Episode 4: Please (Don’t) Go

Summary

The Good Whale: Episode 4 - "Please (Don’t) Go"

Release Date: December 5, 2024
Host/Author: Serial Productions and The New York Times

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Introduction

In Episode 4 of The Good Whale, titled "Please (Don’t) Go," host Daniel Alarcon delves deeper into the ongoing saga of Keiko, the orca famously portrayed in the movie Free Willy. This episode chronicles the challenges and pivotal moments in Keiko's journey toward reintegration into the wild after two decades in captivity. The narrative intertwines personal anecdotes, expert insights, and critical developments that shape the fate of the world's most famous whale.

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Keiko's Struggle for Freedom

The episode opens with Jeff Foster reflecting on his extensive research into orca behavior and referencing Alexandra Morton's insights on animal instinct. Foster posits that Keiko's path to freedom hinges on whether he retains the innate ability to survive in the wild or has become dependent on human care through his prolonged captivity.

Notable Quote:

"If you believe what Morton is saying, then the way forward with Keiko is simple. Just let him be." — Jeff Foster [00:28]

In the summer of 2001, Keiko faced a crucial decision point in Iceland. The team grappled with whether to trust Keiko's natural instincts or continue human intervention to aid his reintegration. Foster emphasized the dilemma:

"The only conclusion you can come to is that Keiko needs us humans for a while, certainly, but maybe forever, to watch over him, teach him." — Jeff Foster [01:50]

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Attempts at Reintegration

Despite initial setbacks, including a botched introduction to wild whales and unsuccessful attempts to establish lasting connections, the team remained steadfast in their efforts. Foster led multiple ocean excursions with Keiko, hoping each encounter might spark recognition and acceptance from wild orcas.

Key Moments:

• First Summer Efforts: Strategies included non-feeding introductions to avoid competition and attempts to pair Keiko with a young emissary orca, which ultimately failed when the potential companion left the area. [05:08]

• Challenges Faced: Frequent attempts to interact with wild whales lasted barely a minute, often ending with Keiko bolting away. Foster noted the emotional toll this took on both Keiko and the team:

  "A sluggish, undernourished whale at sea... we were getting a lot of pressure from certain, you know, certain directions to leave them out there as long as we could." — Jeff Foster [07:54]

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Funding and Team Changes

As 2001 progressed, financial strains began to surface. Craig McCaw, the billionaire funder behind Keiko's project, faced significant losses due to the dot-com crash and personal upheavals, including a divorce from Wendy McCaw, a staunch supporter of Keiko's rehabilitation.

Impact of Funding Shifts:

• Humane Society Partnership: By 2002, the Humane Society of the United States took over as the primary funder, leading to drastic changes in the project's operations. The generous work schedules and comprehensive support previously provided were replaced with tighter budgets, reduced staff benefits, and stricter oversight.

• Staff Exodus: Jeff Foster and most of his colleagues departed the project, perceiving the new management's intentions as undermining Keiko's well-being for financial efficiency.

Notable Quote:

"They were forced to push the old staff out, get some new blood in that would do exactly what the Leadership wanted." — Jeff Foster [10:35]

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New Team, New Approach

The new team, featuring individuals like Thorberg Valdis and Fernando Ugarte, brought fresh perspectives but also skepticism about the previous methodologies. Colin Baird, with his controversial history at SeaWorld, emerged as a pivotal figure advocating for a more naturalistic reintegration process.

Strategic Shifts:

• Less Human Interaction: The new regimen emphasized reducing human presence to encourage Keiko's natural behaviors and interactions with wild orcas.

• Increased Whale Time: Efforts were made to immerse Keiko in environments rich with wild whale activity, fostering opportunities for him to learn and adapt organically.

Notable Quote:

"The whole point was to give him more chances to do the kind of learning he'd largely missed out on as a calf." — Jeff Foster [15:17]

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Keiko's Behavior and Wild Encounters

As the team implemented the new strategy, Keiko exhibited a mix of tentative and hopeful behaviors. While sometimes he remained on the periphery of wild gatherings, other times he actively engaged, suggesting a yearning for social integration.

Key Observations:

• Whale Soup Participation: Keiko occasionally ventured into the chaotic gatherings of multiple orca pods, displaying behaviors akin to playful engagement or social exploration.

  "Keiko was there just on the side, just, whoa, there's something happening there." — Fernando Ugarte [22:33]

• Feeding Attempts: Despite ample prey such as leftover herring, stomach samples often showed Keiko did not successfully hunt, indicating ongoing dependence on human-provided food.

• Emotional Signals: Extended periods where Keiko sought human interaction—spending 57 hours near the boat—hinted at lingering attachments or confusion.

