The last orca born in captivity by SeaWorld has died at only 3 months old!

SeaWorld ended their controversial captive orca breeding programs in March 2016 after huge outcry from the public. The park had got a lot of bad publicity in the recent years, with a peak at the release of the documentary Blackfish. This prompted them to end the breeding programs, and after this point no more orcas would be bred or captured, effectively ending their keeping of orcas on the long-term scale.

An image from a SeaWorld orca show. Image by Cybjorg at English Wikipedia, posted with the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license.

Despite this the orca Takara was just impregnated at the announcement of the stopping, and the 12-15 month gestation period for orcas means that the last ever SeaWorld captive orca would be born in the spring of 2017. And this is exactly what happened; in April of 2017 the calf named Kyara was born in San Antonio, Texas, the last ever SeaWorld bred orca to be born.

Kyara did not live long

Kyara died on July 24,just short of three months after being born. This makes her the 40th orca to die while being handled by SeaWorld, so it seems a very good thing that they are stopping all the breeding programs.

The most likely cause of death for young Kyara was pneumonia, an inflammatory condition where the lungs are infected. This is a big concern for sea mammals, and can be caused by a wide variety of different microorganisms. The veterinary team at SeaWorld is far from 100 % certain that this is what killed her, but they have promised a public post-mortem inspection to published. This might not be ready anytime soon, because tests like these could take several weeks or even a few months to get the results.

Kyara was the third SeaWorld orca to die in the last 18 month period, so at this rate the parks will not have orcas for very long.

Thanks for reading!

About the author

Hi, I’m @valth! I live in Norway with my wife, our baby, and our two dogs, one of which is seen wearing a bow tie in the profile picture!

I am very passionate about nature and biology, and have been studying ecology for a few years now. My passions are mostly within conservation biology, mycology (the studies of mushrooms), botany, animal behavior and general microbiology. I really enjoy both the theoretical aspect, as well as the more practical aspect of biology, and I spend about as much time in front of biology textbooks as I do spend on finding and identifying plant, mushroom and animal species in the forests.