This is actually Tillikum’s second human kill. The first one was in 1999 — a 27 year old man who was apparently desperate to win a Darwin award: “The Orange County Sheriff’s Office said the man apparently hid in the park until after it closed and then climbed into the tank.”
http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/02/24/killer.whale.trainer.death/index.html
Also from this CNN article, it says that in the show just preceding this fatal attack, the trainers were having trouble getting the whales (plural) to obey their commands and one of the trainers even made a joking announcement to the crowd about it. I expect this will be a key point in the promised review of procedures that SeaWorld will be undertaking. When the whales aren’t reacting to their trainers the way they normally do, this should be a huge warning sign to stop the show, get the trainers on high alert, and cautiously investigate the cause. A tummy ache or a tooth ache could put a whale in a bad mood, and others might react to the changed mood of the first one (in other words, they may prioritize the needs of other whales over the wants of their human trainers).
And I expect there could be other hard-to-spot factors that could set off aggressive behavior in whales. They have the ability to hear frequencies that humans can’t hear (20kHz is the high end of the human hearing range, and orcas can hear up to 120 kHz). Does SeaWorld electronically monitor that range of frequencies, to make sure some moron in the crowd isn’t either unwittingly or deliberately transmitting a high-frequency sound that could distress the whales without being heard by people? See this posting by a marine biologist trying to determine a safe frequency for “pinging” in connection with seal research, to avoid triggering the predation instincts of orcas: http://www.mail-archive.com/bioacoustics-
Good points!
Hey. See my most recent link posted. Very interesting, I thought....let me know what you think.
Also from this CNN article, it says that in the show just preceding this fatal attack, the trainers were having trouble getting the whales (plural) to obey their commands and one of the trainers even made a joking announcement to the crowd about it. I expect this will be a key point in the promised review of procedures that SeaWorld will be undertaking. When the whales aren’t reacting to their trainers the way they normally do, this should be a huge warning sign to stop the show, get the trainers on high alert, and cautiously investigate the cause.
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We were at Sea World in San Diego last summer and just such an incident occurred - the whales came out and were not responding to the beginning commands.
Less than 5 minutes after they realized the whales were not responding correctly to their commands, they cancelled that show & asked everyone to leave the Shamu stadium. I got the distinct impression from what they said that it was maybe mating season.
So they are careful about it. Or were when we were there.