Of Orcas and Men

by David Neiwert

  What remains with him in all his dealings, he says, is their similarities to humans: “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. Because as profoundly different from us as they are, they are also like us in a lot of ways. And that self-recognition is both shocking and inspiring.”

  Paul Spong, too, remains impressed by killer whales after all these years of being around them. His abiding impression is of the sophistication and power of their cultures.

  “Their culture certainly seems to be real,” Spong told me one summer afternoon at OrcaLab, looking across Johnstone Strait toward Robson Bight, the Northern Residents’ favorite rubbing beach.

  “You know, if you look at the different populations of orcas around the world and just take note of the fact that they have very real traditions, using the word culture does seem appropriate. The culture of the residents here seems to include this rubbing phenomenon. It’s an amazing phenomenon, especially when you see the enthusiasm that you see little kids picking it up, it’s really quite, quite remarkable.” He laughed his gentle laugh.

  “It’s in a way unique to a particular group in a particular place, although the more that we learn about them, the more we find there are other rubbing spots that they enjoy, we just happen to know about this particular one. It does seem to reflect a longstanding tradition, which is unique to this group, so I think it’s appropriate to use the term culture with respect to them.

  “You look at the other groups—down in Patagonia, the orcas that strand themselves intentionally on beaches in 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.”

  Spong has no abiding doubts about the intelligence and sentience of killer whales. “I think they certainly seem to be very well organized, at a bunch of levels: socially, certainly,” he says. “It’s obvious that the brain gives them the capacity of organizing and dealing with their life in a coherent and conscious way. And they have a very successful life. They’ve been around in this form and doing this thing that they do, organizing societies with obvious cultural periods, for very long periods of time. This is just a phase in a much longer history. The modern form of orca has been around for hundreds of thousands of years, if not millions. The distinction between transients is something that happened back seven hundred thousand years ago. So you’re dealing with really long periods of time.

  “The bottom line there is if they are capable of being self-organized for such long periods of time, we ought to let them go on doing it.”

  John Ford respects killer whales for being creatures whose importance to the world is not defined by anything human. “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.

  “In the case of these animals, certainly their societies have been evolving for millennia, and they are far more sophisticated than I think we know, or give them credit for, even though we do admire them, and I think most of us are highly impressed with their capabilities and their adaptability. The big concern is that we are having impacts on their environment at a global level, and so how resilient are they for some of the threats that are down the road for them?

  “This is why I think it’s so important that they are not so much the ambassador species, but they are iconic—people are naturally curious about them and admire, some people are obsessed by them. Whatever it takes, keeping them in the public’s mind and eye is going to be important for their future survival, because we humans as a species are going to have increasing impacts on that—either through their competition for food, or the more insidious global issues, like ocean acidification. We’re at the point now where humans can affect the fate of all other species. And this is a species that I think deserves much more attention than they’re currently getting in terms of understanding their life history, their culture, and so on, and understanding what they need to survive going forward.”

  For Ford, there is a personal component: “On many fronts, these animals have played such a big role in my life. And I’d like to continue doing it as long as I can still walk down the dock to the boat,” he says.

  But he is most struck, and amazed, by the sea change in the human perspective on killer whales in recent years, coming at a critical moment in their survival and that of the entire oceangoing marine ecosystem: “I guess we’ve seen, in my lifetime, an incredible transformation of the animal in the mind of man—from vermin to icon, in what I consider to be my fairly short lifespan to date. It’s quite dramatic, and it just never ceases to amaze me how we treat them so differently now.

  “And yet the other thing that is astonishing to me is how we have systematically abused all these species of marine mammals, mostly through direct culling, but also through killing for profit, culling them just because they eat too much of what we consider to be our own fish. It was just one after another—first it was the sea otter, then it was the elephant seal, and then the sea lions—machine gunning them and hunting them out. And then the whales—first the large whales, and then later the others. Very few marine mammals got away without being driven down, for various reasons, by humans. Even killer whales were affected, through the live captures, and prior to that probably through pretty widespread directed shootings; they were just despised by mariners. It’s just astonishing to me now the way our species has treated these animals, mostly since the arrival of Western civilization to our coast here, and the improvement in those attitudes now—we wouldn’t think of machine-gunning sea lions any more, or even catching a killer whale for display anymore in this part of the world—it’s sort of unthinkable. Which is a good thing.

