FRIDAY HARBOR, Washington—After a striking absence for most of the spring, the San Juan Islands’ Southern Resident killer whales made their return this month in glorious fashion: a full-on daily display of frolicking and foraging orcas by the 22 members of the J pod. Best of all, they appear to be well-fed and comparatively healthy.
The difference this year is heartening for the people who have been fighting to recover the endangered population—especially those who recall the grim visage only two summers ago, when one orca mother mourned her dead calf publicly for 17 days straight, creating headlines around the world. But the bigger picture remains complicated and not very sunny: These whales are still struggling for survival.
The SRKWs’ return to the Salish Sea was heralded by a brief appearance of members of K pod along the western side of San Juan Island on July 1-2. Though they only remained in the interior waters for a day or two, it was a welcome sight: K pod and its 17 members had not been sighted here for more than a year.
The J pod made its appearance in spectacular fashion on the Fourth of July, traveling up and down the western side of the island for much of the day. Their energetic play—breaching, spyhopping, tail-lobbing, and lots of close contact—was accompanied by fairly evident foraging behavior, including line formations to herd the salmon that are their primary prey.
They also seemed to be vocalizing a great deal: One brief pass near Lime Kiln Lighthouse included an astonishing array of vocalizations.
There are, however, some dark clouds hovering on the horizons of these brilliant displays and sunny feelings. One of the chief undercurrents during the past week is that, while J pod first arrived in tight clusters, as the week wore on, they began spreading out—meaning there were probably not enough Chinook present for them to effectively team hunt, leaving the whales to hunt the salmon individually, which is far less efficient for them.
Katie Jones of the Center for Whale Research observed that during one of the more recent encounters, “the whales remained exceedingly spread out over miles, and we often only encountered each individual traveling alone or in pairs at times.”
As she noted, this is something of a stark contrast from times past, when it was common to see the Southern Residents traveling in large, tight family groups. “Nowadays, those sights are a rarity,” she observes. It also affected their data collection as scientists:
It took hours for us to do what may have only taken half the time during encounters in past years when the whales would spend more time grouped up, and they would commonly be in the inland waters during the summer months. Nowadays, we just have to assume that they may not stick around for very long, and therefore, it’s very important to document everyone as well as we can while we have the opportunity.
Deborah Giles of the University of Washington’s Center for Conservation Biology—who spends her days with a feces-sniffing dog in order to collect whale scat, which provides a veritable gold mine of data for the scientists studying these whales and their health—observed a similarly mixed picture.
Both J pod and K pod, she said, appear to be attempting to adapt to their nutritional problems, primarily by spending more time along the exterior coast (which is the SRKWs’ typical winter and early spring habitat) and less time in the Salish Sea: “We can say that they don’t look as thin as they did last year at this time. They’re looking better fed this year,” Giles told Daily Kos.
What’s more ominous, she said, is not what we’re seeing, but who we’re not seeing: namely, the entire Southern Resident population, including L pod and its 33 members, who haven’t been seen in months. The whales, she said, appear to be having to spend more time at greater social distances and in different locations just in order to find enough food.
“In the more distant past, we’d have had all members of the Southern Resident killer whales in these waters by June, and all the Southern Residents would be seen within their summer core critical habitat at this time of year,” Giles said.
The previous two years, however, were notably worse. “Last year we didn’t see have members of the Southern Residents seen in the month of June. And this year, in the month of May, we didn’t have anybody. And we only had less than 24 hours in June this year,” Giles told Kos. “What we’re having this year is a kind of a hybrid in July—we do have all members of J pod here. And they have been here since July 4. But that’s still different than it used to be, because in the past, we’d have had all members of all three pods here. That’s an important distinction.”
The absence of the other pods is another likely indicator that the run of salmon on which J pod is feeding isn’t terribly substantial and may not last. Moreover, as Giles says, that absence also affects the population’s long-term outlook, especially in term of sustainable genetics.
“It’s so important to have the other pods come in, so that they can avoid inbreeding,” she said. “It’s critically important to the discussion about the recovery of these animals is that the social dynamics of the population as a whole are changing. It’s important not to let that slide. We can’t let the baseline be shifted to think that this is okay or normal. It’s not okay.”
It’s a step in the right direction, she said, but we still have a thousand miles to go. “I don’t want people to get all excited: ‘Oh, Southern Residents are back home!’ Well, J pod is back, and that’s a good thing.
“It’s easy to feel like everything’s okay when you see them off the county park or at the Land Bank or South Beach. It’s easy for the public to think that everything’s okay, and unconsciously we take off our foot off the gas. And that’s an important thing not to have happen.”