Of Orcas and Men

by David Neiwert

  The Glines Canyon Dam is 13 miles away from the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Eight miles downstream from it are the remains of the old Elwha Dam, now completely removed. The dams on the Elwha are among the earliest dams built in the Northwest. Elwha Dam, first built in 1912, was a hastily erected travesty with no fish ladders, made so badly that it collapsed the first time it filled, and then was rebuilt in 1913, all in defiance of the state’s laws governing such structures. Entrepreneurial city fathers from nearby Port Angeles, intent on having hydroelectric power to run the timber mills that they intended as the backbone of their local economy, were behind its construction, as well as that of Glines Canyon Dam in 1927. The latter was actually quite an engineering feat, involving not just building a concrete structure in a narrow, steep canyon, but also drilling tubes down through the rock-canyon face through which water would pour to push the dam’s turbines. Of course, it had no passages for salmon, either.

  At one time, the Elwha River had massive salmon runs that ran deep into the heart of what is now Olympic National Park, a wild and pristine place, rich with vegetation and wildlife. It was one of the only rivers that contained stocks of all five species of Pacific salmon and was considered the most bountiful source of fish, particularly its huge Chinook, on the Olympic Peninsula. The Elwha dams almost completely eradicated these runs within a few years of their construction. By the 1970s, however, the local timber mills in Port Angeles and around the Peninsula were part of the large Northwest power grid and no longer dependent on the meager output of the old Elwha dams. At that point, people began to ask: Are those dams worth the cost?

  First to raise the issue were the Lower Elwha Klallam tribe, who contested relicensing of the dams before the Federal Energy Regulatory Committee beginning in 1973 and were soon joined in the effort by a variety of environmental groups. By the 1980s, a broad coalition of environmental and tribal groups had coalesced around the idea of tearing down the Elwha Dams and restoring the river. The efforts resulted in the 1992 Elwha River Ecosystem and Fisheries Restoration Act, passed by Congress and signed into law, but then effectively blocked and delayed by Washington’s Republican U.S. Senator at the time, Slade Gorton. Finally, in 2000, Gorton relented, and the government went about the work of purchasing the dams and preparing for restoration work on the river. They also began drawing down the reservoirs behind the dams so they would be mostly empty when the time came.

  In September 2011, construction crews began tearing down Elwha Dam and were done in spring of 2012, well ahead of schedule. The Glines Canyon Dam teardown, begun shortly thereafter, has taken longer, mainly because of the amount of sediment behind it; officials underestimated just how much sediment would be making its way downstream and soon found the systems they had built to deal with it clogged. So they delayed the finishing touches on the Glines Canyon Dam to allow the systems more time to deal with the combination of fine grit and heavy sand that was pouring downstream. The last fifty feet of the dam remained in place for most of 2013 while restoration overseers waited. It finally came down completely in the summer of 2014.

  The Elwha project has ramifications well outside of the cloistered confines of the Northwest; if it proves successful, it could weigh heavily in the debates over a number of dams throughout the United States. Most of the 84,000 dams in America are aging—some 70 percent of them will be older than 50 in the year 2020—and will increasingly need repair, replacement, or removal. Some of them need it immediately; a substantial number (4,400) are crumbling and considered serious failure risks, and repairs will not be cheap, costing upwards of $21 billion.

  The Elwha is considered one of the most ambitious ecosystem-restoration projects ever, and even with all the problems the project has experienced, the early results have already been remarkable. In the fall of 2013, biologists went out in snorkel gear and wet suits to count salmon returns in the Elwha below Glines. What they found surprised them; nearly two thousand Chinook and seven hundred new Chinook spawning nests, representing a potential bounty of even thousands more adult fish returning in another six or seven years. “It is truly exciting to see the Chinook finding their way into clear water tributaries,” remarked the parks superintendent. “This is what we have always known was coming.”

