Puget Sound orcas struggling for survival
Northern resident orcas live primarily in the cleaner, quieter waters of northern Vancouver Island and Southeast Alaska, where there also are more fish to eat. They are the same animal as the southern residents that frequent Puget Sound, eating the same diet, and even sharing some of the same waters. They have similar family bonds and culture.
The difference between them is us.
The southern residents are struggling to survive amid waters influenced by more than 6 million people, between Vancouver and Seattle, with pollution, habitat degradation and fishery declines. The plight of the southern residents has become grimly familiar as they slide toward extinction, with three more deaths just last summer. A telling example was the sad journey of J35, or Tahlequah, who traveled more than 1,000 miles for at least 17 days, clinging to her dead calf, which lived only one half-hour.
Just to the north, the orca population has more than doubled to 309 whales since scientists started counting them in 1974, and has been growing at 2.2 percent a year on average.
For scientists seeking to better understand the southern residents’ troubles, the northern residents are like a control group, said Sheila Thornton, chief orca biologist for the Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada.
“Their environment has changed so quickly, over just two generations,” Thornton said of the southern residents. “To keep up with these changes is almost an impossible task. How do they survive in the environment we have created for them?”
The decline of the whales, a symbol of the Northwest, is also a warning, as climate change and development remake the region.
The northern residents live in not just a different place, but another world.
A remote land to the north
Paul Spong stuffs a pair of chainsaw ear muffs on his head to block out the racket as he pilots his boat to collect visitors arriving at OrcaLab, his remote, land-based whale research station on Hanson Island, on the northeast side of Vancouver Island.
On these remote islands of the Broughton Archipelago, An orca leaps out of the water near a whale-watching boat near the San Juan Islands, Wash. A Washington state task force on critically endangered Northwest orcas has recommended a 3- to 5-year moratorium on whale-watching boats in Puget Sound. bears turn over rocks, looking for crabs, and ravens gronk in the woods. The jade green, clear, clean water is alive with seabirds, humpbacks and dolphins. Bones picked clean and wedged between beach stones attest to a bounty of fish.
OrcaLab has been Spong’s listening post since 1970. What he wants to hear — and has obsessively recorded 24 hours a day, seven days a week during summer and fall since then — are the sounds of the northern resident whales that cruise the waters of Blackfish Sound and Johnstone Strait.
Among the first to understand the complex emotional lives and intelligence of orcas, Spong also was among the pioneers who insisted on a name change to orca from killer whale, to better reflect the nature of these animals that for so long were feared and maligned as random and vicious killers. Orcas are efficient and skilled hunters. But never in the wild has an orca been known to attack a human, even when captors took their young for aquariums.
Trained as a brain scientist, it was while working with captive whale Skana at the Vancouver Aquarium in 1967 that Spong discovered he was interacting with a complex mind.
It wasn’t long before he spoke out against captivity, earning his employer’s displeasure. After leaving the aquarium, he established OrcaLab. He remains convinced that humans share space with beings that have capacities we are only beginning to discover.
“They are so successful,” said Spong, reflecting Mother orca whale Talequah clings to her dead calf during her eighth day of mourning as she swims in Swanson Channel, British Columbia, this summer.
on Orcinus orca. They live in cooperative cultures and even in peace among different tribes of their own kind.
Living side-by-side
In the North Pacific, northern and southern resident orcas, transient orcas — or Bigg’s killer whales — and a third type called offshores have worked out a sophisticated diplomacy, sharing space over a vast territory. While they will overlap in their hunting and travels, they mostly keep to their distinct ecological niches.
The northern residents generally keep to northern Vancouver Island and Southeast Alaska, while the southern residents ply the trans-boundary waters of the Salish Sea between the U.S. and Canada and outer coast of Washington, Oregon and even California. The transients travel both places and the offshores typically keep to the outer continental shelf. The three types don’t interbreed; don’t share language, food or culture; and are not
known to fight.
The residents are unique in their family ties, stronger than among humans. Orca families stay together for life; they share food, hunt and travel together, and sleep alongside one another, moving slowly with the current at the surface of the water.
The northern and southern residents are playful, athletic and extremely tactile, continually touching and interacting in the water, with babies tossed by their parents and rolled over their backs. Their social lives are rich. Males and females can mate year-round.
Hostile waters to the south
The southern residents are the most studied whales in the world, and among the most endangered orcas, they contend with boat traffic and human intrusion even in their most critical foraging areas, such as the west side of San Juan Island.
It was these hostile waters through which Tahlequah swam, carrying her sad
burden day after day. She swam south of Vancouver, past the coal docks piled high and ghosting black dust into the water. She swam through busy shipping lanes in Haro Strait, amid oceangoing container ships and towering oil tankers. She swam through busy boat traffic, including commercial whale-watch boats that make millions of dollars every season. Vessel noise masks the sounds the orcas use to find their food.
She and her family contend with other threats to their survival too: toxins that seep into the food chain, then into whale mothers’ milk. A recent study predicted a global orca population collapse because of polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, in the orcas’ food chain. A group of toxic, man-made chemicals, PCBs were banned from manufacture in the U.S. in 1979, but are still ubiquitous in the environment.
Toxins also are more dangerous for the southerns because they don’t have enough to eat. When they go hungry, orcas burn their fat, releasing toxins into their bloodstream. And too often the southern residents do go hungry because the chinook salmon they eat are threatened with extinction, just like them.
The southern residents today are critically endangered, with only 74 left.
Gov. Jay Inslee has convened a task force on orca recovery to devise recommendations for this legislative session. Whether those efforts will result in the far-reaching changes the orcas need — from cleaner water to quieter foraging and more chinook salmon — is yet to be seen.