Toa of Plimmerton. Photo by Marty MELVILLE / AFP via Getty Images

ScienceJuly 21, 2021

The Toa conundrum: DOC faces tough call on what’s next for the celebrity orca

Mirjam Guesgen

Contributing writer

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Toa of Plimmerton. Photo by Marty MELVILLE / AFP via Getty Images

Ten days after the young orca whale calf, named Toa, became separated from its mother in Plimmerton harbour north of Wellington, the Department of Conservation faces a difficult decision: what to do if the pod can’t be located?

New Zealanders have been enthralled by the saga of efforts to reunite Toa, the juvenile orca who is not yet three months old, with his pod. Not since Happy Feet the emperor penguin ate several stomachs-full of sand has a wild animal received this much attention.

But while the focus has been on scouring the seas by boat and plane in search of Toa’s pod, there needs to be a plan B and C according to a leading marine biologist and animal ethicists.

Toa has been kept in a temporary pool since the weekend due to unfavourable weather conditions in the Plimmerton harbour but as time stretches on, concerns about the animal’s welfare grow.

The orca is being cared for around the clock by DOC staff and veterinarians but because of Toa’s young age, what he really needs is his mother, according to marine biologist Karen Stockin of Massey University. “He is a new-born, a mammal totally dependent upon his mother for nutrition and his pod for the development of critical life skills,” she says.

“While excellent veterinary care has enabled Toa’s health to stabilise in the interim, the question must be asked, how long can he remain stable in the current situation?”

The question is both a biological one and an ethical one.

Orcas have a complex social structure consisting of a mum and her calves, their pod, the wider clan (a group of pods) all the way up to a community of several clans in some areas of the world.

It’s through these social groups, particularly their relationship with their mothers, that young orcas learn calls or songs and learn how to hunt. Without these skills, and their mother when they’re young, they’re unlikely to survive out at sea.

Although Toa is receiving care in the form of food and treating his colic, as well as injuries sustained during his stranding, the situation is a stressful one for the calf. It has SPCA chief scientific officer Anja Dale “extremely concerned”.

“Body lacerations, being separated from his mother and pod, being tube-fed, regular veterinary assessments, being surrounded by people, and being transported to a pool are all animal welfare compromises,” she says.

When it comes to what lies ahead if the pod can’t be located, euthanasia may be the most humane option. Stockin says “internationally-recognised practice for separated cetaceans [whales and dolphins] this young is either lifelong human care or euthanasia. Notably, this is based on clear scientific rationale around welfare and survival outcomes.”

A life in captivity can’t fulfil an orca’s behavioural, social and mental needs, Dale says. “Animal welfare science has clearly demonstrated that we cannot meet the welfare needs, or provide a good life, for orca in captivity,” she says.

(Remember the movie Blackfish?)

DOC was not available to comment directly about which options they’re considering, or what factors will inform the ultimate decision about what to do with Toa.

But DOC said in a statement that it is still planning a range of scenarios. “We are optimistic that we may find the pod, and the orca’s health is still stable, but we are also being realistic as we consider the ongoing welfare of this animal – that has to be our number one concern,” said DOC marine species manager Ian Angus.

Others have pointed to the financial consideration of continuing to care for Toa. The Taxpayers’ Union is “cautiously raising concerns” about the cost, which currently totals around $10,000, not including the cost of DOC staff. Talkback host Peter Williams wrote in an opinion piece that the cost is “beyond a joke”.

On the ethical side, it’s a matter of time, according to bioethicist Mike King. “Throughout, it has been, and continues to be, a time-critical situation,” he says. “This means that those involved cannot usually spend a lot of time enumerating options, assessing their likelihood of success, and weighing the different reasons for and against. They must make decisions under conditions of uncertainty by necessity.”

Providing Toa with care could give him a good life if his pod is located quickly, but if not, then his current life in the pen is a stressful one and not in his best interests.

Then there’s the wider ethical question of whether to interfere with cases like these in the first place. “Why intervene in this case, when the lives and welfare of wild animals are usually regarded as their own business? Should we find out how to improve the welfare of wild animals and more routinely intervene in their lives if we have reason to believe we can benefit them?” King asks.

People’s emotional investment in wild animals is paradoxical, according to Annie Potts, professor in human-animal studies at the University of Canterbury.

“This is commendable, of course. But at the same time, bobby calves – also infants who miss the mothers they are taken from – are slaughtered within days of birth or confined in veal crates to produce so-called gourmet cuisine. There is no difference between the whale calf and the bovine calf, other than human reverence for one and human oppression of the other.”

