FRIDAY HARBOR, Washington—Late last Saturday afternoon, seemingly out of the blue, whale watchers out in Haro Strait between San Juan and Vancouver islands were treated to what has become a rare event: a “superpod,” one of the large gatherings of all three pods—some 72 whales—in the endangered Southern Resident killer-whale (SRKW) population of the Salish Sea. They put on a remarkable display, too: breaching, porpoising, romping with one another in an abundant show of play behavior, almost as if they were celebrating.
They apparently had something to celebrate, too: J-35 Tahlequah, the pregnant 22-year-old female orca who had gained global attention in 2018 by mourning her dead calf for 17 straight days, showed off what appears to be a healthy new calf, promptly dubbed J-57. The news was greeted excitedly by the scientists studying the Southern Residents—although the gathering in Haro Strait was short-lived. The next day, the whales had vanished, returning to the coastal continental shelf where they have been spending the large majority of their time.
The seeming celebration, however, was almost certainly coincidental in its timing, as Dave Ellifrit of the Center for Whale Research explained; rather, their brief appearance in the Salish Sea was likely related to the plenitude of salmon—and their return to other waters or a result of the lack thereof. “I think there was just enough fish to bring them in, and then they headed right back out,” Ellifrit told Daily Kos.
Ellifrit noted that Canadian whale researchers have been seeing Southern Residents regularly off the western coast of Vancouver Island, particularly around Port Renfrew, and whale watchers in Tofino, farther up the coast, have been seeing them as well. The orcas, he said, are “all seeing each other out there, so it’s not like it was a big reunion or anything.”
Nonetheless, the Saturday gathering “was the closest thing we’ve seen to a superpod in a long time, in terms of the whole population being here,” said Ellifrit, who has been a researcher at CWR since the 1980s. “It wasn’t classic, like there were whales everywhere like we used to see in the ‘90s, socializing. We did have some, but there were still individuals that were off doing their own thing. Still, there was a lot of socializing going on.”
“It was a fantastic day with members of all three pods,” Deborah Giles of the University of Washington Center for Conservation Biology texted the Seattle Times’ Lynda Mapes. “We were hugely successful, collecting 7 samples, our daily record for the year. The whales behaved much like we used to see them, socializing, with lots of amazing surface active behavior.”
The researchers were especially pleased that J-57 had been born apparently healthy. “It’s fabulous news,” Ken Balcomb, the CWR’s founding director, told the Times. The calf’s sex has not yet been determined.
Ellifrit also noted that it was difficult to conduct their usual data-gathering—the CWR conducts the official government census of the SRKW population, primarily through photo identification—because of the closure of the Canadian border, which runs down the middle of Haro Strait, due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It was an incredibly frustrating day, because they came in straddling the border,” told Daily Kos. “And we can’t cross the border. So we were limited in what we could do as far as getting the photo IDs we need.”
J35 was not the only pregnant whale in the population: as Ellifrit wryly observed, “We’re all on baby watch right now.” Researchers John Durban and Holly Fearnbach, who use drones to make observations on the whales’ size and health, earlier reported that they observed pregnancies among females in all three SRKW pods—J, K, and L. Giles, who also was out collecting scat samples from the orcas during their July 4-16 visit to the inland waters, told Daily Kos that she also observed expectant females in all three pods. “L72 is very pregnant,” she said, adding: “There may be others pregnant as well—possibly members of all three pods.”
For a population down to 72 whales—and which only was able to produce two calves who survived in all of 2019—any sign of additional members is a very welcome sign, as is the mostly healthy appearance of most of the orcas.
A study overseen by UW’s Sam Wasser in which Giles played a key role by collecting whale scat, published in 2017, made a powerful link between the orcas’ ability to reproduce and the availability of salmon. It found that as the whales became more nutritionally stressed, more of their pregnancies failed. If their apparent recent success at finding prey holds up, then the chances for the calves to survive rises significantly.
“It’s always a bit of a nail-biter,” Giles said. “I’m cautiously optimistic that one or more of these calves will be born alive. But the fact is that we have to recognize that so far the data we have from 2008 through 2014 is that 69 percent of the babies are lost before the babies are born viable. We don’t know if that still holds.”
She noted that the odds are stacked against them: “I think there is concern that these females are going to be able to bring these calves to term. And even if the calves are born live, we still have that older statistic that still holds, which is that 50 percent of calves don’t make it to their first birthday, especially firstborn calves.”
The bottom line, she emphasized, is the availability of salmon—the lack of which is part of a larger environmental debate in the Pacific Northwest, since the depletion of salmon runs in rivers throughout the region is largely blamed on hydroelectric dams that destroy their native habitats. There is also an ongoing debate about including a place for orcas at the regional fisheries table when salmon harvests are being divvied up among commercial, tribal, and sport fishermen.
The quick turnaround of the orca population back to Canadian waters reflects the grim status of salmon runs in the Salish Sea—particularly from B.C.’s Fraser River, whose mouth is near metropolitan Vancouver. The sudden flatlining of Chinook runs from the Fraser, still not fully understood by scientists, remains the primary reason that the Southern Residents’ presence in the waters in which they historically have resided remains only occasional and fleeting now.
However, the Fraser is hardly the only culprit; Salish Sea salmon populations historically contained bountiful salmon runs originating in Puget Sound watersheds the complemented the Fraser runs and provided an ample bounty for the orcas. As all those runs have dwindled to a bare trickle of the fish—primarily Chinook, the largest of the Pacific salmon species—so too have the orcas presence. Now, in addition to their numeric decline, the SRKWs are simply going where the fish are, and eschewing the places where they aren’t.
“I’m afraid that’s the situation, unless something happens to bring the salmon back,” Ellifrit says. “Right now, there isn’t a lot happening in their favor. It does seem like there is a lot of time being wasted right now on things that are less important.”