  "57 hours spent begging for attention has to mean something." — Jeff Foster [19:28]

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Adverse Weather and Keiko's Departure

On August 2, 2002, a severe storm in Iceland tested Keiko's resilience. The team faced a critical decision as Keiko was last seen near a pod of wild whales before inclement weather forced them to retreat. Subsequent tracking revealed Keiko had left the designated area, leading to uncertainty about his fate.

Decisions Made:

• Choosing Release: The team opted not to intercept Keiko despite waning signals, trusting his prior course and believing he was navigating independently.

• Emotional Turmoil: Left behind, the team grappled with fear and hope, reflecting on Keiko's ability to adapt and survive.

Notable Quote:

"I just believed it's so much better for him to be free out in the ocean." — Fernando Ugarte [21:38]

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Optimism and Risks of the Project

Dave Phillips, an environmentalist central to Keiko's rescue, remained optimistic despite setbacks. He viewed Keiko not just as a symbol for ocean conservation but also as a beacon for changing public attitudes toward captive marine life.

Perspectives:

• Symbolic Significance: Phillips believed Keiko's successful reintegration would inspire global shifts from exploitation to protection of intelligent marine species.

  "They're going to say, and Keiko will be one of the milestones in this transition." — Naomi Rose [32:55]

• Potential for Redemption vs. Failure: The project carried immense risk; success would validate years of effort and advocacy, while failure could undermine the movement for animal rights.

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Conclusion and Future Outlook

As the episode concludes, Keiko's fate hangs in the balance. The blend of human dedication, financial hurdles, and the unpredictable nature of the wild creates a tense narrative. The team's evolving dynamics and strategic shifts offer a nuanced view of animal rehabilitation, raising profound questions about human intervention and the innate desires of intelligent creatures like Keiko.

Stay tuned for the next episode as the story unfolds.

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• "If you believe what Morton is saying, then the way forward with Keiko is simple. Just let him be." — Jeff Foster [00:28]
• "A sluggish, undernourished whale at sea... we were getting a lot of pressure from certain, you know, certain directions to leave them out there as long as we could." — Jeff Foster [07:54]
• "They were forced to push the old staff out, get some new blood in that would do exactly what the Leadership wanted." — Jeff Foster [10:35]
• "57 hours spent begging for attention has to mean something." — Jeff Foster [19:28]
• "I just believed it's so much better for him to be free out in the ocean." — Fernando Ugarte [21:38]
• "They're going to say, and Keiko will be one of the milestones in this transition." — Naomi Rose [32:55]

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Credits

The Good Whale is written and reported by Daniel Alarcon and Katie Mingle, with production by Katie and Alyssa Shipp. The episode includes contributions from Jen Guerra (Editor), Julie Snyder and Irik Glass (Additional Editing), Phoebe Wang (Sound Design), and features music by La Chica, Osman, Nick Thorburn, and Matt McGinley. Special thanks to contributors Anna Marcibel, Clausen, Filipa Samaja, Patrick Miller, Michael Weiss, and Adam Lalitsch.

For more information, subscribe to The Good Whale on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or visit nytimes.com/serialnewsletter.

Transcript

[Daniel Alarcon]

This podcast is brought to you by Apple Pay. When you've got a gift list to finish, the last thing you want to do is take out your wallet a million times. Instead, pay the Apple way. With Apple Pay, you can pay with a phone you're already holding. Just double click, smile at Face id, tap, and you're done. The people in line behind you will thank you. Apple Pay is a service provided by Apple Payment Services, llc, a subsidiary of Apple Inc. Any card used in Apple Pay is offered by the card issuer.

[Jeff Foster]

I have this whole mini library of Orca books now, stuff I read for this story, and in one of them I came across a line from a field biologist named Alexandra Morton. She's explaining why, as a shy and awkward teenager, she found wild animals so compelling. She writes, animals always knew what to do and where they belonged. When I read that line in Morton's book, it resonated because I felt like it explained something crucial about Keiko's story. Maybe the key to solving this puzzle of what to do with Keiko is embedded inside that idea. If you believe what Morton is saying, then the way forward with Keiko is simple. Just let him be. If he's placed in the right environment and given enough time, he'll tap into that part of himself that knows what to do. He'll figure out who he is. Animals always do. If you don't believe it, or if you believe by holding Keiko captive for two decades we'd transformed him into an exception to this rule, well, then the calculus changes dramatically. The only conclusion you can come to is that Keiko needs us humans for a while, certainly, but maybe forever, to watch over him, teach him. We broke him, so we bought him. And this care is what we owe him. We have to help him as best we can. Respond to those bewildering questions he can't seem to answer on his own. What do I do? Where do I belong? And in the summer of 2001, Keiko's third in Iceland. That's precisely where the project was, at a kind of crossroads. Do we believe Keiko has somewhere deep inside the ability to figure it all out? Or do we believe we must protect Keiko from everything he doesn't know? From serial productions in the New York Times, this is the good Whale. I'm Daniel Alarcon.

