Animals In Film

A NIMAL WELFARE

Free Willy? Dolphin drama riles aquaria Proposal to remove captive dolphins draws fire

W a r h e a d s f r o m r e t i r e d P e a c e k e e p e r m is s ile s in s t o r a g e a t F. E. W a r r e n A ir F o rc e B a s e in C h e y e n n e , W y o m in g . A

n e w v e r if ic a t io n t e c h n iq u e c o u ld p a v e t h e w a y f o r c u t s in n u c le a r s to c k p ile s .

of the weapon itself. Scanning a warhead repeatedly with different preloads or test­ ing multiple warheads in parallel should make verification ironclad. “The inherent simplicity of the principle is enormously pleasing,” says John Finney, a condensed matter physicist at University College Lon­ don, who was not involved in the work.

Glaser’s group devised a proof of prin­ ciple with the British Test Object (BTO), a disk used for radiographic testing in un­ classified research. The BTO has a ring of tungsten, which gives a good approxima­ tion of fission induced when high-energy neutrons slam into plutonium or ura­ nium-235. (The verification test doesn’t increase a radioactive m aterial’s natural fission enough to affect a warhead.) For experimental tests, the team plans to blast the BTO with neutrons from a deuterium- tritium generator and align the resulting radiograph with the radiographic negative. The team anticipates th at it will be able to reliably spot mismatches and discern the true BTO from a fraudulent one.

If a future accord were to mandate elim­ ination of excess warheads, a state might be tempted to cheat by trying to pass off

g a fake as an authentic warhead slated for 1 dismantlement, “allowing the real thing m to be diverted to a clandestine stash,” | Acton notes. The zero-knowledge approach | would readily unmask common real-world £ frauds, the researchers say. For example,

if a nuclear power tried to get credit for decommissioning a harmless warhead loaded with nonfissile uranium-238 or reactor-grade plutonium, a skewed fission rate would reveal th at the device wasn’t, bomb-ready.

In March, Glaser’s group invited seven nuclear jocks to Princeton to “poke holes in our idea,” Glaser says. “If there was a flaw, we needed to find out before it was too late.” Garwin saw some chinks, including the po­ tential for a host nation to rig the system to fake a scan. Adding a second set of detectors tuned to a different neutron generator—for instance, beryllium shorn of neutrons by a gamma ray source—would make the system more robust, Garwin says. “Fission neutrons detected in the side detectors will then be sure evidence of fissile material.”

Before nuclear powers embrace the tech­ nology, they will have to jointly iron out any more kinks th at might undermine trust in a verification system, says Raymond Jeanloz, a nuclear weapons policy expert at the University of California, Berkeley, who also visited Princeton in March for the review. “It’s a great idea, and I’m cheering them on,” Jeanloz says. But to implement this, “the devil is in the details.”

He and others note th at a nonprolifera­ tion payoff may be years off. Even if nuclear powers agree on a foolproof verification system, they must still negotiate how many stored nukes to eliminate. ■

By David Grimm, in Baltimore, M aryland

J ohn Racanelli gazes at his eight bottle- nose dolphins as if he might be look­ ing at them for the last time. The CEO of the National Aquarium here, he sits on bleachers in a circular amphi­ theater as the animals glide around a giant concrete tank, some grasping small

orange basketballs in their mouths, others blowing bubbles. One peeks his head out of the water and stares back at the CEO. “He’s spying on us,” Racanelli laughs.

Last month, the aquarium announced that it is considering moving these animals to a marine sanctuary, citing concerns that it is cruel to keep such cognitively advanced creatures in captivity. The move has deep­ ened a schism in the research community that studies dolphins and whales, collec­ tively known as cetaceans. Scientist-turned- animal-advocate Lori Marino calls the aquarium’s announcement “a giant step for­ ward” and predicts the National Aquarium’s reputation will put pressure on other facili­ ties to reconsider captivity. But this week, the Dolphin Research Center (DRC) in Grassy Key, Florida, sent a letter to the National Aquarium denouncing the potential plan as bad for both science and public engagement. “It’s misguided in a number of ways,” says DRC Research Director Kelly Jaakkola.

Cetacean researchers have wrestled for years with the ethics of confining whales and dolphins; about 600 of the animals are kept in 34 facilities in North America today In 2010, Marino, then a biopsycholo­ gist at Emory University in Atlanta, helped draft a “Declaration of Rights for Cetaceans: Whales and Dolphins,” which argued that captivity spells cruelty for these intelligent animals, because no facility can reproduce the cognitive and social environment of the open ocean. She hoped her work on dolphin cognition—showing, for example, that the animals are self-aware enough to recognize themselves in mirrors—would convince col­ leagues that cetaceans should be studied only in the wild. Instead, many fired back

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with a series of papers arguing that captive cetacean research remained crucial (Science, 29 April 2011, p. 526).

