45 orcas were captured for marine parks, now only 1 survives; this is the fight to get her home

She is the last of her kind to swim around in a cramped tank, deprived of a life in the ocean and natural waterways -- all for a crowd to marvel at her majesty.

Plucked from the Northwest waters as a baby, the orca was among 45 Southern Resident orcas captured and taken to parks worldwide. She's the only one left surviving, still putting on theatrical shows in Florida.

Now, Lummi Nation -- who have lived on the coastal lands that line the Salish Sea for thousands of years -- says the whale needs to live out her remaining years at home.

Their renewed push comes after decades of efforts to get her back in the wild -- and at a time when orcas swimming freely face dangers of their own.

When Tokitae, or Lolita, was taken

By using airplanes, boats and bomb -- hunters herded dozens of orcas from Northwest waters into Penn Cove in an effort to take them to marine parks worldwide.

The demand came in the 1960s and 1970s when people interested in the marine park industry learned that these animals were intelligent and trainable.

Lummi Nation says hunters chased Tokitae as a baby and split her L Pod family apart with dynamite, killing her siblings.

Tokitae was taken to the Miami Seaquarium, and housed with a male orca named Hugo. According to Whidbey News Times, Hugo died in 1980 of a brain aneurysm from smashing his head through the 5-inch-thick windows, which drained the tank of water and chopped off his nose. The average lifespan of a wild orca is between 60 and 80 years.

Hugo's death is a testament to the devastation small tanks do to these animals in captivity, activists say. Orcas travel 75 to 100 miles every 24 hours and in family groups. With Tokitae at 22 feet in length, swimming in a 48-feet-wide, 20-feet-deep pool, she can't even do a deep dive.

But for 44 years, Miami Seaquarium kept Tokitae and gave her the name Lolita. She performs two shows a day, seven days a week.

The fight to bring her back

With whale captures eventually ending in 1976 came various efforts from activist and Washington tribes to bring Tokitae home.

Most recently, Lummi Nation -- which believes in the cultural significance of Tokitae returning to her ancestral waters -- is leading a new push. They plan to keep the pressure on with a 27-day, 9,000-mile Tokitae totem pole journey that will end in Miami at the end of May.

"There's no way they should be getting away with putting these mammals in captivity for a show," Lummi Natural Resource Commissioner Steve Solomon told a Florida TV station. "Those are our brothers and sisters that were taken."

The lesson of an orca named Keiko, who was featured in the film Free Willy, hangs over their quest. After years as a captive, whale scientists tried to return her to the wild near Iceland in 2002.

They patiently introduced her to the ocean, but she never really found a family and ultimately swam to Norway, where she died of pneumonia in 2003.

That's why Miami Seaquarium says they don't believe a release is in Lolita's best interest.

"Any discussion about relocating Lolita to a sea-pen is not in her best interest and so, it is not something that we will consider," the Seaquarium said in a statement to the Miami Herald.

But the Orca Network, which tried to raise $2 million to bring the whale back last decade, says it's had sustainable solutions for the whale for years. They've talked about netting off a cove in the San Juan Islands with caretakers monitoring her diet.

The danger orcas now face

The number of endangered orcas that frequent the inland waters of Washington state is at a 30-year low. While there was a plunge of the population when they were hunted, orcas also face declining food supply, pollution, noise and disturbances from boat traffic.

Many have been sounding the alarm for years about the plight of the southern resident killer whales. The federal government listed the orcas as endangered in 2005, and more recently identified them as among the most at risk of extinction in the near future.

As of last year, there were only 79 left, and a baby orca has not been born in the past few years. Their diet consists almost entirely of chinook salmon—a food source that has had its population cut in half since the 1980s.

This struggle for food is a large part of what’s forced them into a 25 percent chance of becoming extinct in the next century, according to the report. The presence of motorized vehicles — like whale-watching boats — is impacting the orcas' ability to forage. The vessels force the whales to hunt longer and deeper.

Researchers believe that the whales spent most of last summer in the open ocean rather than near the San Juan Islands, where they’ve traditionally foraged and socialized.

How Washington is trying to make change

On Thursday, Gov. Jay Inslee directed state agencies to take immediate and longer-term steps to protect the struggling killer whales. His executive order aims to make more salmon available to the whales, give them more space and quieter waters, ensure they have clean water to swim in and protect them from potential oil spills.

"The destiny of salmon and orca and we humans are intertwined," the governor said at a news conference at the Daybreak Star Cultural Center in Seattle. "As the orca go, so go we."

Lawmakers also passed a supplemental budget last week that includes $1.5 million for efforts such as a boost in marine patrols to ensure that boats keep their distance from orcas and an increase in hatchery production of salmon by an additional 5 million.

Whale advocates welcomed the statewide initiative, saying it creates urgency and calls attention to the issue. But some also said it was long overdue.

"I think that everybody would have loved to have seen this five years ago," said Joe Gaydos, science director for the SeaDoc Society. "It is a crisis. The fact that we're responding is good."

Some late 2017 sightings of resident orcas were encouraging.

"It's been encouraging to see the resident orcas regularly [last] fall after so few appearances [last] summer," Jeff Friedman, president of the Pacific Whale Watch Association said in December. "It tells us what we already know: the whales will go where they can eat. It also tells us that if we can restore their summer runs of Chinook salmon, they will return to the inland waters more frequently, like they used to. More fish, more blackfish."