  The good news from the Elwha was also good news for orca advocates. “I’m very eager to see what happens if they can restore the Chinook run in the Elwha,” says Ken Balcomb. “It won’t solve everything, but every little bit of improvement helps the whales.”

  Indeed, whale scientists have been quick to warn orca advocates not to get too excited about the Elwha restoration as a solution for the Southern Residents. “A lot of people get really excited about the dam removal on the Elwha, and don’t get me wrong, it’s great,” says Brad Hanson. “But I think there are some people who think that’s gonna save killer whales. And the truth is, it’s barely a pimple on a bear’s butt. It’s incremental. People don’t understand the number of fish that need to be in the system. You think about what the Fraser River produces; we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of fish that need to be produced. So yeah, it will help, every bit helps, but it’s just a little bit of where we need to get.”

  Hanson recommends looking elsewhere for a real impact that would help orcas and salmon stocks generally: “I think the best bang for the buck is to go into systems like the Skagit and the Nisqually, those bigger river systems that are still in pretty good shape, and try to make sure that those are enhanced. And that’s a challenge.”

  Killer whales, for that matter, have not been seen much along the shores of the Olympic Peninsula for decades, at least not since the Elwha Chinook runs dwindled to nothing. However, their prevalence in the mythology of the Klallam tribesmen who occupied the area suggests that one time they were common there. The return of Chinook to the Elwha has raised a lot of people’s hopes that the killer whales, too, might return there to feed.

  “That would be a great thing to see,” says Howard Garrett. “If nothing else, it would mean they had yet another place to get their salmon.”

  • • •

  One orca came back, although not in a good way. The body of a female Bigg’s killer whale washed up on the shores of the Olympic Peninsula in early January 2002. She had come a long way to die: Identified as CA189 and named Hope by Northern California whale watchers, a transient who normally occupied the waters off the northern California coast, she was found washed up in a marshy area near Dungeness Spit. Not far from her body was a young male orca, very much alive, soon ID’d as her son, CA188. He had nearly beached himself, but after some effort, he was eventually guided into deeper water, where he swam away to parts unknown.

  It took some work to bring the body of Hope into shore, and once there, scientists immediately began performing a necropsy and were stunned and alarmed by what they found in the orca’s outer layers of fat. Scanning for the toxin known as polychlorinated biphenyls, better known as PCBs, they found levels that were literally off the charts, so high that they had to recalibrate their instruments to measure it: 1,000 parts of PCB per million parts of whale fat. She also had abnormally high levels of other toxins, some of which were completely unexpected. “She basically knocked our instruments off,” said NMFS researcher Gina Ylitalo. “We had no idea we’d see these levels.” Everyone working on Hope was required to wear a hazmat suit, and the site around her body was treated as a hazardous-waste disposal operation.

  None of this was exactly a surprise to Dr. Peter Ross, a toxicologist with Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans, who has been amassing evidence regarding toxins in marine mammals for years. As Ross puts it: “Killer whales rank among the world’s most contaminated marine mammals.”

  The problem arises from their position atop the oceanic food chain. Long-lived toxins, called “persistent organic pollutants” (or POPs), remain in the food chain because they are stored in the fatty deposits of various animals, from fish all the way up to seals and, ultimately, whales. They harm orca p
opulations in two main ways: first, through the milk provided by female orcas, whose fat stores provide much of the source of the rich milk they feed to infant orcas. When these toxins are passed directly to the young whales, they poison many of them and are usually blamed for the high infant mortality rate of wild orcas. They are also believed to play a role in the mortality of adult orcas such as Hope, whose death ultimately was assigned to a complex of problems arising from all the toxins in her body, and others, both Bigg’s and resident orcas, when they are stressed for food sources. At those times, their bodies begin processing their fat stores, and the toxins are released into their systems. The toxins aren’t believed to kill the orcas outright, but rather, to compromise their immune systems so badly that they become susceptible to a variety of diseases, especially lung infections.