In the end, the experts agree that New Zealanders, especially those in positions to be making decisions about what happens with the orca calf, need to put Toa first.

“We all crave a Disney happy ending, but what matters most here is not our understandable human sentiment and emotion, but the viability and welfare of Toa,” says Stockin.

Image: Tina Tiller

ScienceJuly 19, 2021

Could this new Covid test be a passport to the world?

Mirjam Guesgen

Contributing writer

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Image: Tina Tiller

As countries look to open up, being able to show immunity to Covid-19 may be what’s needed to ensure travellers aren’t bringing the virus in with them. A new coronavirus antibody test may be just the ticket to make that happen, but it’s not there yet. Mirjam Guesgen reports.

Scientists from Switzerland and France this week unveiled a new test that can measure how well the body can fight off the virus using neutralising antibodies. Essentially it tests whether someone is “immune” to the virus.

Details of the test were published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

Neutralising antibodies prevent infection by blocking the virus from entering the body’s cells. It does that by clinging on to the spike protein on the virus and stopping it from linking up to the ACE2 receptor on the surface of the cells.

If spike is the key to entering cells, and ACE2 is the lock, neutralising antibodies gum up the lock/key fit.

The newly described test gives a measure of how well antibodies are blocking that linking up, or neutralising the virus.

The test works by putting both spike proteins and ACE2 molecules on the outside of tiny, fluorescent beads. If nothing’s there to stop the two from sticking together, the beads will glow brightly. Add someone’s blood serum (that’s blood with all the cells and bits that help clotting removed), containing antibodies, into the mix and the beads won’t glow as brightly.

“It’s a very close representation of what happens in real life,” says test co-developer, virologist Didier Trono from the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland.

Researchers then set a cutoff for “dimness” where 95-99% of the spike proteins have been neutralised.

From a pool of 300 people, the test could correctly pick out samples that were known to have high levels of antibodies (from someone who’d had Covid-19 before) 96.7% of the time, and ones without them (someone who’d previously tested negative for Covid-19) 100% of the time.

But the researchers went one step further than other similar antibody tests. Their methods let them put different forms of the spike protein – representing different existing or completely new virus variants – on different coloured beads and run the test on all of the forms at the same time.

“You can say, well, my serum prevented the blue, the red and the green beads from binding but it did not prevent the purple beads, which means my serum doesn’t have enough neutralising antibodies against, say, the delta virus. All this in a single tube in a couple of hours.”

The researchers did just that. They engineered their test to work with the spike proteins from the alpha and beta virus variants and ran it on blood samples from 59 patients who had been hospitalised with Covid-19.

They saw that most people had working antibodies against the original coronavirus spike protein and the alpha variant but only just over half of people could neutralise the beta variant’s spike proteins.

And people who had had more severe Covid-19 before, sometimes ending up in intensive care, had antibodies that were better at neutralising the spike proteins, including different forms of it.

On the flip side, Trono says their test could help identify people who might still be vulnerable to new variants.

Trono’s team also proposes that this new test could form part of Covid passports – travel certificates that aim to show that someone has immunity to the virus.

Several countries, including the UK, those in the European Union, Canada and Chile, are already rolling out Covid passports ahead of reopening their borders.

Some passports, like Canada’s ArriveCAN or the UK’s NHS Covid Pass, show that a person has received all doses of the vaccine. In other places, like the EU, there are different passports depending on whether someone has been vaccinated, recovered from Covid-19 or has received a negative Covid-19 PCR test. None use antibody testing so far.

But showing that someone is vaccinated isn’t enough, says Trono. “Not everyone responds equally well to vaccines,” he says, referring to people who are immunodeficient such as people with cancer, transplant recipients, or other people on immunosuppressive drugs. “You give them a passport but they’re not protected.”

The authors argue this kind of antibody test may be more useful if immunity passports are to become a widespread thing.

The issue however with this test, and others similar to it, is that it can’t actually tell how likely someone is to be reinfected.

“This crucial thing that we still need a better grasp on with Covid and immunity is what we call the correlate of protection,” explains Nikki Moreland, an immunologist from the University of Auckland. “It’s the thing that can be measured in someone to say that ‘yes, now you’re protected’.”

She says it’s “highly likely” that the correlate is neutralising antibodies but that scientists aren’t certain yet. “There’s a lot of intense scientific effort going into that right now.”

She adds that, while the new test is “really cool technology”, it hasn’t been thoroughly put through its paces yet. Until the test is trialled in the real world, to see how well it predicts whether someone is protected from reinfection, it’s difficult to say how effective someone’s antibodies are, Moreland says.