Of Orcas and Men

by David Neiwert

  Still, salmon scientists and wild-river advocates have been adamant all along that the only way to bring back the salmon runs to a modicum of health will require a free-flowing Snake River, something spills don’t achieve; to that end, they have continued to advocate tearing down those dams.

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  The listing of the resident killer whales under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) in 2006 could prove critical in this debate. If it is established that the Southern Residents, in fact, depend on Columbia River Chinook salmon, then their needs will certainly play a role in how the policies eventually are adjudicated.

  The decision to list the orcas (currently about 80 whales) was announced late in 2005 after years of pressure from environmental and whale-advocacy groups and was officially put in place in the spring of 2006 by the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS). The announcement was generally greeted with fulsome praise in the local press and among civic and chamber-of-commerce leaders. After all, not only are the whales now a multi-million-dollar ecotourist attraction, but they are above all else a regional icon, part of the Northwest identity. However, salmon-recovery efforts in Puget Sound, notably on the Skagit and Nisqually rivers and the Lake Washington watershed, have been slow to produce salmon numbers. There has been improvement, but it has been mostly incremental. The whales have been scraping on their resources in their home waters for some time now and still are.

  Killer whales are prodigious eaters; their daily caloric requirements are about 10 percent of their body weight, and adults range in size between 8,000 and 15,000 pounds. That means a single Southern Resident will eat as much as 1,500 pounds of salmon in a day. Probably the best public demonstration of their voraciousness and their increasing desperation occurred in 1997 at Dyes Inlet, a remote cove deep in southern Puget Sound, when a contingent of 19 L Pod orcas hung out at the mouth of the inlet for two months and consumed nearly the entirety of a substantial run of chum salmon. That event, notable not least because L Pod rarely strays that far south in the Sound and usually has a strong preference for Chinook salmon, appeared to signal that the Southern Residents were 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, as far as we know. So the presence of a substantial coastal population of transient and offshore orcas means little to the killer whales who reside in Puget Sound for much of the year. Recognizing that this was indeed a distinct population proved key in NMFS’s decision to list the orcas as endangered, since their previous approach had been to consider them simply a subset of the larger coastal population.

  “We were petitioned to list back in 2001,” recalls the Northwest’s chief whale scientist for NMFS, Brad Hanson, “and we went through the status review process for distinct population segments. There was a lot of angst in the process because the whole question boiled down to taxonomy, and at the time, killer whales were considered one species worldwide. So when you look at the factors, the point was, because transients and residents overlapped in the range, if you lost Southern Residents, would that cause a major gap in the population range? Well, the answer is no, it wouldn’t, because you’d still have transients. Really, there wasn’t enough data at that point. The bottom line was that nobody had even suggested then that there might be separate species or subspecies. So we said no at that point.”

  Three years and a citizen lawsuit later, NOAA officials went back to re-examine the matter. “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. We included a taxonomist in our work group and ultimately concluded there was enough evidence to warrant considering it a subspecies. So that qualified it for a distinct population segment.”

  Once that was decided, it became almost an inevitability that the 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.

  The sharpness of the 1990s declines also made plain just how vulnerable to extinction the Southern Residents had become. Those declines, almost certainly not coincidentally, occurred simultaneously with large drops in salmon stocks. So, while the NMFS recovery program recognizes that the whales actually face a variety of threats to their well-being, it is also clear that the cornerstone of any recovery for the orcas lies with producing enough salmon for them to eat.

  The larger problem of salmon abundance, moreover, is intertwined with subsidiary issues such as pollution and vessel traffic. 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 affected developers and the construction industry, as well as various property owners, whose lands are in areas that either affect salmon runs or orca habitat, which is much of the Sound.

  Some of the listing’s other effects included:

  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.

  Unsurprisingly, development and construction interests immediately weighed in; in early 2006, the Building Industry Association of Washington (BIAW), along with the Washington Farm Bureau Federation, filed a lawsuit contesting the listing. BIAW attorney Tom Harris told a Seattle reporter that it was “an unlawful listing,” adding, “You can almost say any individual school of fish can be listed.” A federal judge dismissed the lawsuit several months later.

