Brandie the sea lion died after plung- ing into her 27-foot-deep swimming pool at the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, Calif. Sadly for Brandie, the pool had been drained for cleaning. Fanny and Brigitte, bottlenose dolphins and star performers at the Montreal aquarium, starved to death after their regular trainers joined a picket line in a strike. The animals refused to take food from anyone but their trainers, and both died after 38 days.
The official cause of death for Taffy the sea lion, dead at age 21 at the Morro Bay Aquarium in California, was suc- cinct but not very clinical: "Love sick." In May, the Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lau- derdale gave readers a detailed look into the world of marine mammals in captivity in the five-part series "Marine Attractions: Below the Surface," by se- nior writer Sally Kestin. Although the billion-dollar U.S.
marine park industry thrills millions of visitors each year with slick choreographed performances by dolphins, seals, sea lions, whales and other animals, our behind-the-curtain look showed a far less pretty picture of life in captivity. Our primary research tool was the Ma- rine Mammal Inventory Report (MMIR), a database kept since 1972 by the U.S. government's National Marine Fisher- ies Service.
The MMIR was designed as a tracking and research tool to fol- low every major event in the life of a marine mammal in captivity - from its birth or capture, to its transfer between marine parks, its death or release into the ocean. Among our findings: More than 3,850 marine mammals have died under hu- man care, many of them young. Of nearly 3,000 whose ages could be de- termined, a quarter died within a year of birth, and half were dead by age 7.
fabout 2,400 deaths in which a spe- cific cause is listed, one in five marine mammals died of uniquely human haz- ards or seemingly avoidable causes in- cluding capture shock, stress during transit and poisoning. The tip that led to the series came from a local animal rights activist, who contacted Kestin urging her to look into the death of an orphaned dolphin calf found stranded near Kennedy Space Center and named Rocketman by rescuers.
What intrigued Kestin in the federal records about the young dolphin was not what the activist saw - that the dol- phin had died as a result of a bad deci- sion by the federal government. Kestin instead focused on the reasons the government had ruled out several Florida marine attractions that wanted Rocketman. One had a herpes outbreak among its dolphins. Another had a "history of los- ing calves, maybe due to a viral dis- lease." Another had inexperienced staff and problems with veterinary care.
The conditions described in those federal documents did not seem to match up with the happy image por- trayed by marine attractions. Florida, the birthplace of the marine park in- dustry, seemed the perfect place to launch an investigation of the industry's origins and history. Antiquated database The creators of the MMIR database some 32 years ago probably imag- ined they were creating a reporting system that by 2004 would be a wealth of information for animal bi- ologists and zoo caretakers.
Instead, we found a creaky old database that wasn't even really understood by the agency that keeps it. In fact, it had never even analyzed the information in the MMIR. More than 3,850 marine mammals have died under human care. The fisheries service headquarters in Silver Spring, Md., is based out of the headquarters of the National Oceano- graphic and Atmospheric Administra- tion (NOAA). There, fisheries service officials at first refused to honor Kestin's Freedom of Information Act request seeking the database.
They said they wouldn't give it to us because they didn't know how. They could only give us printouts, which translated to more than 800 pages of legal-sized paper for the 9,678 records in the MMIR. When the Sun-Sentinel threatened to sue, fisheries service officials contin- ued to plea that they had no way of getting the database out of their com- puters. It was a DOS program, they said, and they barely knew how to use it beyond simple data entry and re- trieval.
They said they had no instruc- tion manual, and the company that designed the database interface in 1995 was no longer in business. All this was hard to believe coming from an agency that's part of NOAA, the same people who run our weather satellites and use supercomputers to study glo- bal climate change. We tried walking the fisheries service folks through the process of using dif- ferent variations of the DOS copy-to- file command.
They said they tried it, and it didn't work, and their bosses didn't want them spending time mess- ing with it. We hammered at them for weeks, and it looked like we were headed for court. Rosemary Armao, the investigations editor at the paper, came up with the solution - she proposed sending me to Silver Spring to look at the database and try to retrieve it. The cost was a bargain compared to hiring lawyers: $140 for a round-trip ticket on JetBlue, and $85 for a room at a run-down mo- tel in Silver Spring.
We also expected the fisheries service to balk at the idea of a stranger messing with their com- puters. But they liked the idea. When government officials say they can't make the computer work, they're not necessarily lying. For the trip to Maryland, I took a laptop loaded with several hexadecimal edi- tor and disassembler tools such as Hackman, expecting that I'd need to try to crack into PPIMS, the proprietary program that ran the MMIR.