[Daniel Alarcon]

This podcast is brought to you by Apple Pay. When you've got a gift list to finish, the last thing you want to do is take out your wallet a million times. Instead, pay the Apple way. With Apple Pay, you can pay With a phone you're already holding, just double click, smile at face id tap and you're done. The people in line behind you will thank you. Apple Pay is a service provided by Apple Payment Services llc, a subsidiary of Apple Inc. Any card used in Apple Pay is offered by the card issuer.

[Jeff Foster]

I gave my brother a New York Times subscription. She sent me a year long subscription so I have access to all the games.

[Thorberg Valdis]

We'll do Word o mini spelling Bee.

[Jeff Foster]

It has given us a personal connection. We exchange articles and so having read the same article, we can discuss it.

[Naomi Rose]

The coverage, the options.

[Jeff Foster]

It's not just news. Such a diversified disc.

[Daniel Alarcon]

I was really excited to give him.

[Fernando Ugarte]

A New York Times cooking subscription so.

[Daniel Alarcon]

That we could share recipes and we even just shared a recipe the other day.

[Jeff Foster]

The New York Times contributes to our quality time together. You have all of that information at your fingertips. It enriches our relationship, broadening our horizons. It was such a cool and thoughtful gift. We're reading the same stuff, we're making the same food, we're on the same page.

[Naomi Rose]

Connect even more with someone you care about.

[Daniel Alarcon]

Learn more about giving a New York.

[Jeff Foster]

Times subscription as a [e-mail] gift get a special rate if you act before December 6th. Okay. It's the summer after that first disastrous introduction to wild whales. The former SeaWorld behaviorists like Mark Simmons have left. But the Keiko project continues. Jeff Tracy, Jen and a handful of other trainers, many of whom had joined all the way back in Oregon, they're still there. And that initial botched introduction hasn't slowed them down. They're taking Keiko out into the open ocean to be around wild whales as often as possible.

[Colin Baird]

Dropner go neutral.

[Jeff Foster]

Drop.

[Colin Baird]

The hydrophones happen to do the same. Please drop.

[Jeff Foster]

Nerf's neutral and he's definitely showing an interest. He's approaching from the rear of them. Jeff Foster led a number of these excursions, and each time it happened, each time Keiko encountered wild killer whales, Jeff felt hopeful that this might be the moment when finally something clicked for Keiko, or perhaps even better for the wild orcas, that they would see Keiko, hear him and recognize that this stranger was one of them. Keiko's got a crowd coming up on him.

[Thorberg Valdis]

Hold your course and speed.

[Colin Baird]

Michael, let's go at 1 o'clock, just on the. Just pass about 50 meters on the other side of Draupad.

[Jeff Foster]

They tried a number of things to try to help the process along. They tried introducing Keiko to wild whales when they weren't feeding. So they wouldn't see him as competition. They cultivated a relationship with a young orca who they hoped might befriend Keiko, become a kind of emissary between Keiko and the wild whales. But that particular orca left the area before the plan could be realized. Still, Jeff says they pressed on.

[Colin Baird]

We were always, this could be it. And, you know, we were always really excited about that. You know, we had probably close to 100 encounters that he could have physically, easily touched these animals. He was close enough to be able to do it, but they never lasted.

[Jeff Foster]

More than a minute on him. Whales are right on him. Keiko just started to move fast. Whales are right on his tail. Out of sight now. He just moved up towards the bow. Lost visual. Yeah. Keiko bolted. He bolted. Nothing seemed to work. If Keiko was wondering if this was where he belonged, he always seemed to arrive at the same answer.

[Colin Baird]

Nope, just like to leave it just at that. No sense forcing this down his throat today.

[Jeff Foster]

Well, yeah, it's nice because we can also present him like this. Okay, we did it. It's over. We're moving on.

[Colin Baird]

And we had an animal that was, you know, he was really strong and robust from, you know, from his time in Iceland. But he was caught between two worlds. He was caught between the human world and the wild.

[Jeff Foster]

And it seemed increasingly clear he wasn't going to choose the wild world on his own. So Keiko's humans chose for him. His trainers started leaving Keiko out in the open ocean overnight, just a night or two at a time, at least at first. But crucially, without food, the thinking was this would motivate Keiko to hunt for himself. See, he hadn't yet demonstrated this ability, at least not enough to sustain himself. After all, for most of his life, Keiko had been hand fed over 100 pounds of fish a day. And what Jeff had seen when he tried to hunt for his own food just wasn't very reassuring. Like this one time, Jeff gave Keiko a signal to go get a live fish. So Keiko, always the good boy, off he went. 10, 15 minutes, he was gone.

