In the frigid Atlantic waters off Nova Scotia’s east coast, two orcas—a mother and her calf—swim freely within a long bay. They dive up to eighteen metres to the ocean floor, where rock crabs, sea stars, and mussels live and slimy eelgrass sways with the current. They sense nearby fish; they hear each other’s clicks and pulses. They swim openly within the bay, the only barrier being an eight-inch mesh fence made of Dyneema—“the world’s strongest fiber.” The two have spent their entire lives in a tiny aquarium but are finally back in the ocean and, nearly, free.

This is all a dream—part of a years-long vision of the Whale Sanctuary Project (WSP), which, since 2016, has worked to become the world’s first ocean sanctuary for orcas born in captivity. “We can give back to these animals what was taken from them,” says Lori Marino, a marine mammal neuroscientist and the founder of WSP. With decades of experience in biopsychology, Marino is best known for her appearance in Blackfish, the 2013 documentary about SeaWorld and the troubled orca Tilikum. There, she prevailed upon viewers to recognize orcas’ intelligence and emotional complexity, adding that all captive orcas are emotionally destroyed and psychologically traumatized, leading them to become “ticking time bombs.”

Following the documentary’s release, public opinion shifted. SeaWorld reported losses and later announced that it would end its captive orca breeding program. Three years after Blackfish, California passed a law banning orca breeding as well as captivity for entertainment (a grandfather clause allows SeaWorld San Diego to hold onto their orcas); Canada introduced a similar law for cetaceans in 2019. The last orca in captivity in Canada, Kiska, died at Marineland in Niagara Falls in 2023.

Now, at least fifty-five orcas remain in captivity worldwide, including eighteen held in SeaWorld parks across the United States. As laws ban the keeping of orcas in many parts of the world, they’ve become somewhat of a rare breed.

For scientists and animal activists, these captive environments have proven time and again to be unsuitable—not just due to their size. Their strongest piece of evidence might be the ages of orcas at death. The average lifespan for wild males is about thirty to forty years, with a maximum of around sixty years, and the average lifespan for females is forty to fifty years, with some reaching their eighties. But captive orcas rarely make it past thirty.

And so a question remains: What should be done with them? Should orcas be allowed to die in the aquariums where they are housed? Or is there a better solution, one that brings them closer to an environment from which they were taken?

Three years after the release of Blackfish, Marino decided to open a sanctuary to accommodate orcas that were born in captivity and cannot hunt their own food—“the first of its kind, anywhere,” she says. She’s been dealing with red tape ever since. It took around two and a half years and an analysis of 135 sites in Washington State, British Columbia, and Nova Scotia to land on Port Hilford, Nova Scotia, as the ideal site, in 2020. It took another three years to conduct extensive environmental analyses, including an Archaeological Resource Impact Assessment. In 2022, WSP received an offer to lease from the Canadian government.

WSP analyzed migratory birds in the area, mapped out the sea floor using lidar, recorded underwater noise levels, and tested some invertebrate species for arsenic left over from gold mining in the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. And the project has garnered support from the nearby community of Sherbrooke. Kwilmu’kw Maw-klusuaqn, a negotiation office that works on behalf of the Assembly of Nova Scotia Mi’kmaw Chiefs, has also expressed hopes for establishing a memorandum of understanding with WSP.

The goal of WSP, Marino says, is “to give back to the ones who are in concrete tanks as much of a natural life as we possibly can.” But the sanctuary has not been built; there is nothing but waves and rocky coastline at Port Hilford Bay. To secure final funding, WSP needs orcas and has its eyes on two currently held at Marineland in Antibes, France: a twenty-four-year-old female named Wikie and her eleven-year-old son Keijo, both of whom have spent their entire lives in captivity.

Around 150 kilometres up from Halifax, Port Hilford cradles a small bay along the Nova Scotian coast. Just south of Route 211, the bay exists in relative obscurity—the nearest gas station is fourteen........

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