Are they thriving?
Rojer
The claim is that all cetaceans, but especially killer whales, don’t fare well in human care.
“It’s difficult to imagine a species more inherently unsuited for captivity”, said Dayna Bochco, member of the California Coastal Commission and (as of the 2015 hearing with SeaWorld) “in bed” with extremist activists like Naomi Rose and Ingrid Visser.
I can show that this claim is very uneducated and that, in fact, it’s very easy to imagine many, many species which fare worse than killer whales, even if we’re only talking cetaceans and for the sake of simplicity, exclude all other animals. But for a more complete overview, I will include other animals, including terrestrial mammals and large fish, to show examples of animals that truly do poorly in containment, at least with what has been tried so far.
I would judge a species' ability to thrive depending on the following:
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The species is not notably* more susceptible to disease than in its natural setting
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The species breeds readily, pregnancies (or egg incubation) is successful, and young survive at least as well as in the wild
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Provided enough time (depending on species) and a high enough number of animals have died to provide sufficient data,
the species' lifespan is not notably* decreased from in the wild -
The species exhibits normal behavior appropriate to its situation (e.g. a wolf can't track prey for miles or a goose can't be expected to migrate), and displays general good "mental health"
*By "notably", I mean that real world data is imperfect. If a species has, say, a 19.5 year average lifespan in the wild, and 19.4 years in human care,
that is not a notable difference, but may just be a sign of irrelevant bumps in data.
Dall’s porpoise
A small number of Dall’s porpoises were caught for Marineland of the Pacific and the US Navy, and it never went well.
Most died very soon from hitting against the walls of their tanks, and the longest any of them survived was 21 months (a male named Marty, pictured). They would swim very fast around their tanks, and did not appreciate efforts to train them.
Dall’s porpoises are extremely fast, the fastest marine mammal together with the killer whale. They frequently dive to deep waters of 180 meters, and “zig-zagging” around in the water at very high speeds is normal behavior for them.
“Cormick (1969) reported that 10 captive Dall’s porpoises had never been observed to engage in any activity resembling sleep.”
Due to this history, and their highly specialized lifestyle, it is unlikely we would ever be able to keep Dall's porpoises happy and healthy in containment. Unless possibly a scenario where cetacean keeping is completely restructured, with enormous pools with wave machines, live prey or feeding underwater, and minimal human contact. This is merely my personal speculation, however, and even that may not be enough.
Narwhal
In the 1960s and 70s, attempts were made, surprisingly, to keep narwhals in aquaria.
My initial thought was that “don’t the keepers risk being accidentally speared by the males?” (forming slightly comedic horror scenes in my head). The problems were not that, but they were largely caused by the same thing - the tusks of the males. In the wild, they ram ice with their tusks, and so they’ll do the same with glass in a tank, destroying the glass. In addition to that, all narwhals taken died within months.
Vancouver Aquarium caught six narwhals in 1970, and they all died from pneumonia. The longest-lived, a male, died after four months. However, the water they were kept in was three times warmer than what they were used to (12 degrees C vs 4), which likely contributed to their deaths.
Perhaps they could be kept successfully today like their close cousin the beluga whale (since the number of narwhals kept was very low, and mortality rates were high for all cetaceans in those years), or perhaps their biology is different enough that they simply would never thrive.
VaquitaCPR
Vaquita
In 2017, VaquitaCPR led an operation to try to take some vaquitas and put them in a sea pen in order to keep them safe until the immediate threat to their survival (illegal gillnet fishing) had been removed. They built a round sea pen and caught two individuals on two separate occasions, an adult female and a juvenile. The adult died very soon after capture from heart failure, and the juvenile (pictured) displayed such great stress, they had to release it in order to save its life. The project ended all capture efforts after this.
This thus seems to be an extremely stress-sensitive animal adapted to a very specific environment and lifestyle, and they were already known before this for being very shy, quickly disappearing at the sight and sound of boats.
I don't profess to know more than the experts involved in the effort, and I understand that they did everything that they could with the resources they had, but before these failures, the moment I saw the sea pen, I thought "this is not going to work", because it was so small.
It was a circular, fairly small pen that could have likely kept a killer whale for decades, but for a shy and specialist species like the vaquita,
I was not expecting them to do well. I had expected the project would fence off a large bay of many hundreds of square meters, where the animals could live relatively normally.