[Colin Baird]

And when he came back, he came back with this little fish that was maybe an inch and a half long in his lips. He barely could hold it in his lips and was flipping back and forth, and that's what he brought back to us. And so we would push him. We'd push him to a point. You know, we'd go out there and not feed him, and we watch him, you know, very active initially and becoming less and less active and swimming, you know, spending more time on the surface and knowing that he was compromised at that point.

[Jeff Foster]

A sluggish, undernourished whale at sea. If the goal was to push Keiko to his limit, it was also pushing Jeff to his.

[Colin Baird]

We always tried to do the best thing for him, but we were getting a lot of pressure from certain, you know, certain directions to leave them out there as long as we could. And you know, you, and you can't do that, you know, you just can't, you know, you can't, you know, you know, I didn't sign on board to watch this animal starve to death.

[Jeff Foster]

After a series of unsuccessful reintegration attempts, Jeff Foster gave an interview to a paper back in the States. His assessment was bleak. It is possible, he told the reporter, that Keiko never will be free. Meanwhile, far from Iceland, the project's main funder, billionaire Craig McCaw, was starting to get antsy. Keiko's rescue operation and rehabilitation had been running primarily on his dime for years, since Mexico, to the tune of several million dollars, always with the hope that success, meaning release to the wild, was just around the corner. But as you just heard, it wasn't. And if McCall's patience was beginning to run out, perhaps more importantly, his money was too. By the end of 2001, the dot com crash was hitting tech bigwigs like McCaw hard. Really hard. Soon one of his billion dollar companies would file for bankruptcy and McCaw would begin to clean house, putting his $100 million yacht and an island he owned off the coast of Vancouver up for sale. Plus, he was recently divorced from his wife Wendy, a committed environmentalist who'd been a champion of the Keiko project from the beginning. And so by the start of the following summer in 2002, Craig McCaw had pulled away from the Keiko project and Dave Phillips went looking for new funds. It was the Humane Society of the United States that eventually stepped up. They would provide the funding to continue the project and become a partner in its leadership. But this new funder was not a billionaire with money to burn. It was a non profit, meaning things on the ground in Iceland were about to change. The generous one month on, one month off work schedule, for example, that was over. Now all you got was the standard two weeks vacation, the pay was slash two, and housing was no longer included in the deal. To Jeff, there were ulterior motives in the changes. He told us he saw them as primarily a way to push the old staff out, get some new blood in that would do exactly what the Leadership wanted, and he may have been onto something. Ultimately, Jeff and most of his colleagues did leave the Keiko project. And to some of the leadership, that change was a good thing, a very good thing.

[Craig McCaw]

It was like, we tried it your way. Goodbye. Now we're going to try it, aren't we? Yeah.

[Jeff Foster]

Naomi Rose was a marine mammal scientist working with the Humane Society. She'd had an advisory role on the project from the beginning, but now, in the summer of 2002, her organization was taking on a bigger role. Though Naomi had spent relatively little time in Iceland, just a handful of visits, the way she saw it, something had to change, she believed the trainers who'd left had been fundamentally, almost ideologically, unwilling to do what was necessary to make Keiko free. For starters, she felt they were too risk averse.

[Craig McCaw]

They did not like leaving him out overnight. It made them very nervous. I mean, it was very frustrating for me.

[Jeff Foster]

Jeff Foster disputes this characterization, and I'm paraphrasing here, but he says Naomi wasn't out there with Keiko day after day. Didn't know his limitations like they did. If Jeff doubted Naomi's Keiko experience, well, she had her doubts about Jeff, too. Naomi was a scientist, but she was also a longtime animal rights activist who was suspicious of anyone who'd come from the captivity industry. And that was true of a lot of Keiko's former trainers. She felt like if that was their background, how committed could they really be to release? As Naomi explained to my producer, Katie Mingled, the former trainer's whole approach was anathema to her. It required humans to teach Keiko how to be wild, which, as she saw it, made no sense at all.

[Craig McCaw]

Us training him to be a wild killer whale is a little ludicrous, right? I mean, how can you teach them to be a wild orca? Don't know how he would be trained, but not by us, by the other whales, by the wild whales. That's what the industry guys think. They know what's best for these animals. Think about that. Think about the arrogance of that mindset. I know what's best for this species that is so socially complex and intelligent that I can't even imagine what it's like for them. 500 people over the ocean surface. So the idea that we know what's best for them is ridiculous.