  There are three specific kinds of POPs that affect killer whales:

  PCBs. These long-lived pollutants originated at the turn of the last century and were used for most of the next seventy years in paints, electrical transformers, sealants, adhesives, and hydraulic fluids, and are found commonly in Puget Sound. Because the molecules are so long-lived, they are still leaching into watersheds from various dump sites around the Sound, notably at the various military bases that dot its waterfronts. PCBs can impair reproduction and growth in mammals and are blamed for making them susceptible to infections.

  Polybrominated diphenyl ethers, or PDBEs. These are relatively recent arrivals on the toxin scene, but they are ubiquitous now, used as fire retardants in a large number of consumer products, including furniture and computer products. Their effect on mammals is similar to that of PCBs. They make their way into the aquatic food chain in large part by washing out to sea with runoff from urban areas.

  Dioxins and furans. These closely related chemicals are poisons produced by burning organic material in the presence of chlorine and were for years associated with the papermaking process employed by the pulp mills common throughout the Pacific Northwest, including Canada. They also appear as a byproduct of the activity of municipal incinerators, coal-fired generators, diesel engines, and sewage sludge.

  “Contaminants don’t act as a rapid poison,” says Ross, “but weaken the whales’ ability to survive diseases or other stresses. In southern B.C. and northern Washington State, we’ve got about seven million people, as against 80-some killer whales in the local Southern Resident population. In sharing killer whale habitat, citizens of this region can act as partners with government and industry when they consider their responsibilities in light of household cleaners, pesticides, vehicle use and other lifestyle choices. By protecting streams, rivers and our coastal waters, we can help ensure the survival of salmon and killer whales into the future.”

  • • •

  The J Pod has a new calf, and it seems to be showing off. It’s not just frolicking with the grownup orcas like many of the young like to do; it’s breaching repeatedly, coming up sometimes among a whole cluster of older whales and leaping fully out of the water. It’s an infectious display of delight in the pure joy of living that seems to affect all of us watching. We laugh, smile, applaud, ooh and aah. Stationed at the front of the boat, we’re getting quite a display. There is only a handful of us, and I wonder why everyone else is staying at the back end of the boat.

  Chris, the chief naturalist for the Western Prince, points out distant whale signs for sightseers.

  “Whoa!” The whale watchers in the back holler in unison, followed by whoops and applause. Looking back, those of us in front can quickly see why: Another juvenile orca—this one a good deal larger than the newborn we’ve been watching—is breaching about a hundred yards off the back end of the boat, multiple times: once, twice, thrice, even a fourth time. With each successive leap, it seems determined to come higher out of the water, until on the last few breaches it completely clears the water, its tail tucked sideways like a salmon’s.

  With each leap, the cries from the small knot of people at the end of the Western Prince, a 30-foot cruiser that runs daily tours out of Friday Harbor, grows louder. These are people from all over the United States, and indeed the world, who have signed up to see something like this, although none of them are really prepared for the experience. A tow-headed eight-year-old boy from Lynnwood is especially rapt: “Wow!” he keeps saying. “Wow!”

  Not everyone who signs onto a whale-watching boat gets to see this (in fact, this is my third trip out with the Western Prince, but the first time I’ve seen the orcas with them), but for nearly every one of the 25 people on board, this is why they’re out on the water in the San Juan Islands this sunny day in early May: to see killer whales.

  There are only about 24 killer whales in J pod. Make that 25 with the new calf, although it does not count officially for about a year, after it has made it through the early stages that are proving extraordinarily hazardous for young orcas. During the course of a typical summer, over half a million people will board whale-watching boats based in Seattle, Vancouver, Victoria, Friday Harbor, and elsewhere in the San Juan Islands and the Puget Sound region. Many of them are people who arrive here from all over the world, hoping to get a glimpse of our famous orcas. It’s big money. Industry officials and regional chambers of commerce say the whale-watching industry attracts several million dollars (the estimates vary) annually to the region, and the demand keeps growing.