But I never had to. It turned out that the PPIMS interface was linked to 104 dBASE files on a fisheries service server, and agency technicians knew where those files were located. The only challenge was to find which ones I really needed to re-create the MMIR reports, which include vital statistics such as name, age, species, birth or capture date, date and cause of death, and the current and previous locations of the animal.
I used a three-step process to find the tables I needed. Of the 104 possible choices, many were junk files. These appeared to be remnants of long-for- gotten research: queries that had been run years earlier but were still trapped in the system Weeding out the tables I needed turned out to be simple. First I picked the larg- est ones. Then I selected the ones with names that sounded important. Finally, I asked the fisheries service people if they recognized any of the table names from their use of PPIMS.
It only took three hours to identify the correct tables (datashet.dbf, inventory.dbf, species.dbf, and phf.dbf), import them into Microsoft Access and join them into a working copy of the MMIR. Data gaps For anyone who wants to take a shot at the MMIR, a warning: The tattered old database is filled with problems that make analysis difficult. There's missing data for many animals (the entries go back to the 1950s, appar- ently typed in from old paper records), but there are also many surprises.
For example, of the 7,121 animals in the database, more than 900 vanish with- out any explanation. Usually, this hap- pens in older records from the 1970s and 80s, and occurs when the ani- mals are transferred out of a facility. They are never shown as arriving anywhere. They're just gone. Another headache - and this applies to any research on zoo animals - is the issue of reporting how long ani- mals live in captivity.
Animal rights activists often look at only the aver- age age at death of captive-born ani- mals, which can be very low because of the high mortality rate in the first year of life. For example, the MMIR tells us that the average age at death for bottlenose dolphins that are born in captivity is only 2.5 years. But if the analysis is done a different way, look- ing at only animals that survive at least a year after birth, the average age at death climbs to 6.3 years.
The marine park industry cringes at either formula. They argue that aver- age-age-at-death calculations are un- fair because they do not include the age of animals that are now living. They prefer the use of "life tables," similar to actuarial tables used by in- surance companies to predict human life expectancy. The American Zoo and Aquarium Association's life-table analysis provided to us for the series said that its own analysis of the MMIR shows that bottlenose dolphins now in captivity have a life expectancy of 20 years.
Of the 875 dolphins that have died in captivity with a known birth date, only 17 percent have lived to age 20 and beyond. And 20 years is a long way from the 2.5 years and 6.3 years we found in the MMIR, and nothing close to the life expectancies reported by some marine parks at shows and on their Web sites - up to 30, 37 and 45 years. The association says it will take another 30 years of data collection before they have an accurate picture of how long bottle- nose dolphins live in captivity.
Despite checking with experts around the country, the best we could do for our series was point out the different sets of numbers, which unfortunately didn't clarify the lifespan question. The MMIR also suffers from under- reporting, particularly in the past de- cade. In 1994 at the urging of the in- dustry, the marine fisheries service was stripped of enforcement power over marine parks. The job was turned over to the U.S.
Department of Agriculture, which keeps inspec- tion records of facilities only on pa- per and in Adobe Portable Document Files, and only for three years before they're tossed. In the years before the 1994 agency switch, the MMIR shows that 30 per- cent of marine mammals born in cap- tivity died within a year. But after 1994, the rate drops to 15 percent. This remarkable improvement is not from advances in veterinary care.
Marine parks simply stopped report- ing stillborn deaths or the deaths of newborns to the government. To dem- onstrate this, we used LexisNexis to find newspaper accounts of the deaths of newborn animals, which are often publicized because the birth of a calf or pup is a big public relations event. Many deaths were not reported in MMIR. In a few hours, library re- searchers found 26 deaths in recent years that had never made it into the database.
And the MMIR might not have much of a future. In Washington, a bill passed by the House Committee on Resources in the fall of 2003 and an amendment introduced in April would cut back on the parks' reporting responsibilities. Opponents fear it would lead to the elimination of the MMIR, and could take away the public's ability to find out what happens to their sea stars. The MMIR has data on every marine park in the country, so it's possible to do analysis on local parks.
The con- tact person at the marine fisheries service is Jennifer Skidmore, at jennifer.skidmore@noaa.gov or 301- 713-2289. Contact John Maines by e-mail at jmaines@sun-sentinel.com.