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Orcas in Captivity

Close your eyes and imagine that you are swimming along peacefully in the ocean. Your family is at your side and everything is going fine, when all of a sudden you’re entangled in a net and dragged up on to a boat. Now open your eyes. This happens almost everyday to whales and dolphins around the globe. Innocent whales and dolphins are ripped away from their families, most likely never seeing them again. My name is Brandy Alexander; today I will be informing you on the conditions that Orcas live in while they are in captivity, how these conditions affect them for the worst, and lastly how this confinement is mostly for entertainment instead of research.

These whales live in tanks of artificial salt water. Some marine parks do pump natural salt water from the ocean to their facilities and filter this for use in their pools however in most marine parks fresh water is usually used to house dolphins and whales which are ocean dwelling creatures. Ocean water is made by mixing salt with the

fresh water however there is no way this can replicate the richness of natural water from the oceans where the wild populations live. Some of these animals are also held in chlorinated pools, which can result in skin rashes and disease

I hope you got a better understanding of the conditions a whale has to live in while in a marine life park, the mental and health problems they may face, and how most parks are for entertainment purposes rather than educational. So I leave you with this, I hope the next time you see a whale in captivity, you think of all the ordeals that that whale goes through to entertain you, the audience.

Many whales contract diseases, become aggressive, or suicidal from being confidened in these harsh environments. Orcas navigate and communicate by echolocation, for those of you who don’t know what echolocation is it is when they bounce sound waves off objects just like bats do. In a cement tank the waves from their own sonar are bounced back at them off of tank walls and can drive them insane. Basically their world becomes a maze of meaningless reverberations. Dolphins and whales that are from completely different social groups that are often forced to share the same tank, this can lead to dominant animals fighting for rank and death is not uncommon. A fight for dominance happened during a routine performance at Sea World's marine park in San Diego, California. When Kandu, a female Orca, suddenly turned on her pool-mate, another female Orca called Corky, and as a result Kandu had a broken jaw, she later bled to death. The cause of this attack is unk

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