Of Orcas and Men

by David Neiwert

  There are some variations of this myth. In one, Natsilane is saved not by the sea lion king but by a mystical sea otter, who gives him seeds that grow various new trees, notably yellow cedar, all of which become important parts of Tlingit culture. Remember, it is from a carved yellow cedar tree that the first killer whale sprang alive.

  The legends told by the Tlingits, who mostly lived in what is now southeastern Alaska and coastal British Columbia, stand in contrast to the mythology of many other coastal tribes (although the Haida tell a story of an abandoned hunter who gets revenge in much the same fashion as Natsilane), wherein killer whales—or “blackfish,” kakawin, Max’inuxw, or a number of different names for orcas—are seen as predecessors to humans, not as creations of humans. Just as the Kwakwaka’wakw of western British Columbia believed that the first humans were killer whale spirits who emerged from the sea and transformed into men, the S’klallam who occupied the northern Olympic Peninsula likewise considered killer whales the ancient equivalent of humans.

  A Southeast-Alaskan Tsimshian myth tells another version of the orca creation story. In this telling, the narrator takes on the persona of a transformed goddess:

  I used to be a beautiful white wolf; Noo Halidzoks created only one of me because she thought I was the most beautiful of the four-leggeds. I wandered throughout the world looking for someone like myself because I was really lonely. I came back very unhappy because my quest confirmed I was the only white wolf. I fell into a deep sleep. I had a terrific vision and when I awoke, I rushed to find Noo Halidzoks. “Ts’i’is (Grandmother), I have had a great vision; it calls for me to go below the great waters and sing the history of the world. I am so very lonely in my present form.” Noo Halidzoks was sad, but realized the power of my vision and turned me into a shiny black whale. To remind me that I used to live on land as a wolf, she painted the white markings on my sides. I sank below the great waters singing my song, and all the other swimming creatures rushed to greet me as their new family member.

  I am also held in great awe for my power and size; it was believed I could capture a canoe and take it underwater to transform the occupants into whales. Thus, even to this day, a whale near the shore is considered to be a human transformed and trying to communicate with his family.

  To all of these tribes, orcas are ancient creatures with immense spiritual powers. Orcas are the rulers of the ocean and the embodiment of its power. As it turns out, modern evolutionary science generally agrees with this.

  • • •

  Killer whales, the scientists tell us, have been around at least six million years and probably longer. As with all marine mammals, they are ultimately descended from land mammals. Native myths often associated killer whales with wolves; several myths describe them as wolves who transform into sea creatures. In evolutionary terms, however, there actually is little connection.

  One of the land ancestors of all whales is a cloven-hoofed dog-like carnivore who lived during the Paleocene and Eocene periods, finally becoming extinct in the early Oligocene (that is, between about 62 and 30 million years ago) called the Mesonychid. Despite its appearance, however, it was not an ancestor of modern wolves. One of its evolutionary offshoots, called artiodactyls, were even-toed, hoofed creatures whose descendants would come to include pigs, cows, deer, and hippopotamuses. These last are considered the land mammals closest in relation to modern whales.

  An offshoot of the artiodactyls was the first proto-whale, called the Pakicetus, although it did not look remotely like a whale. It was a furry little dog-sized creature, a carnivore that wandered the swampy coastline of the old Indian subcontinent, near modern-day Pakistan, during the early-to-middle Eocene period, between about 50 to 49 million years ago. The Pakicetus evidently hunted smaller creatures that lived in the swamp, including both fish and land creatures alike. It was a lousy swimmer, with heavy, compact bones that it used for ballast, and it was also not a fast runner. However, it was well adapted to a swamp life that included bottom wading, paddling, and swimming by undulating its body.