[Jeff Foster]

But isn't this project, in a way like you guys saying, we know what's best for you and it should be wild?

[Craig McCaw]

That's what the industry is. So you've been talking to industry folks, I can tell, because that's what they were accusing us of. We were giving him options. If we were just arrogantly saying, we know what's best for him, we would have left him. We would just let him swim off into the subset.

[Jeff Foster]

You guys weren't saying, like, we know what's best and it's to be with other wild killer whales.

[Craig McCaw]

We were saying, that's where he started. Let's try to return him to that, because then nobody has to take care of Keiko. Keiko will take care of Keiko.

[Jeff Foster]

But what if Keiko didn't want to take care of Keiko or didn't have the ability to? Was that choice really available to him? In any case, to execute the new plan, they had to bring on an almost entirely new team. And given the economic reality of a project that had lost its primary benefactor, it was a much smaller team. Keeping Keiko in this particular location in Iceland was way too expensive. So 2002 was looking like it could be a make or break year. If Keiko didn't manage to swim off into the sunset, then this stage of the Keiko experiment might be over, and the world's most famous whale would likely have to find a new, less expensive, and less remote place to live. As far as their original plan went, they'd done the rescue part, they'd done the rehab. If they couldn't release Keiko soon, they might have to settle for some kind of retirement. So they had to try something new. We'll be right back.

[Daniel Alarcon]

This podcast is brought to you by Apple Pay. When you've got a gift list to finish, the last thing you want to do is take out your wallet a million times. Instead, pay the Apple way. With Apple Pay, you can pay with a phone you're already holding. Just double click, smile at Face ID tap and you're done. The people in line behind you will thank you. Apple Pay is a service provided by Apple Payment Services llc, a subsidiary of Apple Inc. Any card used in Apple Pay is offered by the card issuer.

[Jeff Foster]

Hey, it's John Chase and Mari Uehara from Wirecutter, the product recommendation service from.

[Naomi Rose]

The New York Times. Mari, it is gift giving time. What's an easy gift for someone like.

[Jeff Foster]

Under 50 bucks in our gifts under 50 list? I really love this watercolor set from Japan. These beautiful, beautiful colors.

[Daniel Alarcon]

It's something that kids can do, adults can do.

[Naomi Rose]

I love that. For all of Wirecutter's gift ideas and.

[Jeff Foster]

Recommendations, head to nytimes.com holidayguide it's summer 2002. New staff, new tactics, first the staff. There were significantly fewer people working with Keiko now, down, in fact, to just a few core team members. And these folks, they weren't just new to the project. One of them had never worked with whales before. She was an Icelander named Thorberg Valdis.

[Fernando Ugarte]

Christiansdottir, but I'm known as Toppa. Which is easier.

[Jeff Foster]

It sure is. Topa was working at a small zoo in Reykjavik when she got the job.

[Fernando Ugarte]

I got a phone call from a friend of mine, and there he was asking me, would you like to work on the Keiko project? And I was just what?

[Jeff Foster]

She'd be doing a lot of the less glamorous work food prep, feeding Keiko when he was in the bay, that sort of thing. The guy in charge of tracking Keiko and studying the wild whales in the area was a Mexican biologist named Fernando Ugarte. This wasn't his first time meeting Keiko, though. Fernando happened to have been in Mexico on vacation for Keiko's last public show at the small, shallow pool at Reyno Aventura.

[Thorberg Valdis]

And the whale was looking so miserable, like he was. You could see that, his fallen dorsal fin. And he looked thin. It was a really sad sight.

[Jeff Foster]

Now he would be working with the same whale, only at sea, which is a kind of miracle if you think about it. And then there was Colin Baird, Canadian, the only one with experience training killer whales, though not all of it pleasant. He'd worked with Tilikum, the infamous orca from the documentary Blackfish, who'd been involved in the deaths of three people, including a young trainer Colin knew. Soon after this, Colin decided he was done with captivity. I think that was the final straw, if you will. You know, I already had thoughts of this just wasn't right. But Collins still loved working with orcas, so when the Keiko job opened up, he saw it as an opportunity to get back to doing something he loved, but in an environment he could defend. And now, here in Iceland, he had become the de facto leader of the new team. This final push to try to release Keiko into the wild was going to have a completely different vibe from the previous ones. If the main critique of the old trainers was that they had Keiko on too short a leash, the new philosophy was to do the opposite. They thought Keiko's best shot at success would be to give him more chances to do the kind of learning he'd largely missed out on as a calf, watching and imitating what other whales were doing. In fact, this is how scientists think. Orcas learn almost everything useful for survival in the seahow to communicate, how to play, how to hunt. This last point in particular would be key if Keiko were to survive in the wilderness, because killer whales in that part of the Atlantic hunt in a very specific and collaborative way. Not the sort of thing an orca can do on its own. But if he joined a pod, then at least he could eat their scraps. And maybe that was the best Keiko could hope for. Learn to track the cool kids through the ocean, hoping they might allow him to pick up the leftovers of their hunt. To foster these kinds of interactions, where Keiko could imitate and learn from his own kind, the team's new regimen boiled down to this. More whale time, less human time, a lot less human time. The previous summer, they'd tried leaving Keiko out on his own for up to 10 days at a time with no food. Now they wanted to try to go even longer. And just like the previous summer, if Keiko wanted to eat, he'd have to find his own dinner. There were still boats around keeping tabs on him, but it was all from a distance. To Fernando, it felt almost like they were abandoning Keiko, especially in the beginning.

