking on the moon here, we’re covering new territory,” Antrim said.

For openers, Gigi was 10 weeks old, 18 feet long, a robust 4,400 pounds and in perfect health when she was captured by Sea World researchers in Scammon Lagoon in Baja California in March 1971. Her fiercely protective mother tried to prevent her capture.

After a year of study and nurturing, Gigi was released off San Diego in March 1972. Just how long she survived is open to dispute.

The last signals heard from the radio gear attached to Gigi’s back came just three weeks after her release. Repeated efforts by the Navy failed to locate her.

Then in March 1973 a group of children on a whale-watching trip said they saw her off San Pedro. A Sea World researcher, shown pictures, swore the animal was Gigi, but debate continues.

The whale now at Sea World was only a few days old when she beached herself at Venice. She had been separated from her mother and still had her umbilicus attached. When she was brought by National Marine Fisheries rescue workers to Sea World, she was severely dehydrated, hypoglycemic, underweight at 1,670 pounds and near death.

Initially it was unclear whether the baby had ever suckled her mother, an important point because mother’s milk can provide a crucial defense against infection. Blood tests taken since her arrival have indicated that the baby did receive at least a little mother’s milk before the pair were separated.

“We detected gamma globulin, which is the body’s first line of defense against infection,” McBain said.

There is sharp disagreement among whale experts about the best method to use in reintroducing the animal to the ocean and her chances for survival once that is accomplished.

David Phillips, a whale expert with the San Francisco-based Earth Island Institute, said the best chance would be to return the whale to her mother when she next passes by Southern California, a virtually impossible task. The second best would be getting her to join a “pod” of whales, he said.

“This is really breaking new ground,” said Phillips, who is preparing the killer whale used in the movie “Free Willy” for possible return to the waters off Iceland. “Gray whales have an unusually long dependency period, a year or more, and this whale will have missed all that time of learning and being taught how to survive. Sea World has a daunting task.”

Howard Garrett, administrator with the Center for Whale Research, based in Friday Harbor, Wash., said the idea of whales having to learn how to survive is overstated.

“As long as they can get her well at Sea World, it shouldn’t be a big problem to return it to the ocean,” Garrett said. “Whales know how to be whales; it’s instinctive. They have big brains.”

Jim Sumich, a professor of biology at Grossmont Community College in suburban San Diego and a whale advisor to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, said he sees no reason to wait a year until the next migratory season to release the whale, once she is healthy.

Except for the mother-calf bond, Sumich noted, California gray whales are not particularly social. Pods, he noted, are just groups that may make the migratory trip together but have little else in common.

“There’s no reason to think that a 1-year-old, asocial animal will run out and try to hook up with animals with which it has no familiarity,” Sumich said. “By the time this animal is 1 year old, it will not remember ever having seen another gray whale.”

For the near future, the whale will be fed every three to four hours through a tube inserted down her mouth. The main diet, which has led to a weight gain of nearly 50 pounds, is a concoction of artificial milk and pureed clams and squid.

Within a year, Antrim said, the whale could weigh 18,000 to 20,000 pounds. An adult gray whale can weigh 74,000 pounds, making a life in captivity impossible.

As for the whale’s namelessness, Antrim said that names “evolve” and that “we’re waiting to see what kind of personality she has.”