  It was this latter trait that it passed on to the next descendant in the line to modern-day whales, a creature that could both swim and walk called the Ambulocetus. This early cetacean mostly propelled itself through the water by undulating its back in the manner of an otter or seal, but it also had legs and paws and could get about, albeit slowly, on land. Later, during the middle Eocene period, 49 to 48 million years ago, as did its ancestor, it mostly dwelled in the area of the Indian subcontinent (which at the time was a large island continent in the middle of the Indian Ocean). It also had an adaptation in its nose that allowed it to swallow underwater.

  Next came the Protocetidea (proto whales), who propelled themselves through the water with a combination of undulation and strokes from their flukes, as modern whales do. The Remingtonocetus followed; they had developed more streamlined skull features and powerful jaws and apparently were fast and powerful swimmers. They also developed early hearing faculties for underwater listening. By now, moreover, these creatures were reaching more of the world’s oceans.

  One of the interesting components of whale evolution involved the way their breathing apparatus gradually moved from the front of the snout, as it was in the Pakicetes and Ambulocetes, as well as most land mammals, to the back of the head, a blowhole at the rear of the skull. In each step of their evolution, you can see the nasal passages moving farther and farther back, until they reached the skull’s rear in early toothed whales.

  Some in the line were strange-looking, none more so than the Basilosauridae, who appeared in the middle-to-late Eocene periods (about 38 million to 40 million years ago) and were found in all the world’s oceans. They were probably the first fully aquatic cetaceans. They were also extraordinarily long creatures, with spines that extended fifty feet and longer, while their limbs shrank to just the tiniest vestigial rear feet and small forelimbs near the head that scientists speculate were used primarily for grasping partners during copulation. As the largest carnivore in the ocean, they had no predators.

  The fossils of the Basilosaurus so impressed Herman Melville (who called them “the most wonderful of all cetacean relics”) that he devoted a chapter of Moby Dick to describing a specimen found in Alabama in 1842 that was seventy feet long, a find that, as Melville notes, led to the somewhat mistaken naming for the creature: “The Alabama doctors declared it a huge reptile,” he writes, “and bestowed upon it the name of Basilosaurus. But some specimen bones of it being taken across the sea to Owen, the English Anatomist, it turned out that this alleged reptile was a whale, though of a departed species.”

  Owen, Melville reports, eventually “pronounced it, in substance, one of the most extraordinary creatures which the mutations of the globe have blotted out of existence.”

  It was from these creatures that both branches of the modern whale family evolved. Odontocetes (toothed whales) are the most clearly descended from the Basilosaurus, with early forms appearing in the middle Oligocene through the middle Miocene periods (25 million to 11 million years ago). These creatures, called Squalodon, displayed the first appearance of echolocation faculties, although they appear to have been fairly crude. These were the direct ancestors of the first oceanic dolphins.

  Baleen whales, called mysticetes, would appear about this same time, including the earliest, the Cetotehriidae. These creatures, who had both teeth for grinding and early hairy structures lining their mouths that were the forerunners of the thick baleen plates we know today, may have developed these features in response to some worldwide change in the oceanic environment and eventually went extinct. Other mysticetes, including the Balaenidae, the family of today’s bowhead and right whales, appeared a little later, about 22 million years ago. They completely shed the teeth and developed thicker baleen structures. Eventually four distinct families of mysticetes would emerge. None of them appear to display echolocation capabilities, which are unnecessary, since their diet is comprised of food that floats or is at th
e ocean floor and does not require hunting or prey selection. (Worth noting: these whales do produce long-range calls at extremely low frequencies that could be a form of echolocation.)

  The toothed whales would prove both more diverse and tend toward smaller sizes; nearly all of the great whales are baleen whales. However, that was not true in all cases. The earliest odontocetes were the Physterids, the early sperm whales, who appeared about 25 million years ago (about the same time as the earliest mysticetes) and grew to immense sizes. They, too, were deep divers, like their modern descendants.

  Just as the Squalodons and other ancient dolphins were going extinct about 11 million years ago, in the middle Miocene, an explosion of other toothed whales, including the belugas, narwhals, beaked whales, and porpoises, emerged. The dolphins, part of the same shift, made the biggest splash of all.