[Thorberg Valdis]

He knew there were people in the boat. He could see us. He could new boats. So he came into the boat and tried to pop his head up and look at us, and then we just ignored him. We went and went below decks.

[Jeff Foster]

Fernando and Colin would hide below decks out of sight. They even had a term for these times. When Keiko spotted them getting busted, he.

[Thorberg Valdis]

Would just pop his head against the hull of the sailing boat and start screaming, like making a very loud call. Then it felt like children crying and we have to just wait for it to pass and him to give up trying to get our attention and turn back to the wild whales. Yes.

[Jeff Foster]

On one of the first days out, Fernando says Keiko swam straight toward them, staying beside the boat for the next 57 hours, seemingly looking for his humans, often with his head almost touching the hull, before finally giving up and swimming away. It's hard to know, or rather impossible to know, what Keiko made of all of this, but it certainly seems like a yearning for his caretakers, like a dog whining for attention, or some gesture of affection, like, hey, guys, I'm right here. Call it stubbornness, call it desperation, but 57 hours spent begging for attention has to mean something. And Keiko's trainers weren't always consistent, which probably made it even more confusing for Keiko. I mean, they weren't robots. Colin admitted he jumped in the water once with Keiko, and even broke protocol to try to overcome Keiko's reluctance to engage with wild whales. He told me he climbed on Keiko's back once, grabbing his dorsal fin and riding him straight into a pod like a jet ski. Mark Simmons, the behaviorist from our last episode, told us this kind of random, intermittent reinforcement may have actually been fairly detrimental to Keiko's progress, the kind of reward that probably seemed harmless, but may have kept Keiko wanting more and more addicted to humans. Despite the occasional breach of protocol, Keiko was getting more whale time. And now he was in a place where there were no discernible limits. For Topa, that was the entire point of this whole high stakes, high profile experiment to get him into the sea where he might have the chance to be with his own kind. So even if in the meantime he was isolated and alone, it was worth it.

[Fernando Ugarte]

I just believed it's so much better for him to be free out in the ocean, and there is so much going on that in the end he wouldn't be that lonely. So I never allowed myself to go in that, oh, my God, he's going to be so lonely that I'm going to keep him in my arms forever.

[Jeff Foster]

And she might have been right. Killer whales are all over Icelandic waters in the summer, and sometimes they gather in these great big orca parties, which some scientists call a whale soup. This is pretty much what it sounds like. A swirling, frantic, mosh pit of whales from lots of different pods mingling, playing in a way that looks and sounds, frankly, chaotic. And groupings here are very fluid. An individual orca might arrive at the soup with one group of friends, but leave with another, and it's no big deal. In a way, this flexibility was perfect for an oddball like Keiko, because maybe if he was lucky, one of those groups might even make space for him.

[Fernando Ugarte]

There is this one time which really blew my mind. It was a sunny day and the ocean was kind of so calm, and we had like two pods of killer whales. It was a lot of killer whales around us, and they were just coming up all over the place, just poof. You could just poof, poof, poof everywhere. And Keiko was there just on the side, just, whoa, there's something happening there. And if you put the hydrophone down in the water, we just had to pull it up again because it was so many noises and they were just talking so much together.

[Jeff Foster]