  “But now, the pressure is not off these animals. We are affecting them in more insidious ways, through things like pollution, through things like competition for food, and so on. So we need to keep the focus on them for their future well-being and ours. If we know we care so much about the whales, and we can’t save them, then what’s the chances for species that aren’t in the public eye so much? That’s why they are so symbolic of the health of the oceans in this area. If we can ensure that the whales do well, then everything else will probably fall into place, because the apex predators sit atop the food web.”

  Brad Hanson, who has been studying orcas since he was a child and grew up to become the chief whale scientist for the National Marine Fisheries Service’s Seattle region, knows all about their magnetism. He was around when Namu came to town, and he was among the entranced children who lined up at the waterfront to see him. “I knew then that I wanted to work around these guys,” he says.

  The thing that killer whales have going for them, Hanson says, is that unlike other animals—say, salmon or frogs—orcas are breathtakingly charismatic. “I think people identify with them on different levels. One aspect is the black-and-white animal thing—there’s a sort of sea panda aspect to them. Visually, they’re striking.

  “They’re also a top predator. We’re a top predator. I think there’s in some people’s minds a mutual respect. They were feared for a long time. Just like people have a fascination with sharks, people have a fascination with killer whales. They’re these big, powerful animals.

  “But even
beyond that, what we’ve learned in the last forty years, of course, is that they’re very social, so they’re a lot like us. And I think it’s the similarities to us—that they’re social, they have a culture, they communicate with each other—it’s all those things. They have a lifespan that’s almost the same as us. If you looked at that aspect alone, there’s very few species—maybe elephants—that have very similar traits to us. And I think that humans are fascinated by that.”

  “And just the way they lead their lives, and the nature of their long-term ecological success as a species, should provide lessons for human beings,” Hanson says. “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’re very strange in that regard, in particular because 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.”

  For Fred Felleman, one of the killer whales’ fiercest advocates in the political realm—his Orca Conservancy played a vital role in reuniting Springer with her Northern Resident family—the lessons provided by the example of killer whales is vital for the very same humans who are fighting to sustain and help them. Felleman came to Seattle in the early 1980s to get a biology degree and stayed on to organize the environmental and tribal groups who have played the central role in getting the Southern Residents listed under the Endangered Species Act.

  “Because I spent all this time getting my degree and in most of the time since, I’ve been dealing with ships and whales,” Felleman says. “And my clients are these interesting, mostly tribal and environmental organizations. And they’re not what you would call the most lucrative clients, but what has been remarkably obvious to me—and from the outside, you would think these tribal governments have so much more in common than they do as compared to them and us—is that in unity, there is strength, and you would figure they would bind together to try to take on the greater challenges of being a red man in white country.

  “And similarly, from my other clients, the environmentalists, we’ve learned that we will never be able to outspend the big boys, and we’re never going to be able to have the same kind of lobbyist interests in the halls of Congress or the Legislature, and that again, we would do best to coalesce around the cause and try to make up for our lack of financial resources with numbers.

  “So having spent the past twenty years or so doing this, what I realized is that 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’re not the biggest son of a bitch in the valley, but they are the top predator. They are the baddest, as it were. And as a model of how to make a living in a world where there are giants around you, the killer whale has one of the most important lessons to teach us.”

  Val Veirs, a retired physicist who has been listening and gathering orca sounds for several years, believes that breaking the communication barrier, as unlikely as it might be, could open opportunities for human education not just in relation to orcas but in relation to the natural world they inhabit. “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 other wisdom. “So maybe they have some long-term wisdom that if you could communicate with them, they could say, ‘We have an oral tradition in our world, and our oral tradition says that at one time you couldn’t catch any fish here, because it was ice all over the place, and then the ice went away, and then the fish started to come up here where the fresh water is.’ Maybe they’ve got all that encoded.”