  Delphinidae are the largest, most diverse and most widespread of all the cetaceans, representing 36 species currently surviving, including dolphins, pilot whales, and killer whales. All of them possess some form of echolocation capacity, and all are carnivorous predators. Early forms of killer whales, scientists believe, evolved fairly early in the process, about 10 million to eight million years ago. The earliest fossil records of Orcinus orca date back about five and a half million years, suggesting they have been around at least six million years and probably longer.

  In those six million years, orcas have been largely undisputed atop the oceanic food chain. They have been phenomenally successful over all those eons; they reside in every ocean on the planet and are the apex predator in each one of them. They have no predators themselves.

  All of this led scientists originally to assume that all of the world’s orcas were, in fact, a single species occupying different niches of different environments around the world.

  That, as it turned out, was all wrong.

  • • •

  Thanks to a Canadian whale researcher named Michael Bigg, sometime in the 1970s scientists first began realizing that there might be what they call “speciation,” the divvying up into individual species, going on among killer whales. It was Bigg who had pioneered the use of photo identification, focusing on the dorsal fins and white “saddle patches” that are the most frequently visible parts of killer whales, and which act as a kind of unique fingerprint, to take a census of Pacific Northwest killer whales. With help from a number of colleagues on both sides of the border (notably, Paul Spong of OrcaLab, and John Ford and Graeme Ellis of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans on the Canadian side, and Ken Balcomb of the Center for Whale Research and Rich Osborne of the Whale Museum on the American side), Bigg was able to get a fairly clear picture of the orcas’ grim population outlook within a few short years.

  The majority of the orcas that Bigg and his colleagues observed were what they called “resident” killer whales, individuals who spent a great deal of time in the inland waters of the Salish Sea and northern Vancouver Island. These whales moved together in large pods, sometimes even convening in gigantic “superpods” of fifty whales and more, and they fed strictly on fish.

  However, Bigg also observed other whales who behaved quite differently, moving in small pods of three to five (or even less, sometimes), swimming not in the deeps where the fish were but in the shallows, where the seals and sea lions upon which they mostly fed could be found. (One of Bigg’s earliest observations of wild killer whales, in fact, involved a pod of whales attacking and eating a Steller sea lion.) At first he thought these were renegade or outcast whales; however, the more he and his colleagues watched them, it became clear they were actually a separate population, a different kind of killer whale than the residents.

  They named them “transients,” and indeed these were whales who would roam extraordinary distances, from the coast of California to the Queen Charlotte Islands (or Haida Gwaii), and everywhere in between, including the Salish Sea. They looked different: The females’ dorsal fins were more triangular and pointed in appearance; their saddle patches were a solid, uniform grey; and the whales in general were often more nicked up and scratched. In addition, they did not vocalize heavily while hunting, unlike the residents, relying instead on stealth to capture their prey—and what a range of prey it was. Over the years, scientists would observe these whales devouring all kinds of mammals: seals, sea lions, harbor porpoises, Dall’s porpoises, Pacific white-sided dolphins, and even a few varieties of seabird. On a couple of occasions, they were even observed taking down and eating the moose that would sometimes swim between islands in the archipelagoes of southeast Alaska and British Columbia.

  Unlike their salmon-eating counterparts, the transients were not warm and cuddly sea creatures to observe but were brutally efficient killers who could tear apart a harbor seal (which comprised over 60 percent of their diet) in seconds. Their role in the ecosystem was similarly indisputable.