There's video of one of these days where Keiko's out near the whale's soup. It's almost as if he's watching sort of on the edge of proceedings. And you can see the waters churning with killer whales. Orca fins pop up from the water in groups of two or three. The crew had a hydrophone, an underwater mic, and they could listen to the cacophony of whale chatter through a loudspeaker on the boat. I like this tape so much. I just do. It could even be my favorite in the whole series, though, of course, I have no idea what it means. With sperm whales, researchers now know their clicks function something like an Alphabet for orcas. We know each family has its own repertoire of calls that only they make. But whether what you're hearing is language, in the way humans think of language, well, we just don't know. We don't know what it could have meant to Keiko, if it was disorienting or vaguely familiar or exciting, intimidating or simply noise. But just listen. It's so much chatter. That July, there were lots of occasions like this, lots of encounters. According to Fernando, Keiko was usually somewhere on the periphery, but always facing the direction of the other whales. In the videos, there are so many whales, you can't always tell where he is exactly, but sometimes you can hear him. Do you hear it? Keiko just sounds different. One scientist who had heard Keiko's vocalizations described them as not fully developed. To me, they sound almost childlike, noticeably so, if not to the untrained ear, then certainly to the wild orcas at that day's soup. Then again, amid all this noise, maybe no one was listening to the weirdo hanging out at the edge of the party. Like I said, all pods have their own distinct dialect, so it's unlikely that Keiko could actually understand what the other orcas were saying. But there is one universal sound all orca pods seem to share. Scientists call it V4. And get this, they think it may be laughter. So it's not a stretch for me at least, to think of Keiko, who was deprived of his orca brethren for close to two decades, at the edge of this soup, suddenly able to hear the conversations, maybe even laughter, of his whale peers and feeling an emotion he cannot name, like coming home late one night to discover music and laughter leaking out into the hallway. The neighbors you've never met, the cool ones, are having a party, and the apartment door's been propped open. Everyone's having so much fun. Keiko, so what are you gonna. As July unfolds, Keiko spends nearly all his time out in the ocean, away from the bay pen. And while Keiko is often near wild whales, he's not among them. We've got Fernando's field notes from that time and the progress Keiko's making, it's slow. In his notes, Fernando seems concerned. At one point, he describes Keiko as looking miserable.

[Thorberg Valdis]

But at some moments, I was wondering how much, when is too much, how much will this whale suffer before we think it's time to bring him back to human control?

[Jeff Foster]

They hadn't been feeding Keiko regularly, but if he was hungry, Collin says there was always tons of leftover herring. After the wild whales ate their fill, there was so much herring in the water that Keiko wouldn't even have to have hunted. He would have just had to swam up and started feeding on these things. But when they do a couple stomach samples, Fernando says, they find nothing.

[Thorberg Valdis]

Just slime and water, no fish.

[Jeff Foster]

Still, they keep on. From Fernando's field notes. July 19, Keiko is near, but not within the feeding wild whales. July 24th. More of the same. Keiko floating 1,000 meters from the closest group. On July 27th, Keiko seems to be closing the gap. Fernando records him as 30 meters from the other whales, but it's not enough. Even if he was closer to whales, he still wasn't really interacting with them. And Fernando is starting to doubt it will ever happen for Keiko. He notes in his journal on July 29 that Keiko doesn't dive when they dive. Instead just sort of floats on the surface. But when he's on his own, that's when he dives. But then the very next day, on July 30th, something big happens. Fernando was on a boat about 70 meters away, and a member of his team caught the moment on film. It was the usual whale soup situation, but instead of hovering on the edge of it, Keiko was suddenly right in the middle of the action, diving among the feeding whales, possibly even feeding himself.

[Colin Baird]

Yes, sir.

[Jeff Foster]

He did it.

[Thorberg Valdis]

It used a white wing.

[Colin Baird]

Looks like.

[Jeff Foster]

This was exciting, even if the overall picture was a little muddled. If you wanted to be optimistic, Keiko had learned, or was beginning to learn, where he belonged. I mean, look at him partying at the whale soup. On the flip side, his empty stomach samples from earlier that month were a clear reminder that he still didn't have it all figured out. So let's call it what it was. Keiko wasn't wild. He was wild at Jason. On August 2, just two days after Keiko's first real interaction with wild whales, or at least the first one Fernando knew about the Weather turned. They were all used to brutal rain in the area, and the strong Icelandic winds had been an issue from the very beginning. But they were mostly using a sailboat now because it was silent, which meant they could watch Keiko without really alerting him. In any case, being out on the ocean in a sailboat in one of those storms just wasn't safe. Before the storm got worse and the boat had to head back, they'd seen Keiko swimming near a pod, so what should they do about him?

[Fernando Ugarte]

There was just a lot of discussions. Okay, should we call Keiko in or should we leave him out there? What to do?

[Jeff Foster]

They decided to leave him out and take the sailboat back to shore with a plan to monitor him from back on land. But Topa says the extreme weather made even that difficult.

[Fernando Ugarte]

It was so windy, and it was so tough to go down to the coast with the radio transmitter just to try to get the signal. And then Saturday, we got the signal, but the signal was starting to get weaker. And then on Sunday, it was getting very weak, and we were just, okay, he's leaving.

