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The orcas would drive the whales into the river’s mouth, alerting the humans to the presence of prey by extraordinary displays of tail-lobbing and wait for the humans to harpoon and kill them. Then the Davidsons simply tied a rope and buoy around the whale’s flukes and left the first spoils to their cetacean partners, who would feed on the carcass for a couple of days, mostly taking just the lips and tongue (just as they usually did when humans were uninvolved). The whalers then would row out and bring the remains in to shore for
rendering. They called this arrangement “the Law of the Tongue.” This went on for 90 years. Over time, the Davidsons and the orcas developed a special kinship. If orcas became entangled in the whalers’ ropes, the humans would abandon whatever efforts they were engaged in to rescue their partners. These were also shark-infested waters, and occasionally the big baleen whales would smash the little green rowboats and send their occupants spilling into the sea. When this happened, the orcas would surround the men in the water and protect them from sharks until they could be rescued.
At the time, these orcas and their exploits were a media sensation. Numerous newspaper stories told their saga, and members of the Australian Parliament came out to Eden to watch, along with hundreds of other spectators. One of the first documentaries ever committed to film, a 35-mm feature shot in 1910, recorded the killer whales in action. All prints of the film, other than a few stills, were reportedly lost in a vault fire in 1916.
What most impressed early observers of killer whales was their efficiency as predators.
By the mid-1970s, the shocking news was confirmed: There were fewer than a hundred whales in the population of orcas that lived in Puget Sound and the San Juan Islands, and there were about two hundred whales who lived in the area of northern Vancouver Island and the archipelago of fjords and islands around it.
Canada did likewise for its waters, shutting down orca captures in the Northwest for good. The whales of Puget Sound do not often return to the places where they were captured. With rare exceptions, you will no longer see killer whales, as you once did, in Penn Cove, Carr Inlet, Port Madison, Yukon Harbor, or any of the places where humans drove them into nets and captured them. They still visit many diverse places in the Puget Sound’s waters, are still seen from time to time chugging right past Seattle itself, but they do not go to those other places anymore. They seem to remember.
All this was possible because millions of people began filing through the turnstiles at these parks and still do. The marine-park industry attracts more paying customers than even the most popular sports leagues. In 2012, orca facilities around the world drew over 120 million people, more than the combined attendance at Major League Baseball, National Football League, and National Basketball Association games. Orcas are Big Money now.
Our first spectacular view of them came from an area on the west side of the island known as the “Land Bank,” an open space south of Lime Kiln where
“I guess one thing that the whales have taught me is the benefits of just sitting in one spot and waiting for something.
that a scientist brings in terms of quantification and objectivity. That has changed somewhat,” he says. “Today, when I teach a course on the killer whale, back in Wisconsin, I bring the students here,” he says. “I want them to be able and willing to look at the killer whale through the eyes of a poet, a musician, an artist, as well as a scientist. I encourage my students to dabble in the arts, because it makes them much better scientists.
We hear from hundreds of people here every day who come in, and they perceive the killer whale as the icon of a perfect world. Anyway, it’s very satisfying and rewarding. And I think if you hear that a few thousand times as a scientist, you start to feel that somehow our objective measures are not tapping into that, and they should.
the more we learn about these whales, the less we understand,
they know enough not to eat all of them. In fact, they only eat about 10 percent of them. They know that it just doesn’t work, if you eat them all. And whether or not they experimented with that eons ago, I don’t know, but certainly in their management of things, they are very, very conservative.
“They have a sense of humor,” he says. “They play games and are clever. They outwit us and know it. It’s very easy to anthropomorphize with these guys.
Johnstone Strait toward Robson Bight, the Northern Residents’ favorite rubbing beach.
order to catch baby elephant seals. Certainly, they are in a sense, effective hunting techniques, but it’s so extreme—I mean, do they really have to go to this in order to get a bite to eat? I rather doubt it. There’s no particular—in order for the dietary side to be satisfied with this hunting technique—there’s no particular reason why they have to do this intentional stranding. It seems to be, for them about the challenge. And within that culture, that’s what they do. So culture is an appropriate term.
The distinction between transients is something that happened back seven hundred thousand years ago. So you’re dealing with really long periods of time.
capable of being self-organized for such long periods of time, we ought to let them go on doing
“They’ve been around a long time, they’re highly successful, certainly in terms of the geographical scope over which they live, the range of habitats from the polar seas to the tropics—it’s amazing,” he says. However, he studies them because he fears for them: “They are vulnerable to extinctions, and the populations are not very large. But that’s typical of apex predators, whether they’re killer whales or lions or tigers. They are never all that abundant, and so they are vulnerable.
it’s so important that they are not so much the ambassador species, but they are iconic
others.
“One of the things that does fascinate us is that these guys all seem to get along pretty well. Which is unusual for most mammal species, including ourselves, given how much time we spend at war with each other.
they don’t kick males out. Usually, in mammalian species, males are gone once adolescence kicks in. Resident types don’t do that. The fact that they do get along—I’m not sure we can learn how they get along, but it’s the fact they do get along is something that’s of value to observe in the natural environment.
one of the hardest things for human beings to do is to cooperate, and that’s the most important thing that the killer whale can teach us, as a cooperative hunter: There is unity in strength.