  The legal beagles who cobbled that lawsuit together, the conservative Pacific Legal Foundation, attempted more or less the same lawsuit in 2012 on behalf of California property owners involved in the water-rights battles along the Sacramento River, claiming that the orcas’ endangered status was about to rob them of their water rights. A judge dismissed that lawsuit, too.

  There may be other bones of contention with powerful interests yet to come. American wildlife managers may raise concerns over management of the Fraser River fishery, which is a significant food source for the Southern Residents. However, the Fraser is not the only major river outside of the Puget Sound whose runs are part of the orcas’ food picture. Another, in fact, is the Columbia River, and that puts those dams eventually in the crosshairs.

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  The probl
em scientists face right now when it comes to assessing how to proceed with the orcas is a real lack of data. They’re unsure which salmon the orcas are eating at which times of year and which runs are truly critical for their well-being. Underlying the uncertainty is one of the orcas’ abiding mysteries, namely, where they go and what they eat during the winter months.

  What we know about the orcas is mostly based on what we observe of them when they’re in Puget Sound and, for the majority of them, that means the months of May through September. J Pod will continue lurking about in the Sound throughout the year, although even that is sporadic; they’re often observed as far south as Vashon Island in the winter months. However, the K and L pods, which constitute the large majority of the clan, head offshore, but no one is sure exactly where they go, since they spread out and are only sporadically sighted.

  The first scientist to try to tackle these mysteries was John Ford, the renowned orca researcher and author and a biologist for the Canada Department of Fisheries and Oceans. In his 2006 study (“Linking Prey and Population Dynamics: Did Food Limitation Cause Recent Declines of ‘Resident’ Killer Whales in British Columbia?”), he found, among other things, that the Southern Residents range, in the winter months, from as far north as the Queen Charlotte Islands (where L pod has been sighted, and a K pod member washed ashore dead) to as far south as northern California, where the J and K pods have been sighted. However, they stay relatively close to shore; none have been observed any farther from the coast than about 30 miles.

  His core finding, however, was linking the whales with a particular kind of salmon: Chinook. Orcas focus on them almost exclusively in the summer months, Ford found: “Chinook salmon appears to be preferred over other salmonid and nonsalmonid species due to its large body size, high lipid content, and year-round availability in the whales’ coastal habitat. Sockeye and pink salmon, which are abundant during migrations to spawning rivers in July-August, are not a significant prey species.” Some runs of chum salmon appear to be preferred in the fall.

  Moreover, Ford notes, “The distribution and movement patterns of resident killer whales are consistent with what might be expected of an animal having a year-round focus on Chinook salmon as preferred prey.” That is, during those winter months, they are haunting waters that are historically known to contain large runs of Chinook, gathering along the coastlines on their way home to their respective rivers to spawn.

  “I think there’s been a lot of assumptions over the years, and they’re very reasonable ones,” Ford told me, “that the whales feed from the spectrum of salmonid species that are available to them, especially the most abundant ones. I guess that’s what’s really changed as a result of our work, that we’ve now convinced ourselves that in fact they’re very selective. It’s really Chinook that seems to be of critical concern to the whales and us.”

  Historically, the largest single source of Chinook in the Northwest’s Pacific coastal waters during the winter and spring has been one place: the Columbia River. The role that the Chinook salmon could play in the orcas’ health was underscored two years ago by a Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife report on killer whales: “Perhaps the single greatest change in food availability for resident killer whales since the late 1800s has been the decline of salmon in the Columbia River basin.”

  So far, the lack of hard data keeps scientists from concretely linking the Southern Residents with the Columbia River Chinook, but Ford says the data uncovered in his study tends to point in that direction: “Part of our study is that we actually genotyped all the Chinook samples we got from the whales, and we’re putting a piece together now about which river systems the whales are taking,” he said in the interview. “For example, we’ve got a fair number of Chinook samples from Northern Residents up in the northern end of the Queen Charlotte Islands, and a substantial proportion of the salmon that the whales take up there are Columbia River fish on their southward migration.”

  Ford says that the ecosystem is large enough to involve a broad range of river systems: “No doubt there’s a lot of Chinook populations that are of questionable status, and that’s the next step, to see how they can be better conserved.

  “Because killer whales don’t have any predators, they are ultimately prey-limited. The question is, are they at that sort of carrying capacity? And when that carrying capacity declines unexpectedly, as it did in the late ‘90s, do they suffer? It makes sense, therefore, that enhancing the availability of Chinook for the whales, sort of both in quality and quantity and temporal or seasonal availability would be a pretty reasonable recovery strategy.”

