(photo: Dolphin Project)
Lolita, the World’s Loneliest Orca, Has Lived In This Tank For Over 40 Years
In 1970, when she was just four years old, she was captured from her family, the “L”-pod, from the Salish Sea off the coast of Seattle in the Pacific Northwest and sold to the Miami Seaquarium for about $20,000.
She currently resides in the smallest orca tank in the United States. It measures just 80 feet long, 60 feet wide, and a shallow 20 feet deep. Experts note that her tank is so small that it violates the standards of the Animal Welfare Act, legislation that outlines the bare minimum of acceptable standards of care for animals held for exhibition and research.
When she first came to the Seaquarium, Lolita lived alongside Hugo, another orca captured from the same region, who had been captured two years earlier. Lolita and Hugo lived together for about 10 years until Hugo, after years of slamming his head against the sides of the tank and breaking his rostrum, died of a brain aneurysm in 1980.
Since Hugo’s death, Lolita has lived without the company of any other orca, a lonely life for a member of a family-oriented, social species