  Over the fall of 2002, articles began to appear in the regional press describing biologists’ concerns about a sudden overpopulation of harbor seals in Hood Canal, one of the more remote and traditionally pristine reaches of southern Puget Sound. They were seeing upwards of 1,500 seals in the canal, putting stress on the local fish and mollusk populations. Then, early in 2003, a large group of 11 transient whales showed up in Hood Canal and began devouring the seals for weeks on end. It was somewhat unprecedented, since transients rarely ever stay longer in a single place than a day or two at most. These whales stayed in Hood Canal two months and from nearby shores could be seen frolicking with their prey, tossing them in the air repeatedly, like a cat tossing a mouse it has caught. After the first seven weeks, scientists estimated that the whales had devoured about a third of the seal population in the fifty-mile-long fjord.

  Then the whales disappeared, although in 2005, after the seals rebounded to number about 1,200 in Hood Canal, another group of six transients took up occupancy there, this time for over five months. Dubbed “the slippery six” by locals, they too spent plenty of time feasting on harbor seals. The seal overpopulation problem went away—scientists estimated the whales ate half the population—and eventually so did the orcas.

  “It’s amazing to see them hunt,” a state biologist named Steve Jeffries told a reporter. “They’re able to kill seals without any effort at all. They’ll be swimming along, and then they just go down and pick up a seal.”

  Watching transients hunt can be simultaneously appalling and enthralling. Among their prey are Dall’s porpoises, which are among the fastest animals in the water where they can reach 35 mph. However, orcas, even more remarkably, are perfectly capable of keeping up with them, despite their significantly greater size, mainly by “porpoising,” thrusting themselves powerfully forward through the air in a series of linked leaps. There is no scene quite like watching a transient killer whale chasing a Dall’s porpoise, sprinting high out of the water at full speed as though it was born to fly.

  The more scientists studied them, the clearer it became that “transient” was not exactly an accurate description. These mammal-hunting whales, it appeared, formed fairly large but broadly dispersed communities that ranged over wide stretches of territory with an ultimately well-defined reach. These orcas formed smaller pods but, within their own communities, were also remarkably cooperative.

  Nor did they appear to socialize with resident killer whales at all. In the intervening years, all of the interactions ever observed between resident and transient killer whales were of a hostile nature, with the residents—who always outnumbered the transients—chasing their mammal-eating neighbors away. Scientists aren’t sure why, but they speculate that perhaps at some level the transients could pose a threat to the residents’ young calves. Not only was there no social overlap between the populations, but there was no communication between them, either. Resident orcas used an entirely different set of calls from transients when communicating and used them in entirely different fashions. It was a biologically unusual situation for two populations of the same species to occupy the same spac
e (or waters) and to observe completely different behaviors, including diet and communication. The only word for this is culture, and there is only one other species that has exhibited it: human beings.

  About the only thing the resident and transients had in common was their echolocation. Scientists began to wonder if there was even any genetic connection. Finally, in 2003, the genetics results came in, and the answer was definitive. There had been no genetic interaction between resident and transient killer whales for somewhere between 150,000 and 700,000 years. To put that in perspective: Homo sapiens has been on the planet only about 200,000 years. That in turn raised all kinds of questions: Were residents and transients separate species? What about the other populations of killer whales around the world? Is there a single species of killer whale or a number of them? That debate, in fact, still rages today. However, the fact that it exists at all is testament to the legacy of Michael Bigg, who died of cancer in 1990. Indeed, today the preference among scientists is to stop calling these orcas “transients.” Their new name: Bigg’s killer whales.

  • • •

  Contributing to the debate was the realization, in the mid-1980s, that there was still a third population of killer whales in the North Pacific, dubbed “offshores,” who lived much farther out to sea and never came in to shore. These whales, too, had a distinctive appearance and diet; their coloration was slightly different; they appeared to be smaller; their fin shape was also different than that of transients or residents; and they appeared to be eating deep-diving sharks. They also communicated with a completely distinct set of calls. Given their known location, however, these whales have been notoriously difficult to study, and so relatively little remains known about them, including the size of the population. All we know for certain is that they exist. Thus we know there are at least three distinctive populations of killer whales in the North Pacific, all in overlapping waters and territories.