Instead, in the small, circular pen, surrounded by nets and people, the animals went under such extreme stress it became life-threatening, and in one case ultimately fatal.
Beaked whales
Beaked whales of various species have never, to my knowledge, been purposely caught for display or research, but only rescued and rehabilitated. A couple have been successfully released after a few days of care, but most died very soon (which is of course already common for any cetacean in need of rescue), and the longest any survived was for only 25 days before being released.
Beaked whales are the cetaceans we know the least about, but we do know they are deep divers. Some can dive to thousands of meters of depth to hunt squid and jellyfish, and only surface every couple of hours to breathe, so it should come to no surprise that what they need to live and thrive can’t be realistically replicated in a manmade environment. Naturally, the same applies to other deep-sea cetaceans like pygmy and dwarf sperm whales.
Raularaque
River dolphins
Many Amazon river dolphins were caught between the 1950s and 70s, and most of them died. Today, only three facilities in the world keep river dolphins. One of the ones who did make it, Chuckles, lived for 32 years at the Pittsburg Zoo. Duisburg Zoo in Germany had two long-lived males. Apure/Vater, caught as an adult in 1975, died in 2006, aged around 40. Their last river dolphin was Baby, caught as a calf along with his mother in 1975, and he died in late 2020, approximately 46 years old.
So they can live a long time in human care, but overall they did not surive well (apparently due to the exhibits being constructed poorly, as Amazon river dolphins need a very shallow area to be able to rest properly, meaning the early dolphins died from exhaustion), and nothing can be said on breeding as I don’t know how much, if at all, it has been attempted.
“Rare” dolphins
There are and have been many species of dolphin (above showing Atlantic white-sided dolphins) which have been kept so rarely that there is not much to say on their survivability and breeding, because they are often (but not exclusively) only kept in poorer facilities, and/or only one or a few individuals at a time. So we don’t know how well they would do if as much money, energy and professionalism was put into them as often is in the common species today.
SeaWorld San Diego kept quite a number of common dolphins in the 1980s and later, and excluding the rescues that died quickly (since they were already sick and dying when taken in), their 13 common dolphins averaged 3.6 years before dying, and only four lived past 25 months. The fact that they are more pelagic than bottlenose dolphins may have something to do with them faring much worse.
Niall Kennedy
Great white shark
Many attempts to keep great white sharks have been made, but they have all failed. In 1981, a shark survived for 16 days at SeaWorld San Diego before being released, and that was a milestone. The longest ever a great white has ever been in human care was at Monterrey Bay Aquarium in 2004, when a female survived 198 days before being released. Two years later, they kept a male alive for 137 days before release, and another male the next year, for 162 days.
These were all juveniles, and the species has shown very poor signs of surviving in tanks. Frequent refusal to eat, constant banging against the walls, problems navigating, the list goes on.
So naturally, no animal has lived to an old age, and no breeding has ever taken place.
Ben Lei
Other pelagic sharks
Besides for the great white, pelagic sharks rarely fare well in containment. Hammerheads of all the larger species (the exception being the bonnethead), mako sharks and blue sharks are all known to fare very poorly in aquariums, mainly due to their inability to navigate around walls, so they can beat themselves so badly on the tank walls that they die, not to mention other issues.
If you find any pictures of these sharks in aquaria, you'll often find their noses are badly hurt.
The longest-lived blue shark in a tank was a one year old that survived for 873 days (2 years and 4 months), "but died due to factors such as disordered swimming due to dehydration." All other blue sharks died within one year.
Further reading: Mako shark,
brett211
Tobias Nowlan
Indonesian rhinos
There are two species of Indonesian, or rainforest rhinoceros: The Sumatran and the Javan. Both are known to do very poorly in zoos.
The Javan is not an entirely fair comparison, as they haven’t been kept in zoos for over a century. However, at least a couple of dozen were kept, but not once did they breed, and the oldest lived to 20, which is hardly middle-aged for other rhinos.
The Sumatran is far more well-known than their Javan relative, and unlike them they are still being kept, but they also fare very poorly in an artificial environment. Despite the advancements of zoos thoughout the decades, until recently, only one zoological birth had ever occured in this species, and that was in 1889.