Then came Blackfish. The popular 2013 documentary, in which Marino appears, cast a pall on captivity by focusing on the travails of a SeaWorld orca named Tilikum, which was implicated in the deaths of three peo­ ple. Racanelli says public opinion fed into the National Aquarium’s announcement, but he also has personal reasons. He began interacting with dolphins 40 years ago as a tank cleaner at Marine World in San Fran­ cisco, and says premature deaths of captive dolphins shaped his views. Shortly after he arrived at the National Aquarium in 2011, he stopped the facility’s dolphin shows (Science, 30 May, p. 951). Today, visitors can view the animals, but they won’t see them perform tricks. “No music, no monitors,” Racanelli says. “They just get to goof around.”

Still, he’s not satisfied with the current setup. The dolphin tank is small, chemically treated, and bereft of other marine life. “This is still a stadium,” he says, glancing around the amphitheater. “It does not feel like a dol­ phin habitat.”

Last fall, Racanelli gathered a group of ma­ rine biologists, veterinarians, and structural engineers to map out a new mission for the National Aquarium, including deciding the fate of its eight dolphins. If the animals do move, they won’t go to the open ocean, an environment most have never encountered. Instead, the group is con­ sidering the feasibility of a dolphin sanctuary, perhaps a large, fenced- off area of the sea. The animals would continue to get regular medi­ cal care, but otherwise would have almost no in­ teraction with humans. No such sanctuary exists today, so the team would start from scratch.

The working group, known as BLUEprint, hopes to make a prelimi­ nary decision about the dolphins by April of next year, Racanelli says. A sanctuary would take anywhere from another 3 to 10 years to become reality, and no cost estimates have been given.

Such a plan would face stiff opposition from other cetacean facilities such as the DRC, a nonprofit funded with admissions and public donations that houses dolphins in sea pens and has conducted studies of dolphin behavior and cognition. In its let­ ter to the National Aquarium this week, the DRC states that it and other facilities adhere to “extremely high standards of animal care

and training” and that Racanelli is advancing “opinions that are either factually inaccurate and/or that do a great disservice ... to the very animals themselves.”

Jaakkola, the center’s scientific director, worries that if dolphins are out of the pub­ lic’s sight, they’ll also be out of mind and support for protecting them will drop. “Be­ fore aquariums, humans didn’t know or care about these animals,” she says. “Now people care about them because they can get up close and personal with them. That’s why we

have things like dolphin- safe tuna.”

Others fret that our understanding of ceta­ ceans will stall without access to captive animals. Shawn Noren, a physiolo­ gist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who has studied whales and dolphins for nearly 20 years, testified in April against a California bill that would have banned orca shows in the state and phased out captivity.

Her studies on dolphins kept in natural la­ goons (where they also perform shows and swim with the public) has involved attaching heart rate monitors to the animals, for ex­ ample, to determine why they are susceptible to decompression sickness when startled by Navy sonar; this study was funded by the Of­ fice of Naval Research, which has not taken a public position on the issue of captive ce­ taceans. “None of this work could have been done in the wild,” she says.

Sanctuaries are not viable, Noren says, because dolphins that have spent most or all of their lives in sterile environments would

face pollution and disease. Plus, she says, “these animals are used to human stimula­ tion and interaction. They’d be bored out of their minds.” Jaakkola adds, “Sanctuaries are not necessarily a Disney type of place.”

Nevertheless, Noren says, the die may have already been cast. Even though the Cal­ ifornia bill she fought didn’t pass, the press coverage of it placed aquariums on the spot, and the National Aquarium’s plan, if it goes forward, “would put even more pressure on them.” There are other signs of changing attitudes. A biannual marine mammal re­ search conference in New Zealand last year hosted a panel discussion on the ethics of captivity, the first such forum at this meet­ ing that researchers can remember. Marino left Emory this year to head the Kimmela Center for Animal Advocacy, which aims to inject more science into the animal advocacy movement. She’s also advising the Nonhu­ man Rights Project, which last year filed a series of lawsuits in an attempt to free four New York chimpanzees from captivity (Sci­ ence, 6 December 2013, p. 1154) and may set its sights on cetaceans.

If chimpanzee research is any parallel, those who support studying captive ceta­ ceans have reason to worry: Similar concerns spurred the National Institutes of Health to phase out most of its captive chimp stud­ ies and move the animals to sanctuaries {Science, 5 July 2013, p. 17).

Back at the National Aquarium, one lit­ tle girl has toddled into the amphitheater and stares, mouth agape, at the dolphins. “Whoa!” she says. Racanelli looks over at her. “I worry about losing that,” he says. “But at the end of the day we have to figure out if these dolphins are part of our true mission: changing the way humanity views and cares for the ocean.” ■

Captive cetaceans

607 Whales and dolphins are kept in captivity in North A merica*

506 76 25 Dolphins Beluga Killer whales

‘ NUMBERS EXCLUDE THOSE HELD BY THE U.S.NAVY. WHICH DOES NOT RELEASE SUCH DATA

Source: CETA-BASE

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