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World’s Loneliest Orca Still Stuck In America’s Tiniest Tank

The Miami Seaquarium confirmed this week that Lolita, the unfortunate orca who has spent 45 years in captivity, will not be released.

Lolita is the oldest orca in captivity in the United States, as well as the orca with the tiniest tank. The 49-year-old orca was captured in the wild as a 4-year-old calf in 1970 and has spent the most of her life in the Seaquarium’s cramped tank, which is only four body lengths long and 20 feet deep.

Despite the fact that orcas are very gregarious animals and Lolita would have spent her whole life in the wild with her family, her only friend, a male called Hugo, died in 1980. She’s been alone ever since, albeit she now lives with a few dolphins in her modest abode.


When SeaWorld announced last week that it will stop breeding orcas in captivity, the Seaquarium responded with an update of its own, signaling that Lolita’s position isn’t going to get any better anytime soon.

In a statement, Andrew Hertz, general manager of the Miami Seaquarium, stated, “We will continue our dedication to teaching, protection, and respect for all marine animals, including Lolita, our resident Orca [sic].” “All of the park’s residents contribute to Miami Seaquarium’s aim of educating the public about the need of protecting the marine environment and its inhabitants.”

“A few months ago, the killer whale show at Miami Seaquarium evolved into an instructional presentation about killer whales, their natural habits, and the endangered Southern Resident Killer Whale population,” Hertz explained.

However, one marine researcher claims that the Seaquarium’s new performance is far from informative.

Dr. Naomi Rose, Ph.D., an orca specialist and marine scientist who works with the Animal Welfare Institute, told The Dodo of a recent trip to watch the revised performance, “I literally broke out laughing up in the bleachers… after they stated killer whales vocalize using their blowholes.” “It was a disaster. It’s completely incorrect.”

Rose also said that the show’s conservation focus ended up being a “grim and bitter” portrayal of how bad the wild was – an approach that, according to Rose, would not motivate people to want to conserve it.

“They wanted to show people that Lolita would never leave,” she explained, “and the only way they could do that was to illustrate how dreadful [the wild] was.” “They simply kept harping on about how bad things were.”

The show’s focus on the southern resident killer whales, a group of orcas that lives off the coast of the Northwestern Pacific, is relevant since Lolita was one of a generation of southern resident killer whale infants kidnapped in the 1970s.