"His unplanned capture proved the viability of holding a killer whale in captivity, and it hinted at the potential of live orcas as tourist attractions.
[9] The collectors mounted a harpoon gun at East Point, Saturna Island on May 20, 1964, as data compiled at the Light House from 1958 to 1963 showed that killer whales were particularly common there from May to October (peaking in August with large groups).
With care, the captors managed to have the young orca trail their small fishing boat like a dog on a leash; he intelligently avoided pain by not dragging on the harpoon rope.
[18][17] To vacate the dock and allow it to return to its regular work, a makeshift sea pen for the orca was constructed on military property at Jericho Beach, a location with less vessel traffic.
"[21] The seven-mile transfer of Moby Doll's berth on July 24 took ten hours, longer than expected, due in part to his resistance and attempts to escape.
[22] "The captured killer whale bucked, twisted, squealed angrily, thrashed the water and charged the boat that tried to nudge her into her new home," reported the Vancouver Sun.
[24] Because scientists had never previously been able to study a live orca, aquarium curator Murray Newman was eager to keep Moby Doll for that purpose, more than for display.
[22][26] When Moby Doll was moved to the army base at Jericho Beach, "guards were posted 24 hours a day to protect the whale from the public.
[41] Murray Newman and McGeer rightly came to suspect that orcas do not stop swimming to sleep, because the guards that were posted to Moby Doll's pen never observed it.
[20][47] After Moby's death, when his body had been lifted by a crane, Joe Bauer confidently reached into his genital slit and pulled out his penis, and teasingly asked Penfold, "What do you think now, Vince?
"[4] When Sam Burich the sculptor-capturer eventually completed his model of the whale the following year, he made a special casting of the penis as a gift for his onetime assistant Bauer, who had shielded the orca from the bullets during his capture.
When one-pound fish were lowered into the water, the juvenile orca ignored them and inadvertently knocked them off the lines with his tail as he continued swimming around the pen, oblivious to the fact that they were meant to be food for him.
Aeneas Bell-Irving called Moby Doll's pen a sick bay and speculated that it might take several months to have him "eating out of hand" and being friendly.
[48] In early September, assistant curator Vince Penfold reported that the moody and docile orca of the first weeks after his capture had become friskier, at times tail slapping and even breaching, although the public was still not permitted to visit the whale until a permanent pen might be built.
The Vancouver Sun account blandly reported that "Moby Doll finally got really hungry,"[50] yet orcas, unlike some other whale species, are not physiologically suited to long fasts, and forage multiple times every day.
He was photographed using a far shorter pole than before, to dangle fish at the surface for the orca to take directly, as Moby Doll rolled over, "to show her belly and her 24 pointed teeth two inches long.
"[54] The feeding problem was solved, but aquarium staff remained intent on searching for a better site with more consistent salinity and tidal cleansing of the water, amid concerns over an unsightly skin condition that Moby Doll had developed.
[56] In their discussion, they stated that, while Orcinus orca was well known as a hunter of marine mammals, "the young specimen captured at Saturna Island preferred fish to mammalian flesh.
[6] Writing later, Newman and McGeer summarized: "The enervating effects of acute mycotic and bacterial infections together with the debilitated condition of the animal probably led to exhaustion and drowning in the water of low salinity.
[39] In their scientific paper, Newman and McGeer's final words about Moby Doll were, "The experience indicated the feasibility of maintaining and possibly training killer whales in captivity.
[4][65] Although the Vancouver Aquarium wanted to replace Moby Doll, nearly three years passed before it opportunistically acquired Walter the Whale, another southern resident orca, in March 1967.
With the more knowledgeable practices they implemented, Walter, renamed Skana, survived for thirteen years to be "the star of Stanley Park, giving millions their first close-up view of a killer whale.
"[68] The orca was fed "100 pounds of fish, mostly ling cod and herring, in four daily feedings," illustrated in an intimate photograph with Terry McLeod, who had also been Moby Doll's trainer.
In Walter's new tank at the Vancouver Aquarium, Vince Penfold reversed the sexing problem he had had with Moby Doll, whose 'feminine' name had been given to a male orca.
"[73] "Moby Doll's time in Vancouver was brief, but he had made his mark...His unplanned capture proved the viability of holding a killer whale in captivity, and it hinted at the potential of live orcas as tourist attractions.
They came from Charlie White of the Undersea Gardens at Oak Bay Marina on Vancouver Island, and from Marineland of the Pacific in California, which had captured Wanda, the diseased first orca ever held in captivity.
When the orca was trapped by a fishing net near the town of Namu, British Columbia, one of the fishermen, Robert "Lonnie" McGarvey, remembering Newman's valuation of Moby Doll, believed the "blackfish" would make him some money, and started looking for a customer, and found one.
Subsequently, aquarium director Murray Newman "sent the young man to Sea Life Park on Oahu to apprentice in marine mammal training.
For the first time, Spong grasped the fundamentally acoustic nature of orcas and in the process realized what a limited view of them his visual acuity tests had provided.
[90] When launching their first expedition, in April 1975, the activists "unfurled a flag featuring an indigenous image of a killer whale as they departed," with poetic justice, from Jericho Beach.