  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.”

  Howard Garrett, who has been watching whales ever since his brother, Ken Balcomb, brought him out to the Northwest in the early ‘80s, has been applying his background as sociologist to his observations. Garrett says that “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, goes a long way toward explaining killer-whale behavior.

  Garrett contends: “Orcas and humans have independently evolved (or converged) into symbol-using animals. 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.” He writes that “self-recognition, role-taking, interpretation of the generalized other and use of symbols are all essential precursors for the development of culture, whether in orcas or humans.”

  There is a lesson for humans, too, Garrett says, in how orcas organize their societies: “I think it’s live together and enjoy life. Learn to transcend hostility. They’re as capable of it as any creature on the planet. They have hierarchies of dominance, beginning with the matriarchs, but there’s no sign of discipline, there’s no jousting for position. You only see occasional scuff marks or rakes, mostly on young ones. But they don’t butt heads, 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.”

  Dolphin neurophysiologist and ethicist Lori Marino, too, has speculated about what killer whales might be able to teach us, should we ever breach the communication gap: “One, I’m not sure we ever really will,” she warns. “But you would hope that what you’d want to learn is something about who they are, and maybe something about whether they share an internal world—their phenomenology, or their subjective experience. I think just the idea of being able to have communication with them that we can confirm as communication—right now, we do communicate, but we don’t speak the same language so we never really know—but the idea of just knowing that there could be an exchange where both parties willingly know what is going on, I think that would be quite amazing.

  “I don’t know if we will get there. I just think that their communication system is probably more complex than we can imagine. I think we could get closer, but people have been trying for decades, and we still haven’t really figured out much.”

  Nonetheless, of all the animals she has studied, Orcinus orca is the one that most inspired Marino’s awe. “They were the brainiacs of the planet well before we were,” she says. “The thing is, one of the things that you can learn from cetaceans is that there are ways to survive when there are many different types of species of the same kind. I mean, we’re so used to putting ourselves apart from the great apes, we’re the only hominids around, and that gives us a false sense of who we are. The seventy-seven species of dolphins and whales and porpoises have been sharing the ocean for tens of millions of years, and managed to do that.

  “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.

  “We went off that track, separating ourselves from nature, thousands of years ago. And I think part of the problem is that when you don’t allow yourself to be connect
ed, then you can’t expect to really understand other species. Part of not understanding orca communication is the presumption that it’s got to be much less complex or less deep than our communication. And once you start from that point of view, you’re not going to get very far. But if you start from a different place, you just might.”

  CHAPTER Seven

  Salmon, Boats, and Oil

  THE SUMMER OF 2013 WAS A PECULIAR YEAR—A WORRISOME YEAR—for whale watchers in the San Juan Islands, and it all came down to salmon, most likely.

  Simply put: No salmon, no whales. The resident killer whales just were not around much at all in the Salish Sea that summer. The J pod and some K pod whales were around in the first week of June and then pretty much vanished. Some J pod whales briefly reappeared in mid-July and then promptly returned to sea. They did not return with any regularity until mid-to-late August.

  This was most peculiar. In all the years they have been carefully observed here, the resident orcas have always been plentiful in late June and early July, with numbers slipping into August and September, but in 2013, those weeks were barren of orca sightings.

  Large ships and their noise loom almost constantly in the lives of Southern Residents.

  There were those three L pod whales—a subpod headed by L-22, Spirit, and her two sons: L-79, Skana, and L-89, Solstice—that hung out in the waters near Kanaka Bay for all that period of time, but they were actually quite an oddity, because they simply lingered in the same spot for the better part of three weeks, while no other whales were around. Resident orcas never do that; they almost always travel overnight and rarely ever stay in one place like that.

  I paddled down there one day to observe them, and they were vocalizing a little, but they seemed to be hunting quite intently, because they were echolocating heavily. The whales all looked and sounded healthy, but with orcas, it is usually hard to tell if something is wrong until it’s too late.