  Yet beneath all the sunny exclamations and beatific testimonials, there is a dark side to the whale-watching industry, directly connected to the doom that hangs over the whales themselves and all those people coming to see them. When the Southern Residents went on the endangered-species list, one of the major factors that federal officials began looking at in helping them recover was the potential need to regulate the whale-watching industry. The problem is self-evident to anyone who witnesses the scene off the western coast of San Juan Island on a typical summer’s day. Whenever orcas arrive on the scene, they are accompanied by a massive flotilla of boats: whale-watching tour craft intermingled with private recreational boaters out for a gander, as well as fishermen and other regular users of these waters, including kayakers out looking for whales, too. They zoom in and out and around, creating a scene that often borders on the frenetic, all in pursuit of a close glimpse of the largest member of the dolphin family. It’s constant; at times during the summer, whale observers say the orcas are accompanied by boats from nearly sunup to sundown.

  It’s even more apparent to anyone who drops a hydrophone beneath the surface of Haro Strait at these times to listen in on the whales’ conversations, which come in the form of whistles, chirps, calls, and clicks. In addition to whatever noise the whales make, the strait itself is a cacophonic canyon full of boat-engine noise. The sounds range from the high squeals put up by small outboard motors zooming through to the sometimes overpowering thrumming noise created by the steady stream of large vessels en route through the strait to Vancouver and points north. Scientists have been studying the effects of all these boats and the noise they create on the whales in recent years, and the data they’ve collected so far indicates that, at least in years when the supply of Chinook salmon that comprise the bulk of their diet is low, the boats are amplifying the harm to the whales.

  “There are two things of concern, really,” says David Bain, a former University of Washington marine biologist who specializes in killer whales. “One is that they tend to travel farther to get from Point A to Point B when boats are around. So it’s kind of like they take detours around the boats. So basically what that means is they’re spending more energy than they would otherwise, because some of the whales are kind of zigzagging around the boats, and other whales go straight through, and they stop and rest while the others catch up. There’s a difference in how much energy they spend swimming versus how much energy they spend while they’re resting. The other effect we’re seeing is they do less foraging when boats are around. That probably means that they’re eating less and acquiring less energy. There is an energy bala
nce in whales, and whale watching has an effect on that.”

  In some regards, this means that, for the whales, a critical mass of obstacles is created by the sheer number of vessels, including the kayaks, which Bain says are capable of startling the whales in ways that power boats cannot, especially if they dart into the whales’ path or invade their space, and fail to warn the whales of their presence. Still, a kayak that observes the preferred whale-watching guideline of 100 yards’ distance will have almost no effect on the whales because of its silence, while any power boat within audible range is creating at least some level of disturbance.

  “Most likely noise is a mechanism involved,” Bain says. “Killer whales find their food with echolocation, and the noise reduces the range at which they can detect prey with echolocation. So my sense of what’s happening is that when it gets noisy, they don’t even try to look for fish. They just kind of save their energy and hope they run into fish in a quiet place or a fish gets close enough that they can in essence bump into it or find it without really looking for it.”

  The noise levels, as well as the kinds of noise, vary widely from boat to boat. For the most part, the majority of whale-watching boats are not particularly noisy; there are just a lot of them. The loudest noise comes from shipping traffic, although much of that is lower-frequency noise that whales often seem to talk over. The most disruptive noise comes from private recreational boaters, particularly those who fire up their engines in close proximity to the whales.

  “The smaller boats tend to make higher-frequency noise, so it interferes more directly with the killer whales’ communication and echolocation signals,” says Bain. “And the larger ships tend to make lower-frequency noise, which is less relevant to the killer whales. I think what the noise means is that they’re more likely to miss the fish that are there. Because of that, it may not be worth the effort for them to, say, dive down to where the fish are most likely to be. They’ll travel along and try to find a quiet spot and then they’ll fish there, so they’ll have in essence less time to find food.”