Lolita, also called Tokitae or Toki for short (c. 1966 – August 18, 2023), was a captive female orca of the southern resident population captured from the wild in September 1970 and displayed at the Miami Seaquarium in Florida. She was retired from performing and taken off public display in 2022, and subsequently died in August 2023. At the time of her death, Lolita was the second-oldest orca in captivity after Corky at SeaWorld San Diego. In March 2023, the Seaquarium announced that plans were being made for Lolita to be moved to a pen in the Salish Sea for the remainder of her life. On August 18, 2023, Lolita died from renal failure after exhibiting signs of distress over the prior two days.
Life Lolita was member of L Pod of the southern resident orcas, an endangered orca community that lives in the northeast Pacific Ocean. She was a close relative of L25 "Ocean Sun", who is the oldest member of the pod. After Lolita's death, L25 "is the only living whale from the 1960s and 1970s capture era." Lolita was captured when she was an estimated three to six years old, on August 8, 1970, in the Penn Cove capture in Puget Sound, Washington. Lolita was one of seven young orcas sold to oceanariums and marine mammal parks around the world from a capture of over 80 whales conducted by Ted Griffin and Don Goldsberry, partners in an operation known as Namu, Inc. Miami Seaquarium veterinarian Jesse White purchased Lolita for about $20,000. Upon arrival at the Seaquarium, Lolita joined a male southern resident orca named Hugo, who was also captured from Puget Sound and had lived in the Seaquarium for two years before her arrival. The young orca was initially called "Tokitae", which in Chinook Jargon means "Bright day, pretty colors". However, given the age difference between the young female and Hugo, she was renamed Lolita after the heroine in Vladimir Nabokov's novel. The Lummi Nation of Washington refers to her as Sk'aliCh'elh-tenaut, or, a female orca from an ancestral site in the Penn Cove area of the Salish Sea bioregion. They view her as a member of their "qwe 'lhol mechen", which translates to 'our relative under the water', according to former tribal chairman Jeremiah "Jay" Julius. Lolita and Hugo lived together for ten years in the smallest orca tank in North America known as the "Whale Bowl", a tank 80-by-35-foot (24 by 11 m) by 20 feet (6 m) deep. The pair mated many times (once to the point of suspending shows) but they never produced any offspring. Hugo appeared to suffer from a form of psychosis endemic in captive whales, and often rammed his head against the tank walls; he died in 1980 at 15 years old of a brain aneurysm. Lolita then shared the tank with a short-beaked common dolphin and a pilot whale during the 1980s and 1990s, and later with a pair of Pacific white-sided dolphins, Li'i and Loke. In 2017, "the Miami Beach Commission voted unanimously for a symbolic resolution" to return Lolita to the place of her capture. In August 2021, Cancún-based The Dolphin Company bought the Seaquarium. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) inspection report released a month later listed multiple serious problems with the conditions in which Lolita was held. The USDA issued a new license that stipulated that neither Lolita nor her dolphin companion Li'i could be on public display or used for staged exhibition shows. The Dolphin Company announced that they would allow third-party veterinarians to examine Lolita.
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