SeaWorld and the other groups took up to 50 orcas from the southern resident population of around 120, Rose said. The females in the group began to breed as quickly as possible to replace the numbers, but the group faced a second population drop years later when the stolen babies would have come to sexual maturity.
Even now, Rose explained, the population is still one third smaller than it used to be because the group is facing a number of other threats including contaminants and food shortages.
So, that wild population that SeaWorld boasts so proudly of outdoing? It's actually a crippled, endangered population that's struggling to find food and has been fighting for decades to bounce back from the damage inflicted by SeaWorld.