[Jeff Foster]

Keiko was on the move. The signal from the radio transmitter got even weaker, and eventually they lost it entirely. Keiko had a satellite transmitter, too, but this one only gave them a few positions a day. They took the sailboat and later a small plane out to these locations, but when they did, they discovered Keiko was long gone. He wasn't staying still. He was heading somewhere, swimming east. But where exactly? Topa and Fernando couldn't say for sure.

[Thorberg Valdis]

At that time, I honestly thought that Keiko was lost, that he had lost the whales he was following, and that he was alone in the open ocean, not knowing where to go.

[Fernando Ugarte]

I was nervous. I was just, whoa, Will we ever see Keiko again? What is happening here? Is he going out and coming back, or how will this end?

[Jeff Foster]

Across the globe in the San Francisco Bay Area, Dave Phillips was asking himself the same questions. Dave, you'll remember, was the environmentalist who in some ways set this whole story in motion, orchestrating Keiko's move from Mexico to Oregon. He was still deeply involved in Keiko's care. With his whale on the move, he was staying up late into the night to track Keiko's pings on the satellite, the digital map of his progress as he swam east at an average of 44 miles a day.

[Naomi Rose]

You know, we were looking at. We were like, wow, this really looks intentional. It looks really strong. It looks really like he's going somewhere with a purpose. I was like, you know what this is pretty unbelievable that this is happening. And I really actually found myself being very excited. It was intrepid, it was bold. And I was just like, go, K, go, go.

[Jeff Foster]

This was it. Actual Free Willy. In Dave's mind, there was so much riding on Keiko's journey now. When he first signed onto the project, he saw Keiko as a symbol for the seas, a chance to tell a story about what we owed the oceans and the animals that live there. But now, now he saw Keiko a little differently. Now the story had become about us, about the potential for our own redemption.

[Naomi Rose]

I mean, I'm very confident, extremely confident that in a short number of years we will look back and say, I can't believe we ever let orcas be kept in captivity. What were people thinking? And they'll actually think about. I actually think they'll think about Keiko. In that vein. They're going to say, and Keiko will be one of the milestones in this transition, this huge ark of public attitudes that is moved from exploitation and dominion to protection and reverence.

[Jeff Foster]

Of course, that message only gets through if the Free Keiko Project is a success. But it's risky because if the project fails, it's sending the opposite message. Back in California, Dave saw reasons to be optimistic.

[Naomi Rose]

We know from the information that we collected that he was not like, zigzagging or stalled or if he was actually stopped and just floating and not making any progress and just lost, we would know that and we could do something. We also know that he was diving deep. The only reason for him to be diving deep was to feed. So we had ways of knowing was, was he in danger? And he wasn't.

[Jeff Foster]

There came a point where Dave and his team considered trying to intercept Keiko and bring him back to the bay pen.

[Naomi Rose]

I remember very clearly that there was a discussion about the fact that an intersection point, that there might be a plan, might be a way to get a boat there. And that was like a real kind of key decision point. And Lanny with his vet and me were like, no, we're not going to do that. Some. Some would be saying, you know, just get him and bring him back. But I think that the prevailing sense was he seems like he's maintaining a good course, he's traveling a reasonable distance for a. A orca whale, healthy orca whale, he's diving and we should just follow his trajectory and see where he goes. And that was the final decision.

[Jeff Foster]

Well, not the final decision that, as a matter of fact, would be Keikos. Next time on the Good Whale Something a little different, a surprise. You'll see New York Times All Access and audio subscribers can binge all episodes of the Good Whale right now on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Just head to the link in our show notes and subscribe. Or, if you're already a subscriber to the Times, link your account. Don't forget to sign up for our newsletter to see photos of the Good Whale himself. This week we've got pictures of Keiko gallivanting in the ocean while his humans watch from a distance. Go to nytimes.com serial newsletter the Good Whale is written by me, Daniel Alarcon and reported by me and Katie Mingle. The show is produced by Katie and Alyssa Shipp. Jen Guerra is our editor. Additional editing from Julie Snyder and Irik Glass. Sound design, music supervision and mixing by Phoebe Wang. The original score for the Good Whale comes from La Chica and Osman. Our theme music is by Nick Thorburn and additional music from Matt McGinley. Research and fact checking by Jane Ackerman with help from Ben Phelan. Tracking direction by Elna Baker. Susan Wesling is our standards editor. Legal review from Alameen Sumar and Simone Prokis. Carlos Lopez Estrada is a CAT contributing editor on the series. The supervising producer for Serial Productions is indeed Chubu Mac Miller is the executive assistant for Serial. Liz Davis Moore is the Senior Operations Manager. Special thanks to Anna Marcibel, Clausen, Filipa Samaja, Patrick Miller, Michael Weiss and Adam Lalitsch. The Good Whale is from Serial Productions and the New York Times.