  What that involves, however, is another question. “We don’t have a complete enough understanding of the whales’ diet, especially in the winter,” says Ford. “And that’s sort of what we need next to understand.”

  Whale advocates say they’ve been aware of the potential connection of the orcas to the Columbia River runs for a while: “This is something I’ve been talking about for a long time,” says Howard Garrett of the Whidbey Island-based Orca Network. “We’ve known it almost intuitively. It’s been part of my regular slide show. So, it’s gratifying to see the scientific data supporting it.”

  “To me, it’s just a no-brainer,” says Darcie Larson, a board member of the Seattle chapter of the American Cetacean Society and the associate director of Save Our Wild Salmon. “It couldn’t be more plain that these killer whales have relied on salmon from the Columbia River historically, and the lack of those salmon is hurting them now.

  “I think even without definitive studies, you can still clearly say that, before the time of Lewis and Clark, there were between 10 and 16 million wild fish that were returning to the mouth of the Columbia River. We know that whales are eating these fish, we know that they like Chinook, and there were definitely millions of Chinook that were returning to the mouth of the Columbia.”

  There is also historical anecdotal evidence that puts killer whales at the mouth of the Columbia during the winter and spring months. More recently, a group of J Pod orcas was observed feeding on salmon there. However, these remain anecdotes and intuitions. In the winter of 2012, they finally began obtaining hard evidence of it: NOAA scientists successfully attached a sensor to a K pod whale and were able to track the pod’s movement’s for several months, during a time when the orcas are difficult to study. What they found was that, not only did the pod travel all the way down the coast to Monterey, but they spent an inordinate amount of time hanging out at the mouth of the Columbia. When the Columbia River fish enter the equation for orcas, their endangered-species status takes on even larger political ramifications, because that population of Chinook is directly affected by those same four dams on the Snake River that have become a major battlefield in the state.

  Killer whales, after all, reside atop Puget Sound’s food chain and are thus one of the real indicator species for the overall health of its inland waters. If they disappear, it will toll a death knell for much more than just whales. The bigger picture, as Brent Norberg suggests, is that the orca listing is already certain to have a positive impact on the Puget Sound ecosystem, and perhaps beyond it as well, by underscoring that they are simply some of the most prominent occupants of a vast and complex ecosystem.

  “I think in general what gets missed in the public mind is that there are substantial things being done already on the part of fish and clean water and so on before you ever get to the whale link,” Norberg said. “The whales, however, because of their charismatic position in the public consciousness, make a really good focal point to try and leverage more beneficial actions on the part of those other things that are already being done. They make a positive argument for doing things to benefit fish. They help make a positive argument for doing things to clean up persistent pollution of sediments in the water. Those are good things that are going to benefit not only the whales in the long term, but other species, too.”

  The defenders of the dams, in the meantime, have insisted all alo
ng that there’s no evidence that tearing them down will even restore the salmon to their runs anyway and that proposals to tear down the dams are nothing but pie-in-the-sky environmentalist fantasies. However, on the Elwha River, that assertion is being put to the test.

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  No matter how far over the edge you dare to peek, it is so deep and the space so dark and narrow that you can’t really see the bottom of the carved-stone gap through which the Elwha River is pouring at the top of Glines Canyon. The water roars over the top of the dam down into the canyon, but forget about being able to see the river 210 feet below. All you can see are the mists that float up into the canyon and turn the black rock walls sleek and mossy.

  The mouth of the waterfall is lower now; at the sides of the gap, you can see the marks where the dam once was, now blasted away, bit by bit. At one time the dam reached up to the level where most people can now stand, looking down into the gap. Now it is down to the point where the waterfall is, some thirty feet below, and getting lower with each blast of dynamite to bring it down. Behind the dam, or at least its remnants, there is a vast mud flat stretching back several miles where there used to be a reservoir called Lake Mills. Running down through the middle of it is the now-recovering Elwha River. This is all part of a grand experiment, the purpose of which is to find out if salmon runs can return to rivers if the dams that made them extinct are removed. Even though some 500 small dams have been demolished in the United States in the past twenty years, something of this scale has never been attempted before.