Orcas are highly social animals which have roamed the seas for millennia. Their small size has spared them from wholesale slaughter but doomed them to two decades of capture and exhibition in aquariums. Dr. Spong started to study orcas in captivity, but he quickly came to believe that these animals would best be studied in the wild and were, in fact, being hurt by continued captivity. In 1969, he founded Orcalab on Hanson Island, B.C., where he started a new approach to research - collecting information without actual observation. Sound is gathered through underwater microphones that allow scientists to catalog the vast repertoire of sounds that fingerprint different groups of whales, and the scientists can then "follow" the whales without actually seeing them.