by David Kirby
The reason for this behavior remains unknown. The whales might be scraping parasites from their skin, they might crave the massaging stimulation of the smooth stones, they might find the whole thing fun and relaxing, or they might be motivated by all of those things. Whatever the reason, the rubbing beaches of Robson Bight almost guaranteed that the students on West Cracroft Island would see killer whales coming and going steadily: that is, Northern Resident whales. Transients and Southern Residents are not known to visit rubbing beaches or partake in this behavior.
Life on West Cracroft Island was at times exhilarating, in a survival-of-the-fittest kind of way. There were tents to erect, latrines to dig, fire rings to build, wood to chop, salmon to catch, and equipment to hook up to the car batteries.
Water was brought in by boat in big blue jugs. The island had a small source of water, but it was not considered safe to drink. A dribble of liquid oozed from a porous, mossy rock face several yards down the beach. Everyone called it the seep. A clever researcher with some engineering expertise had devised a makeshift wooden gutter lined with a tarp to catch the dripping water and collect it in a metal barrel. The water was warmed over a fire and used to fill a crude wooden hot tub by the sea.
Cliff Camp, where Naomi would spend many of her summer nights, was a small clearance on the narrow ledge atop a 150-foot bluff overrun with a thick forest of red cedars and Sitka spruce. Just getting yourself up there on the steep and often slippery deer trail was a bit of an ordeal, let alone while hauling gear, food, and field equipment. The main advantage of Cliff Camp, however, was its wonderful elevation and unobstructed views up and down Johnstone Strait, weather permitting. On a clear day, you could spot a pod of orcas from a mile away; even more with good binoculars or a spotting scope.
Cliff Camp’s height was also ideal for deploying the theodolite, a surveyor’s instrument that researchers used to track the movement and relative proximity of orcas. After carefully calibrating the instrument, one peered through the device to triangulate the animals and pinpoint them in the strait. It was a good way to notate their passage through one’s arc of vision. It helped collect important data such as travel paths, speed, and distance between two whales.
Boat Camp, as its name would imply, was set inside a small cove just protected and deep enough to moor a boat and keep it safe during rough weather. That first summer, Naomi spent time in both camps, and each had advantages.
Up on the cliff, the view and the relaxed environment were sublime. Naomi found life slower there, more contemplative. She had a little bit of free time to read, to work on side projects, or just to sit and watch the eagles whoosh by—sometimes beneath her feet. “It is absolutely the most gorgeous place on earth,” she told her mom on the phone from Alert Bay one afternoon while getting provisions and doing laundry.
Boat Camp, to Naomi, was a lot of hard work, but offered many chances for fun. She got to go out on the water and track alongside the orca pods, helping to gather audio recordings or compile written data on killer whale observations. And she didn’t have to climb that cliff.
But keeping a boat secured was a serious challenge, Naomi soon discovered. Because the strait is so narrow, millions of cubic feet of water per second pass through during tidal shifts. The difference between low and high tide can be as exaggerated as seventeen vertical feet. This made mooring difficult. The length of line tethered to the anchor (an old tire filled with rocks) needed to be calibrated precisely. If the line was too short, the anchor might be lifted off the seafloor at high tide, causing the boat to drift loose and eventually bang up against the rocks. But if the line was too long, it might create excess slack at low tide, sending the boat onto the shore and leaving her grounded until the tide turned.
The lifestyle at camp could generally be described as damp and cramped—both sites were small, and your companions were most of your universe for ten weeks or more. As Naomi put it, “Either you get along, or you kill each other, and we had a little of both: getting along and killing each other.” It was a serious challenge, to put it charitably, to share such close quarters, surrounded by wilderness, with only a few other people you didn’t know well. Naomi found herself turning more and more to her personal journal to express anxieties and vent frustrations. Her patience was being rocked. On June 29, 1986, she wrote:
I was struck by a very frightening feeling this evening. I suddenly felt misplaced, or perhaps more accurately unplaced. I felt as if I had no real home, no identity.… And suddenly I even doubted my ambitions and future plans. What am I doing here in the middle of the wilderness, with a latrine in the woods, no outside world communications, limited resources.… What am I supposed to do here? How am I supposed to survive this summer?