“They do have a certain kind of long-term memory because they know how to organize their lives around the comings and goings of things that are not easy to understand,” Veirs says. Presumably, that’s why the mothers live so long, because they pass on geographic and
There might be lessons simply in long-term survival there, too, Veirs says. “Why are they so specialized?” he wonders. “Given that they don’t have any real competitors, maybe ecological niches are a way that species can carve out a way to avoid competition. Maybe that gives you a certain kind of stability that allows, say, the residents to coexist with Ts without competing with them.
“symbolic interactionism,” the notion that people act towards things based on the meaning those things have for them, and those meanings are derived from social interaction and the symbolism that attaches to that,
Behavior based largely on symbolic interaction fosters the creation of complex cultures that allow action based on
meaning, interpretation and choice, which can, and usually does, override genetic or environmental factors in determining behavior and speciation.
“self-recognition, role-taking, interpretation of the generalized other and use of symbols are all essential precursors for the development ...
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they don’t beat each other up. “One of the few universal behaviors that they have is that they do not harm humans. They are unique among apex predators that way. And that alone stands as reason to heed whatever lessons they might have for us.
“They were the brainiacs of the planet well before we were,” she says. “The thing is, one of the things
“Look at the orcas: They manage to partition resources, even when they live in the same region. So they’ve figured that out. They’ve done it better than we have. But it tells you that if you have a big brain and you’re really complex, then you can do it.
Resident orcas never do that; they almost always travel overnight and rarely ever stay in one place like that.
The big king salmon comprise over 80 percent of the orcas’ summer diet, and over 90 percent of the Southern Residents’ summer Chinook typically come from the run that is heading up to the Fraser River in British Columbia, the mouth of which is just south of Vancouver. Sure enough, it soon emerged, as the fish counts arrived from the Canadian biologists who monitor these things, that the Fraser Chinook run was down in 2013 (along with the far more endangered sockeye runs in the river, victims of rising river temperatures).
Vessel traffic is more complex, posing a kind of multi-level threat. The noise they create interferes with intrapod communication, which is critical for hunting, as well as with their ability to echolocate. The simple presence of all vessels, from kayaks to giant freighters and everything in between, alters the course that orcas travel and thus affects their ability to hunt and probably requires them to expend energy needlessly.
proliferation in their waters in the past couple of decades of salmon farming operations, an industry that brings pollution and predation problems with it, threatening a number of native salmon populations on which
diet.
In the Crozet Islands, the population is threatened by its own tendency to steal fish from the longlines of fishermen who frequent their waters; these fishermen often kill orcas in retaliation. In Alaska, the resident killer whale population of Prince William Sound is still slowly recovering from the effects of the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989, and one transient pod, the AT1s, is ...
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Salmon are a uniquely useful species for vibrant and healthy forest ecosystems. As young hatchlings and fry, they consume relatively little in the way of food resources in the waters of their birth or as they travel downstream to the ocean. Then, after spending years in the ocean, effectively gathering up proteins and becoming themselves large swimming bags of amino acids and other nutrients from the sea, they return with all those nutrients to the upper reaches of the rivers whence they came, where they die, bringing all those fresh proteins to regions where they become essential
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In the Northwest particularly, salmon are deeply tied to the identity of the region, including those deep forest regions where the salmon used to make their runs. There is also a deep biological connection; scientists
estimate that 137 other species of animals in the Northwest depend on the presence of salmon.
decision to list the orcas (currently about 80 whales) was announced late in 2005 after years of pressure from environmental and whale-advocacy groups
having real trouble finding enough food to eat. Over the next five years, the population of Southern Residents began to decline precipitously, from nearly 100 in the early 1990s to 79 by 2001.
Scientists grew concerned that if the declines continued much further, the whales would no longer have a viable gene pool and would soon tumble into an inevitable downward population spiral. By then, scientists had learned that the Southern Residents are genetically isolated, that even though Bigg’s killer whales visit their waters to feed on large sea mammals like seals and sea lions, there is no social interaction or apparent communication between them. Likewise, they do not interact with their fellow Northern Residents at all, nor with offshore killer whales,
“In 2004, there was a cetacean taxonomy workshop where we had all the people working on killer whale genetics in one room,” recalls Hanson. “There was a general feeling that there was enough evidence to suggest that it might be a subspecies.
Southern Residents would be listed, and the taxonomic decision was eventually confirmed in 2010, when NOAA scientist Philip Morin published his study of mitochondrial DNA in resident and Bigg’s orcas, demonstrating that there had been no genetic crossover between the two populations for over 700,000 years.
Noise in the water and the presence of boats is mostly a problem for orcas when they are already stressed searching for scarce salmon; it just makes their work that much harder. More importantly, when orcas run out of food, their bodies begin burning their fat reserves, and those stored toxins begin circulating in
their systems and poisoning them. So the ESA listing of the Southern Residents meant that many of the efforts currently under way on behalf of the fish, including a $1 billion Puget Sound salmon recovery plan begun at the same time, would have even more teeth, so to speak. Many of these plans include placing restrictions on development in sensitive areas and limiting runoffs from urban areas into the orcas’ waters. Moreover, NMFS’s orca-recovery plan specifically required “expansion of local land-use planning and control, including management of future growth and development.” That immediately
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Examining the adequacy of wastewater-treatment plants in the region and perhaps requiring upgrades. Confronting the wastes being dumped into the Sound by cruise ships. Potentially regulating whale-watching operations. Enhancing cleanup efforts at toxic-waste sites, particularly those containing polychlorinated biphenyls or PCBs.