Between 1984 and 1996, a conservation program transported 40 Sumatran rhinos from their native habitats to zoos and reserves across the world. While hopes were initially high, and much research was conducted on the captive specimens, by the late 1990s, not a single rhino had been born in the program, and most of its proponents agreed the program had been a failure. In 1997, the IUCN’s Asian rhino specialist group, which once endorsed the program, declared it had failed “even maintaining the species within acceptable limits of mortality”, noting that, in addition to the lack of births, 20 of the captured rhinos had died.
After this, more of the rhinos died, and eventually, only three remained. They were reunited at the Cincinnati Zoo, where the first calf in 112 years was born. Soon, three more calves followed, which makes for a total of five calves. Overall, this species seems to do very poorly outside their natural environment, and only breed well in facilities very close to their natural habitat.
I do not know why precisely they fared so poorly. Perhaps they need the specific humidity and temperature of their natural habitat. Perhaps they are highly sensitive to stress, and so became sick and died in a zoo environment that might be perfectly suitable to African rhinos. Perhaps they have an immune system suited for their native lands, but not outside them, and so they were basically immunocompromised outside of Indonesia. Perhaps their bodies need specific plants found only in their native habitats, in order to function properly.
I don't know, but I would love to speak with someone who has worked with, or has more detailed knowledge on Sumatran rhinos.
Baleen whales
Baleen whales have only been kept for very short periods of time after being rescued, and if they survived, were released again as quickly as possible, such as JJ the grey whale shown above.
They have obviously never been intentionally kept due to their immense size and specialized lifestyle. But I have to wonder, if a specific species, such as the humpback, could theoretically be kept successfully in human care. Decades ago, it would have been impossible, but today there are aquariums measuring 100 meters across.
While the Georgia Aquarium's Ocean Voyager tank (which keeps, among others, whale sharks) measures 87 by 38 meters and 24 million liters or 6.3 million gallons (the entire tank is slightly smaller than SeaWorld Orlando's entire killer whale complex, which contains 6.6 million gallons), various sources claim Chimelong Ocean Kingdom's whale shark exhibit to be far larger (though I have seen huge discrepancies in volume and no measurements).
A humpback whale is a much lower-energy animal than a killer whale, and not as social, but they may have other biological or behavioral requirements for needing more space compared to its size, so for simplicity's sake, let's extrapolate and give it the same size enclosure as a killer whale, for its size.
A 100 by 50 meters pool is to a 15 meter humpback whale the same as a 40 by 20 meter pool is to a killer whale, which is the same size as SeaWorld's underwater viewing pools for killer whales, and smaller (in total volume) than the show pools.
Again, it is not a very fair comparison to take a 15 meter relatively slow-moving filter-feeding whale compared to a 6 meter high-energy predatory dolphin, but it is just as a mental exercise, and because there is no better comparison.
I picked the humpback because like killer whales and bottlenose dolphins, they show incredible adaptability and diversity of behavior, with various subgroups having their own hunting strategies. Completely unlike the pelagic dolphins and porpoises, who when taken into aquariums, did nothing but swim in swift circles. Those species are so specialized for their lifestyle, they could not adapt to a life in containment.
I don't think baleen whales will ever be kept in aquaria so we will probably never know, but as a mental exercise, I think even humpbacks could be better suited for this than even some small dolphins and porpoises. (And certainly not the small minke whales, who don't exhibit the humpback's adaptability.)
princesskoko
Killer whale
Completely unlike the other species mentioned here, the killer whale is showing all signs of adapting very well to life in human care.
While activists like to point to horrible outcomes in the 1960s and 70s, or a handful of facilities that had much worse outcomes than the average (which also exists for every single species) this is not in any way a fair or reasonable way to criticize killer whale keeping today.
As it stands, they live just as long as in the wild (or more), infant survivability is vastly greater than in the wild, and they display every normal behavior, playing, resting, moving and entertaining themselves normally, socializing normally, showing they are content in their surroundings. Even recently caught whales from Russia (2012-onwards), being held in modern facilities, look as comfortable and at home in their new surroundings as whales that have been bred for multiple generations.
Being such an adaptable species, just like bottlenose dolphins, this is to be expected.