--- title: "Captive orcas wear their teeth down on concrete tank walls, and all 29 whales in one study had damage" url: https://badiyaa.com/captive-orcas-teeth-damage-tank-walls/ published: 2026-11-13T04:18:00+00:00 modified: 2026-11-13T04:18:00+00:00 section: Pets & Animals publisher: Badiyaa --- # Captive orcas wear their teeth down on concrete tank walls, and all 29 whales in one study had damage Captive orcas chew concrete and steel tank walls, and a 2017 study of 29 whales found every one had damaged teeth, with most needing teeth drilled. Every one of 29 captive orcas examined in a peer-reviewed dental survey had damaged teeth, and most of the harm traced back to one habit: biting and grinding on the concrete and steel of their own tanks. The study, published in the journal [Archives of Oral Biology](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.archoralbio.2017.09.031) in October 2017, is circulating again this week as a startling animal fact. It was the first detailed look at the mouths of orcas kept for display, and its numbers still land hard. ## What the researchers found The team was led by John Jett of Stetson University in Florida, a former orca trainer. They scored high-resolution photos of each whale’s upper and lower teeth for wear, fractures, missing teeth and drill holes. The 29 animals all belonged to one company and lived at parks in the United States and Spain, according to the University of Otago, whose dental researcher Carolina Loch co-wrote the paper. “Every whale had some form of damage to its teeth,” Jett said in the university’s release. More than 65 percent of the whales showed moderate to extreme wear on the lower jaw, which he linked mainly to “chewing concrete and steel tank surfaces.” The authors also pointed to aggression between tank mates and to repetitive oral behaviors, the kind of stereotyped biting on hard surfaces that animal-welfare scientists treat as a sign of stress. ## Why the teeth get drilled Once a tooth is ground down far enough, its soft inner pulp is exposed and open to infection. Keepers respond with a procedure the paper calls a modified pulpotomy: a hole is bored into the tooth and the pulp is cleared out. Unlike a human filling, the opening is left unsealed and has to be flushed every day for the rest of the animal’s life. More than 61 percent of the orcas in the study had been through that procedure. A drilled tooth is weaker, Loch explained, which helps account for another finding: over 60 percent of the second and third lower teeth were broken. Put those percentages against the sample and the scale becomes concrete. Sixty-five percent of 29 whales works out to about 19 animals with heavy lower-jaw wear, and 61 percent works out to roughly 18 whales living with at least one drilled tooth. ## How this compares with wild orcas Ingrid Visser, a New Zealand scientist who has studied wild orcas for more than three decades and co-wrote the study, said the contrast is stark. “Compared to free-ranging orca, the teeth of captive orca are incredibly compromised and you just don’t see this type or level of damage in the wild,” she said. Wild orcas use their roughly 48 teeth to grip fish, seals and other prey, then swallow chunks whole. They do not chew rock. Tank life is a different picture: the encyclopedia entry on [captive orcas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captive_killer_whales) notes that one whale at a Canadian park swam 879 laps of her tank a day and repeatedly rubbed against its walls, behaviors not seen in wild pods. Teeth are not the only visible change. Between 80 and 90 percent of captive males have a collapsed dorsal fin, a condition that is rare in wild populations. ## Where captive orcas live now Around 55 orcas were in captivity worldwide as of March 2024, and 33 of them were born in tanks. Canada passed a 2019 law banning new cetacean captivity, and France has enacted a ban on public display of whales and dolphins that starts in 2026. For more ocean giants, read how DNA from a Greenland skull confirmed [the only known narwhal and beluga hybrid](https://badiyaa.com/narluga-narwhal-beluga-hybrid-skull-dna/), or how underwater recorders tracked [the elusive Omura’s whale off northwest Australia](https://badiyaa.com/omuras-whale-northwest-australia-recordings/). The study’s authors also warned that daily tooth flushing makes these whales poor candidates for release to the wild, a point that will matter to any park weighing a seaside sanctuary for its last orcas. ## Further reading - [Wikipedia: Captive orcas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captive_killer_whales) - [Jett et al. 2017, Archives of Oral Biology](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.archoralbio.2017.09.031) *Image: Noah Wulf, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons* *This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. [How we work](https://badiyaa.com/editorial-policy/).*