She was bored at times and terrified at times and had some sublime moments as well. On one of the first clear evenings at camp, a moonless night at about eleven o’clock, the clicks and wails of orcas came in over the hydrophone linked to the little RadioShack speaker tied to a tree. Everyone ran to the cliff’s edge. Now they could hear the orcas’ respirations, one after the other, as they emerged slowly from the water to breathe.
Then Naomi saw them, not twenty feet offshore swimming around in a bed of bull kelp. She didn’t exactly see the whales themselves. It was too dark for that. What she saw was the bioluminescence, the eerily glowing blue-green phosphorescence created by swarms of plankton that flourish in these waters each summer. When agitated by motion, they light up like submerged fairy dust. Naomi watched in amazement as the glowing outlines of salmon pulsed through the black water, trying to flee from the giant green monsters that pursued them around the seaweed. Sometimes the light was so bright one could actually make out an orca eye patch or two.
On a typical day that summer, Naomi might either go out on the Tesseract with Janice and Dave to take “babysitting” data and record killer whale vocalizations, or head up the cliff to record theodolite tracks. The work was often quite rewarding even if the mood felt frantic and chaotic at times. Dave was determined to finish his data collection that summer, and Janice was equally determined to make this her second-to-last season in the boonies. It meant everyone had to adhere to a bruising and tight schedule.
To Naomi, Dave Bain could come across as a bit of a techno-geek, at times more interested in the machines that monitored living things than the living things they monitored. But he was clearly a technical genius, and Naomi was interested in his research on orca vocalizations, some of it beyond her understanding. Dave had invented an ingenious array of hydrophones that he attached to a homemade pyramid-shaped structure of PVC piping. With this setup, Dave could triangulate various calls as a way to discern which and how many whales were talking. Naomi’s job was to help throw the pyramid contraption into the water or hold the wheel of Tessie until it was in, then help haul it back out again later.
Dave would bring the recordings back to camp and download them onto a crude computer program, with reel-to-reel tapes, that he had invented.
Naomi also loved listening to the killer whale sounds coming in over the camp hydrophone. She had heard humpback vocalizations before—as with humpback sounds, most of the orca sounds fell within the range of human hearing—but these were quite different, an unearthly array of whistles, creaks, and groans. “It really is a conversation, isn’t it?” she marveled one day to Dave. He told her that many researchers now believed that orcas communicate through a complex combination of sounds, body language, and physical touch. It was not that orcas and other dolphins had “words”—that was not even a constructive question to ponder, to Naomi. While they can understand a little bit of our sign language and symbols (such as Phoenix and Ake did in Hawaii), we have no idea what they are saying, precisely because they lack the words.
Naomi couldn’t forget the haunting clamor. “The whales sound eerie and mystical as they cry out underwater,” she wrote in her journal. “Is it a language or just a signal of identification? And what do you hear underwater in the teeming ocean
full of fish, whales and seals? Is it a symphony or a cacophony? But it is not silent, not silent at all.”
She learned from Dave that Resident orcas do have whistles that signal to others in the pod, “Hey, this is me over here!” They make other sorts of sounds when they’re excited, when they’ve found food, and so on. But what those sounds meant, exactly, scientists did not know. “We know the context of some of the sounds they make, but not what they mean,” Dave explained. “And there’s quite a bit of crossover: Some sounds that they make in one context they will also make in other contexts.”
Processing sound is essential for killer whales to eat, navigate, and socialize. Orcas have no sense of smell, and though their eyesight is excellent, it’s not much help at night or in deep waters. That’s where echolocation—emitting a series of clicks and listening for their echo—comes in. Killer whales use echolocation to avoid hazards such as rocks, shoals, and boats, to locate prey such as fish, seals, and other cetaceans. Orcas vocalize to keep track of each other when milling, foraging, or traveling.
