X-SciTech

It's Sink-Or-Swim Time For JJ

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

March 31, 1998 / 7:16 AM EST / CBS

JJ, the California gray whale, rescued as an infant and raised in captivity, was returned to the Pacific Ocean Tuesday to begin her life at sea.

The young whale was hoisted off the deck of a Coast Guard cutter and released from a sling about 10:20 a.m. PST. She splashed briefly before submerging into the water. About an hour later the crew of a spotter boat saw her surface. She was headed north.

"She's alive and well,"' said Jim Antrim, curator at Sea World, where JJ was raised.

JJ had a tough start in life. In January 1997, when she was just a baby, she was found stranded on a Marina del Rey beach, just south of Los Angeles. Abandoned by her mother, with her umbilical cord still attached, JJ was comatose.

Marine experts did not give her favorable odds for survival, reports CBS News Correspondent Jerry Bowen. Her rescuers didn't even think she'd survive the 100-mile trip to Sea World in San Diego.

Tuesday, 14 months later, JJ has grown to 31 feet and 19,000 pounds. And she is on the way home, back to the ocean, hopefully to join a pod of other gray whales during their northern migration. Sea World has been planning this operation for weeks, and on Tuesday, the time was ripe for JJ's departure.

"It's best for her," says Kevin Robinson of Sea World, who has been caring for JJ during her time at the marine park. "She's ready to go."

JJ will either reclaim her birthright among the ocean's leviathans or she will die from predators, struggles in commercial fishing nets, or her own inability to cope.

Scientists will monitor JJ by boat for the first three or four days. Then they will use four electronic transmitters attached to JJ's back to monitor her movements. If the batteries don't fail and JJ doesn't knock out the transmitters, researchers can watch her for as long as 18 months.

One critical point for her will be Monterey Bay, where killer whales, natural predators of gray whales, live in large numbers.

"We're not certain if her avoidance of predators is instinctive or learned behavior," Antrim said. "This is one way we might learn that."

If JJ doesn't migrate, it doesn't mean Sea World will take her back to their tank. Joe Cordaro, a wildlife biologist for the National Marine Fisheries, said researchers won't intervene if JJ is attacked or if her demise is because of a natural occurrence.

"Once she returns to the ocean, she has the status of a free-ranging marine animal," he said. "That means she'll have to make it on her own."