Orcs thrive in a country to the north. Why the death of Puget Sound? | national

The difference between them is us.

Southerners struggle to survive in the waters influenced by more than 6 million people, between Vancouver and Seattle, with pollution, habitat degradation and declining fishing. The fate of the people of the south of the country became terribly familiar as they were about to disappear, along with three other dead, last summer. Telling was the sad journey of J35, or Tahlequah, traveling more than 1,000 km for at least 17 days, clinging to his dead calf, which only lived for half an hour.

Yet in the north, the population of killer whales has more than doubled to 309 whales since scientists began counting them in 1974, and has since been increasing at an average of 2.2% per year.

For scientists seeking a better understanding of the problems of southern residents, they are a control group, said Sheila Thornton, chief killer whale biologist with Fisheries and Oceans Canada.

"Their environment has changed so quickly, in just two generations," Thornton said of southerners. "Following these changes is an almost impossible task. How do they survive in the environment we created them? "

The decline of whales, a symbol of the Northwest, is also a warning, as climate change and development reshape our region.

Northerners live not only in a different place, but in another world.

Paul Spong rides his pair of chainsaw earmuffs and blocks the paddle while piloting his boat to retrieve visitors arriving at OrcaLab, her land-based and remote whale-watching station located on Hanson Island in northeastern Vancouver Island.

OrcaLab grows on the shores of the island like a lingonberry herb that comes from an old strain: organic and nestled in its place. And what a place it is.

It's a vision of how the lands and waters of Puget Sound were.

Behind the lab, a 1,000-year-old cedar reigns on woods in which the light looks green. The soil under the foot is thick and mellow, with deep down, and the forest covers the land up to the waterline. The beaches, never shielded or isolated from the feeder sea, are piled up with driftwood and fucus.

On these remote islands of the Broughton Archipelago, bears return rocks in search of crabs and crows grinding in the woods. The clear, clean, green water of jade abounds with seabirds, humpback whales and dolphins. The bones picked up and stuck between the stones of the beach testify to the richness of the fish.

OrcaLab has been Spong's listening post since 1970. What he wants to hear – and has been obsessively recording it 24 hours a day, seven days a week, in summer and fall all these decades – is the its whales residing in the north that navigate the waters of Blackfish Detroit Sound and Johnstone.

Sitting on a wooden rail of the bridge overlooking the sea of ​​glass, Spong gently talks about the life that he and his wife, Helena Symonds, have lived here in the midst of whales.

Behind him, in his lab, a group of ever-changing research volunteers are watching images from underwater cameras that Spong has placed in the area over the years to document non-invasively the lives of passing whales. Hydrophones – submarine microphones – also monitor the water of a listening network Spong has established an area of ​​about 50 square kilometers in the central habitat of the killer whales. Live webcams also bring the wonder of this place to the world.

Among the first to understand the complex emotional life and intelligence of orcas, Spong was also one of the pioneers who insisted that one's name change to orca killer whale, to better reflect the nature of these animals long feared and decried at random. and vicious killers. Orcs are efficient and competent hunters. But never in nature have we ever seen a killer whack a human, even when the kidnappers took their cubs for aquariums.

From a scientific background in the brain, it was in 1967 that he worked with the captive animal Skana at the Vancouver Aquarium that Spong discovered he was interacting with a complex mind.

He quickly protested against captivity, which provoked his employer's dissatisfaction. After leaving the aquarium, he quickly created OrcaLab. To date, he has recorded thousands of hours of orcs sounds and images and is even more convinced that humans share a space with beings with abilities that we are just beginning to discover.

"They are so successful," said Spong, referring to Orcinus Orca, sovereign of the seas and supreme predator of all the world's oceans. They live in cooperative cultures and even in peace between different tribes of their kind. In the North Pacific, northern and southern resident killer whales, transient killer whales – or Bigg killer whales – and a third type called offshores have developed a sophisticated diplomacy, sharing space over a vast territory. Although they overlap in their hunting and hunting trips, they remain for the most part in their distinct ecological niches.

Northern residents generally remain in northern Vancouver Island and southeastern Alaska, while southerners cross the transboundary waters of the Salish Sea between the United States and Canada and the United States. outer coast of Washington, Oregon and even California. Transient passengers travel through both locations and offshores generally remain on the outer continental shelf. The three types do not cross, do not share language, food or culture and are not known to fight.

Specialization in the diet could be one of the reasons: people in transit eat seals and other marine mammals; aliens eat sharks, while northerners and southerners eat fish, mostly chinook salmon.

Residents are unique in their family ties, stronger than humans. Orca families stay together all their lives, their children never leaving the company of their family day after day. They share food, hunt and travel together, and sleep side by side, moving slowly with the current on the surface of the water. Breathe conscious, unlike us, they have to keep half of their brain awake to keep breathing while they're resting.

They are superheroes of the sea, traveling at least 75 km per day, with a speed of up to 30 km / h and capable of diving more than 3,000 feet.

Yet, they are so much more than all business. Northerners and Southerners are playful, athletic and extremely tactile players, who touch and interact continuously in the water, their babies being tossed by their parents and fallen on their backs. Their social life is rich. Males and females can mate all year.

Spong shows underwater images taken by cameras of the Robson Bight (Michael Bigg) ecological reserve, reserved for whales. Here, on round and smooth stone beaches, they eagerly seek their pleasures: orcs glide through a pellucid aquamarine water, pressing the air of their lungs in the form of silvery bubbles in order to sink down and pamper on the stones. They rub their bodies on the pebbles, apparently just for fun.

