Word: keiko
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...Charles Vinick, sitting in the chopper overhead, was disappointed, he didn't show it. Instead, he was upbeat about the progress made since Keiko saw his first wild cousins a few months ago--and fled in fright. Vinick is executive vice president of the California-based Ocean Futures, a nonprofit environmental organization headed by Jean-Michel Cousteau (son of Jacques) that has taken over the job of returning Keiko to the wild. Ocean Futures sees this as a "labor of the heart" but hopes it will also help raise public interest in marine issues. "The knowledge we are acquiring with...
...Keiko has shown signs of wanting to mate, which may push him to try to join a group with fertile females, but whether he will be accepted into a pod is impossible to predict. He also has to "unlearn" what he was taught during his long years in captivity. Bit by bit, he has had to be distanced from humans, and his trainers reluctantly have had to drop, albeit gradually, the affectionate fuss they made over him. Physically, too, Keiko has had to be conditioned for a different life. The easy parts were training him to swim faster...
...least, says Vinick in tones of relief, "Keiko speaks killer whale." Long years alone in a concrete-sided pool--which, unlike the open seas, quickly bounced back any of the sounds Keiko made--did little to hone his conversational skills. Keiko was only a juvenile of two in 1979 when he was captured in Icelandic waters by the Gudrun, a ship that, ironically, is based in Heimaey's harbor, next to the bay that is Keiko's present home. Shipped to a marine park in Canada, Keiko did not respond well to captivity, and lesions started appearing on his skin...
Producer Richard Donner's Free Willy saved him. The 1993 Warner Bros. movie was a hit and was followed by an international public outcry, led chiefly by children, when it turned out that Willy in real life was Keiko, a sick and far from free whale. In January 1996, UPS helped pick up the tab for flying him in an ice-water-filled crate to a new home in Newport, Ore.--a $7.3 million pool, four times the size of the Mexican tank, with pumped-in, 37[degrees]F seawater deep enough to dive in. The pool was built with...
Within 18 months of arriving in Oregon, Keiko gained just short of a ton, mostly in muscle weight. His skin disease cleared, he started mastering the skills of catching his own fish, and he seemed much happier. But Keiko was still not free...