Decades before captive orcas started falling sharply out of fashion in the West, U.S. authorities had stopped allowing their capture in the wild. But many say the practice is alive and well — it has simply moved east. Activists say Russia is the new frontier for catching wild orcas, an industry fueled by the growing demand for the crowd-wowing marine mammals from aquariums and theme parks in Russia and China.
Information about where orcas are caught and held is sketchy. Whale and Dolphin Conservation (WDC), a nonprofit organization based in the United Kingdom, estimates that at least 16 orcas have been captured between 2012 and 2015 from the Sea of Okhotsk, off the coast of eastern Russia between Siberia and the Pacific Ocean. WDC believes that at least three orcas are in Moscow, and that Russia has exported at least seven to China.
With pressure against orca capture rising in the U.S., activists say the industry migrated to Iceland, then Japan, and now Russia.
The Russian government regulates orca capture and in 2015 set a quota of 13 as the total allowable take for the year, the WDC said, citing figures from the Ministry of Agriculture. "Quotas were for 10 orcas annually until this recent increase to 13, which has us very concerned," Courtney Vail, WDC's campaigns and programs manager.
Researchers and activists say they have found it difficult to get exact orca capture numbers from the Russian government. Dr. Naomi Rose, a marine mammal scientist at the Animal Welfare Institute, said researchers know almost nothing about the orca population in the Sea of Okhotsk.
“Nobody is studying them. That’s the problem,” she said. “It is the least-regulated, least-sustainable place to be doing it, but that is also the only place that’s doing it. … They’re issuing quotas and permits about a population about which they know nothing. And they don’t seem to care.”
Orca-hunters have been operating in waters off Russia where they were already capturing Beluga whales, activists said.
No U.S. aquariums are known to have tried to import orcas captured in Russian waters. The Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta has attempted to bring in 18 belugas captured in the Sea of Okhotsk, but the NOAA in 2012 denied the required permit. The aquarium sued the NOAA over the denial in 2013 and lost, then appealed and lost again in September of this year. NOAA said that it denied the permit partly because it was unable to determine if the importation would adversely impact wild beluga stocks, and that five of the belugas were captured when they were so young that they were still nursing.
Of 81 beluga whales caught in the Sea of Okhotsk in 2013, 34 were believed to have died as a result of the capture operation, and seven died in temporary holding tanks, according to a 2014 paper presented to the Scientific Committee of the International Whaling Commission in Bled, Slovenia, the WDC said. The paper was written by Russian researchers Olga Shpak and Dmitri Glazov, from the Russian Academy of Sciences.
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