Naomi knew that all toothed whales have a large sac that rests atop their skulls in their foreheads, called the melon, filled with a fine, thick waxy oil. They can manipulate nasal sacs located behind their melon to make clicking sounds, changing the shape of the melon and using it as an acoustic lens, which they can focus into a narrower or broader beam as needed and then send it in almost any direction.
The clicks, which sound like a finger running over a comb, last from one to five milliseconds. Sound travels through water about four and a half times faster than through air, around one mile per second. When each click pings off an object, part of the sound wave is sent back toward the dolphin, where it is received through fatty tissue located in the lower jaw. From there it is transmitted to the middle ear and the brain. Dolphins have pinholes where outer ears should be; their auditory canals are unused. They hear with their jaw.
Each click is exquisitely synchronized so that outgoing sounds do not interfere with incoming ones: Each echo is received before the next sound is dispatched. The amount of time that lapses between a sound and its echo tells the dolphin how far away an object is. Direction is determined by comparing the relative strength of the echo on each side of the animal’s head. By sending and receiving a continuous string of clicks, all dolphins can follow moving objects (such as food) and home in on them.
Naomi also learned that the visual and auditory regions of the killer whale brain are set closely together and have become extraordinarily integrated over the ages, allowing the animal to construct a visual image based solely on the echoes being received through the lower jaw. The whales can even determine the species of fish they are tracking, not only by the echo of the prey’s size, but also the dimensions of its air bladder. Orcas, and all dolphins, can differentiate between objects with less than 10 percent difference in size. They can do this in a noisy environment, even while vocalizing. And they can echolocate on near and distant targets simultaneously, something that boggles the imagination of human sonar experts. One thing dolphins cannot do is echolocate through thick beds of bull kelp (so named for its long, whiplike strands that can grow up to a foot a day). The salmon know this, and they try to hide themselves in the beds. That is why orcas can often be seen tearing up kelp—they are in search of food.
Even though Naomi was interested in Dave’s acoustical experiments, Janice’s work on orca babysitting behaviors was fascinating to her, as well as being more accessible. Alloparenting among Northern Resident whales was commonly observed: unrelated females babysitting an unrelated calf for an hour, adult males looking after younger siblings, a grandmother minding her grandkid. Naomi always looked forward to helping Janice collect observational data. As the summer wore on, the sun grew warmer in the sky and the mist parted for days. It could get quite sweaty on the strait when the boat was still, up to eighty-five degrees or more, even on the chilly water.
Naomi was surprised by how quickly she could recognize the various pods and subpods and the matrilines that made up their foundation. Before long, she was able to visually identify individual whales by their dorsal fin’s nicks, notches, or waves, by various scars and scratches on their back, and by the pattern of their gray saddle patches. She also quickly learned which calves belonged to which mothers—a critical skill needed to gather observational data on orca alloparenting.
Once a group of whales was identified, the students followed them to begin a series of five-minute “observation sessions.” Janice would call out the information as Naomi added notations to a data sheet. They recorded the time, the whales’ number and letter identifications, distance between animals, travel speed and direction, and types of behavior observed. Naomi also put a check mark in a box for each respiration the whales took—usually about every ten seconds or so.
It wasn’t easy, Naomi thought, but not as nerve-racking as trying to keep track of dolphins or porpoises. The orcas seemed so unhurried, so stately, in comparison to their smaller, frenetic cousins. “They just give you all the time in the world to figure out who they are, don’t they?” Naomi said to Janice one day as they motored off Robson Bight.
When Resident orcas travel together, they often come up to breathe in unison—their black dorsal fins cutting the surface first, followed by a good portion of their entire shiny backs rolling forward, up and out of the water, punctuated by a whoosh of inhalation. Compared to dolphins, it does seem to be happening in slow motion. “It’s like they’re saying, ‘Yeah, over here! See? It’s me!’ And then they slowly go down again,” Naomi said, “deep under the water like phantoms.” That first summer, Naomi would spend far more time staring at data sheets than actually observing orcas. Janice had that privilege, calling out names and behaviors to Naomi and her pen.
