Tide May Have Turned for Orphaned Gray

SAN DIEGO —  She spends her days and nights swimming and floating and eating and even playing, all under the solicitous eyes of the people who saved her life.

J.J., an orphaned California gray whale, is getting stronger, gaining weight and preparing for an uncharted and uncertain future. And the Sea World animal care specialists who have tended her since she arrived a week ago are increasingly upbeat.

“It’s been a novel, exciting, exhilarating experience, and also very cold,” said Keith Yip, an animal care supervisor and one of the specialists who have kept a poolside vigil over J.J. “It’s meant long hours, but overall she’s been an easy animal to work with, despite her size.”

Mention the name Sea World, the theme park owned by Anheuser-Busch Cos., and the mind promptly turns to Shamu, the stage name given collectively to the orcas--so-called killer whales--that serve as the park’s headliners and advertising symbol, adorning billboards throughout Southern California. (The original Shamu died years ago; the park’s biggest killer whale these days is 8,200-pound Corky.)

Shamu aside, a lesser-known aspect of the park is its marine mammal rescue program, which involves bringing beached, distressed and helpless animals to the park--with permission of the National Marine Fisheries Service--for emergency care.

In an average year, Yip and other members of Sea World’s stranded animal rescue team recover more than 75 animals, predominantly seals, sea lions and walruses but also an occasional sea turtle, sea otter and Guadalupe fur seal. (Hundreds of birds, mostly brown pelicans, are also treated.)

Most of the rescued sea animals are suffering from exhaustion, malnutrition, parasites or internal injuries; others have become entangled in fishing gear, garbage, kelp or other seaborne detritus. In 80% of cases, the animal is an infant that has become separated from its mother.

In the 1980s, 14 orphaned walrus calves were transported to Sea World from Barrow, Alaska. In 1990, a female hooded seal was recovered from Silver Strand Beach at Coronado, the first hooded seal ever spotted in the Pacific Ocean. In 1992, a harbor seal pup just hours old was rescued, hand-raised for three months and then released, after being named Cupid.

When an infant gray whale was seen thrashing off the coast and then beached itself at Venice Beach a little more than a week ago, Marine Fisheries Service rescue specialists knew there was only one location in Southern California with the expertise and facilities to handle such a bulky and ailing animal.

J.J. arrived at Sea World by truck on a Saturday night and upon arrival was showing the convulsive twitching that is common of animals on the verge of a seizure because of low blood sugar.

“She was comatose,” said Sea World veterinarian Tom Reidarson. “The only movements she had were involuntary. She was completely helpless.”

“Things were very iffy,” Yip said.

Lowered into a 40-foot-by-40-foot pool--filled with 120,000 gallons of filtered seawater from nearby Mission Bay--the whale was given copious amounts of antibiotics and a warm, sticky liquid made of cream, artificial milk and pureed clams and squid.

Dressed in winter wetsuits to protect them from the cutting wind and 55-degree water, the rescue team members kept close to the grayish creature, stroking her and guiding her around the big pool behind Shamu Stadium.

“We had to make sure she was coherent enough to negotiate the pool walls and not injure herself,” said Greg Bruehler.

For hours she seemed to respond only slightly, then, at long last, she opened her eyes and her breathing became deeper, more regular. Team members, who shared a fear that J.J. might not survive her first night, began to allow themselves to think she could live.

“I don’t think the whole thing became real to me until we felt her start to breathe,” said Shannon Lolley. “Her rib cage expanded, water came out her blow hole. Then I realized: This is real!”

Although team members are experienced handlers of other mammals, few had ever touched a gray whale. Her skin was squishy and bumpy, not sleek and taut like a killer whale. Her tongue was amazingly strong. Her gaze was direct and expressive.

“She seems to make eye contact and she enjoys being rubbed down,” Lolley said. “She will suck on your finger or your knee. Her tongue is full of muscles. The force of the compression is impressive.”

Still, J.J. has her moods. “When she doesn’t want us around, it’s obvious,” Yip said. “We give her her space. She’s very aware of our presence.”

“We want her to stay as wild as possible,” Reidarson said. “We don’t force ourselves on her.”

After the first intensive-care days passed, team members largely retreated from the pool, entering only to assist with feeding or to take blood or other samples.

For the foreseeable future, J.J. will be observed 24 hours a day, with one team member watching her at all times from a tall chair akin to that used by a tennis referee. Three to four team members enter the pool at feeding time to maneuver J.J. into position and then stick a slender tube down her throat, from whence flows two gallons of sustenance.

At 13 feet, 8 inches long and weighing 1,770 pounds, there is no moving J.J. if she does not want to go.

Her caretakers cite three key challenges that lie ahead for J.J., who was named for the late Judi Jones, director of operations for Friends of the Sea Lion, a marine mammal rescue center in Laguna Beach.

The first challenge will come in a few weeks when the natural antibodies she received from having nursed from her mother, albeit briefly, wear off. She will need to develop her own immune system to ward off the various ills that sea mammals are prone to.

The second challenge will be to learn how to feed herself, to scoop fish and other edibles off the bottom of her tank. Unlike orcas, gray’s are toothless, baleen whales that obtain food--mostly shrimplike crustaceans--by straining seawater through their mouths.

Gigi, a gray whale captured by Sea World in 1971 for a year’s study, took six months to be weaned from tube feeding. Part of the process of getting J.J. to be an independent feeder is to decrease her human contact.

“At this point she would be bonded to her mother,” said Jim Antrim, Sea World’s general curator. “She is focusing on us because that’s where her food is coming from. But at some point we need to divorce her from all that.”

The third, and biggest, challenge is returning to the ocean, probably in 12 months when California gray whales are again making their southward migration from the Bering Sea to Baja California.

Releasing animals back to the sea is dicey. Only a third of the animals rescued by Sea World are deemed fit to be released. Gigi, released in 1972, is the only gray whale ever successfully released, but it is unknown how long she survived.