The sanctuary is visible from a remote observation outpost of OrcaLab on Cracroft Point, with underwater cameras placed at fixed locations to serve as a window to whale life. A hut at the top of a small platform on the tip is the base camp for volunteers who also document the whales' whereabouts and the human activities that surround them.

On the coast, more and more volunteers are also working at the research station called Eagle Eye. Reached by a rope, climbed hand-in-hand on a steep cliff, volunteers here guard the reserve, erected in 1982 as sanctuary reserved for killer whales by the BC. government. They monitor all boats, motorized or not, that could harm the peace and privacy of whales. They record whale sightings and boat activities. Marine patrols on patrol ensure that boaters are kept at a required distance of 200 meters from whales outside the reserve and monitor the waters that are found there.

Southerners do not have respite nor shelter from human intrusion and noise. Although they are the most studied whales in the world and among the most endangered orcas, they have to deal with boat traffic and human intrusion, even in their most critical feeding areas, such as than the west coast of the island of San Juan.

The sanctuary for northern residents, reserved for eating, socializing and enjoying the beaches, is not perfect. Commercial fishermen are allowed in the sanctuary to pursue sockeye salmon. And nearby Johnstone Strait remains a major communication route between the waters of southeastern Alaska and the Salish Sea.

Of course: a cruise ship, from a height of five floors, suddenly appears, blocking the view of the sparkling waters of the Strait. This seems spectacularly out of place, an emissary of lands and waters to the south – where among millions of people, southerners are trying to live and cope.

It is these hostile waters by which Tahlequah swam, carrying his sad burden day after day. She swam south of Vancouver in front of the coal docks stacked high and leaving in the water a ghostly black dust. She swam in the busy shipping lanes of the Haro Strait, amid the container ships and oceanic tankers that dominated her. She swam in traffic jams, including commercial whale watching boats, which bring in millions of dollars each season. The sound of ships masks the sounds that orcas use to find their food, which adds to their problems.

Along with her family, she also faces other threats: toxic substances seeping into the food chain and then into the milk of whale mothers. A recent study predicts a global collapse of the population of killer whales due to polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in the orc food chain. A group of man-made toxic chemicals, PCBs were banned from manufacturing in the United States in 1979, but are still ubiquitous in the environment.

PCBs have been used around the world for decades, mainly to insulate and cool electrical equipment and prevent electrical fires. They have also been used in hydraulic systems, cable lighting and insulation, painting, caulking, sealants, inks and lubricants. Today, PCBs continue to wash, leak, dissipate into the atmosphere and contaminate runoff during precipitation.

The study found that PCBs and other toxic substances posed a greater risk to the health of people in the southern United States, as southern residents live in more polluted waters.

Toxic substances are also more dangerous for them because they do not have enough to eat. When they are hungry, orcas burn their fat by releasing toxic substances into their bloodstream. And all too often, people in the south are hungry because the chinook they eat is threatened with extinction, just like them.

Tahlequah was swimming alone, her gondola within earshot, but not in sight. She was swimming slowly, perhaps exhausted, and her dives were getting shorter as she worked to restrain herself at her calf. Despite the sunset light shining on the rocks in the Swanson Canal on a July evening, it was not a typical Orca postcard photo, but the burning sight of an animal struggling to keep in a state of extinction.

True, the people of the north are still a threatened species and have their own problems. But people in the south have always had the upper hand, said Jared Towers, an expert on killer whales from Fisheries and Oceans Canada, who studied both populations.

The killer whales in the north of the country have a range of salmon tracks much more varied, including chinook created in Washington State as the salmon matures and travels in northern waters. They pick them up before the southerners have their chance.

But for thousands of years, southerners have continued to prosper until their habitat and food reserves are reduced.

The main limiting factors for southern residents are the reduced quality of their habitat and insufficient nutrition in their primary range, said Towers.

The short portion of the southerners' stick is getting shorter as they struggle in some of the world's most urban waters. The southern inhabitants are now in critical danger of extinction, with only 74 people.

Barry Thom, Regional Administrator of NOAA Fisheries, West Coast Region, faced an angry mob at a public hearing in Friday Harbor in September after the terrible summer of losses for southern residents. "I'm looking at 2018 and I hope it's the low point," Thom said. "Time is running out to recover killer whales and it's heartbreaking to see."

In response, Governor Jay Inslee convened a task force on the recovery of the killer whale, which is now meeting to formulate the recommendations to be presented on November 16 for this legislative session. It remains to be seen whether these efforts will bring about the profound changes that the killer whales need – from cleaner water to a quieter foraging and to a greater amount of chinook -.

As winter approaches, scientists' drone photography shows that many southern residents look leaner than at the beginning of their season in the Salish Sea – a bad way to start the leanest season .

There is hope in at least three pregnancies in groups of southern residents, J, K and L. However, this hope is fragile. Of the 35 whale pregnancies followed by scientists from the University of Washington from 2007 to 2014, more than two-thirds failed to produce a live calf. And the losses were probably higher; all pregnancies are not detected. Struggling to survive in hostile waters, southerners have not been successfully breeding for three years.

In the north, life is so different; Last year, 10 new calves were born to orc families.

PHOTOS (for help with images, contact 312-222-4194): Orcs

GRAPHIC (for help with images, contact 312-222-4194): Orcs