Nice photo! The pacific white-sided dolphins have become extremely popular at the aquarium, and it's interesting that a few killer whales used to be kept in the same pool before they were phased out a decade ago.
i love pacific white sided dolpins, but there are none in europe and the closest ones to where im staying in florida is miami seaquarium, darn you seaworld, get some pacific white sided dolphins!
When I visited they only had one lonely dolphin, called Spinaker I think. I believe he'd previously been the companion to their last orca. It was not possible to release him into the wild as he had health problems: old injuries (boat?) that needed ongoing treatment I think. Glad they've found him some company.
I don't think they had anywhere near enough space for orca, and that's probably why they phased them out. When I was a kid a lot of places kept single orca. It's now realised that they really need to be kept in family groups. In the wild orca stay in familly groups for life. For mating two or more groups meet up. Added to that there's two types of orca, residents and transients who differ in hunting habits and range, which a lot of the early exhibitors didn't know. All in all keeping orca properly in captivity would require a lot of space! Really you'd need space for two groups at least, and you'd need to rotate whole groups to other aquaria to prevent inbreeding. Not sure anyone is actually doing this!
(Information learnt during several hours on a boat coming back from seeing a resident population of orca's near Vancouver *g*. I got very lucky and visited on a day there was mating going on and large numbers of pods had met up and there was a fair amount of breeching etc going on)