Naomi realized that time was going by—she had been in grad school for almost a year. She was certain she would be back the following summer, and she knew that then she would be the one calling out observations to a field assistant, and not the assistant who has to mark the sheet.
6
Hotdogging
Jeff Ventre used a running start, dove out into the middle of the pool, and waited for Katina the killer whale to make her steady approach for a foot push. Clad in the standard-issue black-and-red wet suit, he began treading water in a seated fashion with feet pointing out in the whale’s direction, a signal for her to make contact with his feet and commence the maneuver. She made contact: like a giant mother ship gingerly docking with a small lunar space module. He could sense the firm roundness of her rostrum sink into the balls of his feet, with his toes helping to forge a proper fit. The killer whale had “hit her target.”
Jeff blew his trainer’s whistle—a signal to Katina, known as a bridge, to let her know it was a perfect docking.
Katina began pushing Jeff backward by his feet. He pivoted onto his belly, facing forward, arms at his side. Jeff had decided to open with a real crowd-pleaser, the jaw-dropping “hydro-hop”—or “hydro” for short—and Katina, or Tina, as most people called her, instantly understood. She knew the hotdogging part of the show, currently titled “Shamu: World Focus,” was starting. And on this cloudless day, she and Jeff were playing the lead roles in A Pool—the main, glassed-in performance tank at Shamu Stadium. Tina gave a vertical heave to her mighty flukes, and off they went.
The fifty-five-degree water rushed past Jeff’s ears and nose, the deep chill practically slamming him with an ice-cream headache. Salt, bromide, and other chemicals in the artificial ocean stung his eyes. But Jeff was used to it by now. Besides, any cold and discomfort instantly vanished when he was focused on the risky aerial ballet he was about to perform with a top predator nearly forty times his size.
Few things feel more exhilarating than bolting through water at ten to fifteen miles an hour with tons of thrust propelling you from behind by your feet. It’s like having a jet pack fastened to your soles. With that much energy, all you need to do is steer.
Jeff lo
ved steering, and he was good at it. He always wore one pair of white athletic socks under two pairs of black dress socks. They were better than rubber bootees, providing more flexibility for the toes and maximum traction against the whales’ slick and rubbery skin.
To execute the hydro, he needed Katina to push him almost to the bottom of the pool, from where she could build up enough vertical speed to propel them both skyward and out of the water. Jeff lifted his head to gulp some air, then leaned both head and torso downward. Katina, the Cadillac of killer whales, effortlessly shifted course with her power steering and luxury ride. Now she knew what they were about to do: a hydro. She was definitely into it, Jeff could tell, and he smiled to himself underwater.
Tina nimbly drove her trainer downward by the balls of his feet. Jeff was getting over a cold and his sinuses were inflamed. He braced himself for the dive, knowing what was about to come. Katina continued the downward plunge, almost to the bottom of the thirty-six-foot-deep tank. Jeff’s sinuses began squeaking and squealing. They felt as if they were about to pop. Water was still inside the cavities from the last show, and the pain was intensifying as bone and tissue tried to equalize the mounting pressure. Pressure at the bottom of A Pool was equal to two atmospheres, and Jeff was not exactly descending in a leisurely fashion. He was performing a hydro in Orlando, not snorkeling off Key West.
Jeff used his head and torso to steer Katina along the bottom contour of the pool, hugging its shape while allowing enough space for her to get underneath him. It was time to launch. Jeff steered toward the sky. Tina issued three strong pulses from her tail, and up they went. He could see the bright Florida sun, shattered by ripples on the surface. He felt the power of Katina at his feet as the brawny mammal contracted the powerful muscles of her peduncle, a whale’s lower trunk extending from the dorsal fin to the fluke. The force of her thrust hurled them both upward at remarkable speed.