Resident Orca have Come and Gone

As the fate of missing orca J50 remains uncertain, some in the orca watching community are celebrating a special encounter with the Southern Resident orcas – a greeting ceremony between pods.

Bart Rulon, a wildlife photographer and longtime orca fan, captured the event with his camera Thursday while out on a Puget Sound Express whale watching boat. (Scroll below for raw footage)

The team sighted J, K, and L pods converging near Victoria, British Columbia.

"In this day and age, the last couple years, it’s rare," said Rulon.

Rulon said seeing the whales’ gathering was exciting.

"It’s a big party whenever they have a meeting like this when the pods haven’t seen each other for a long time," he said. "It’s pretty exciting. It’s uplifting to see them happy like this because we’ve seen a lot of bad news lately."…
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We are witnessing a slow motion extinction here,’ researcher says of endangered killer whale population.

An ailing killer whale calf that scientists have been trying to treat since August has died, scientists believe.

Ken Balcomb, head of the Center for Whale Research on San Juan Island in Washington state, said research teams declared the three-year-old female, known as J50, dead on Thursday evening.

J50 had not been spotted since last Friday.

Scientists became concerned for the southern resident killer whale in early August, when overhead photography showed she had lost 20 per cent of her body weight. The images triggered a cross-border emergency response and an unprecedented attempt to shoot the whale with doses of antibiotics.

“We know we’re not going to get a carcass, because she was so thin her body sank to the bottom for sure. We’re calling her dead as of 5 o’clock this [Thursday] evening,” Balcomb said.

“Our boat is returning with no evidence that she’s alive anywhere in the population.”

The southern resident killer whales, which are so endangered there are just 75 left, swim between Canadian and U.S. waters through busy shipping lanes….
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Canada is taking steps to expand habitat protection for killer whales to boost survival of the critically endangered southern-resident population.

The Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada announced Wednesday the department is initiating a 60-day comment period on creating new areas of critical habitat for the whales. One area is off the coast of southwestern Vancouver Island, including Swiftsure and La Pérouse banks (important for both northern and southern residents). The other is in Dixon Entrance, along the north coast of Graham Island from Langara to Rose Spit (important for northern residents).

The move to expand habitat protection comes on top of a reduction by the department of chinook salmon harvest by up to 35 percent for the 2018 fishing season, with a full closure of commercial and recreational fish for chinook in three key foraging areas for the southern residents: the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the Gulf Islands and the mouth of the Fraser River. These measures, enacted June 1, will continue until Sept. 30, and include increased monitoring to assess the effectiveness of the closures….
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Hundreds of sea lions now congregate in the Columbia River and its tributaries, decimating salmon runs that migrate upstream into Washington and Idaho. Over the last 10 years, state resource managers have killed nearly 200 animals near the Bonneville Dam in Oregon, and they’re asking for permission to lethally remove them in other parts of the river.

Meanwhile, proposals to kill off harbor seals in Puget Sound that failed to gain traction in the past are now being taken more seriously. One of three breakout sessions during the Aug. 28 meeting of Gov. Jay Inslee’s task force to save the dwindling southern resident killer whales focused exclusively on proposals to reduce salmon predation by pinnipeds, which compete for food with fish-eating orca pods. The widely reported death of a southern resident calf, and the subsequent two weeks of grieving by its mother has increased the urgency to take drastic steps to save the southern residents. Killing pinnipeds, however, remains controversial.

Harbor seals feed more often on juvenile salmon than adults, and studies have found they eat more individual fish than any other predator. Orcas consume the most salmon biomass — they eat fewer individual salmon, but the fish they eat are older and larger. Sea lions eat less biomass than the orcas, but state resource managers say they have a particularly detrimental impact on salmon populations because they eat spawning adults at fish ladders….
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The video was taken by The Monterey Bay Aquarium in California. Dolphins typically swim in pods of a few dozen at a time, but a superpod sighting is rare, especially so close to shore. (However, there were reports of a superpod of 100,000 dolphins near San Diego in 2013!)

Seeing hundreds of these creatures together, racing after billions of baitfish, is mesmerizing.

It occurs when the food source the dolphins are hunting change direction and pods start to overlap, bringing multiple pods together in a beautiful, almost synchronized swim towards nourishment.

They work together to corral schools of small fish so that everyone gets ample food for their efforts….
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Whales finally got some good news on Wednesday after the International Whaling Commission adopted a number of measures at its annual meeting in Florianopolis, Brazil, including a resolution recognising the cetaceans’ crucial role in ecosystems.

While, in the past, the IWC has looked at whales simply as resources, the mammals are now seen as “ecosystem engineers”, moving deep sea nutrients into the sunlight where their faecal plumes fertilise the water and help the productivity of ecosystems.

The resolution was voted on and got through in spite of opposition from Japan….
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A proposal to create a whale sanctuary in the South Atlantic was defeated Tuesday at a meeting in Brazil of the International Whaling Commission, amid a clash between countries that think whales can be hunted sustainably and others that want more conservation measures.

Opponents of the plan argued the science didn’t support the case for a sanctuary and said that it wasn’t necessary because there isn’t any commercial whaling occurring in the South Atlantic.

The measure received support from 39 countries Tuesday at the meeting in Florianopolis with 25 opposed – falling short of the three-quarters majority to pass.

Countries like Brazil, which proposed the measure, said it would have addressed threats to the mammals beyond whaling. Humane Society International called the defeat a "bitter disappointment" and said it would have helped protect whales from entanglement in fishing gear and ship strikes.

Edson Duarte, Brazil’s environment minister, said he would not be deterred, even though the measure which has repeatedly been defeated….
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The adult dolphin carried the limp, dead calf on her back. Occasionally, the dolphin, presumed to be the mother, would dive into the water, taking the carcass with her. A half-dozen Chinese white dolphins followed closely, while a larger group trailed at a distance. When the procession met a boat, the trailing dolphins formed up, pushing themselves between the vessel and the central group.

"They were almost defensive," says Matt Pine, a marine biologist at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, who watched the scene play out in Sanniang Bay, in southern China, in December 2014. Pine and his colleagues turned off the boat’s engine and lowered a hydrophone into the water, capturing audio of what they believe to be the sounds of dolphins grieving….
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For two days, the Eastern Tropical Pacific orcas had a buffet off local waters, first spotted Wednesday off of the San Clemente Pier. They moved up the coast to Newport Beach by sundown, and on Thursday morning were spotted off Laguna Beach, making their way down to Dana Point and then San Onofre State Beach toward San Diego.

The surprise sighting was not just exciting because ETP orcas rarely come this far north, but also because of the rawness exhibited in the predators’ hunting behaviors, seen up close by whale watching charters and boat captains.

"I got so excited, I forgot the people were on the boat," White said.

Steve Burkhalter, a captain aboard Dana Wharf’s OCean Adventures, has had the chance to see orcas about seven times in recent years – but Wednesday’s sighting off Dana Point was unique. He saw a large pod of common dolphins nearby, and suddenly they started stampeding, moving swiftly apart as if their lives depended on it….
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An unusual visitor has been hanging out in the St. Lawrence River for the past three years: A narwhal, more than 1,000 kilometres south of its usual range.

But the lone narwhal is not alone – it appears he has been adopted by a band of belugas.

The narwhal – thought to be a juvenile male because of its half-metre-long tusk – was filmed in July playing among a pod of young belugas, thought to be mostly or all males.

The video was taken by the Group for Research and Education on Marine Mammals (GREMM), a non-profit group dedicated to whale research, conservation and education based in Tadoussac, Que.

“It behaves like it was one of the boys,” said Robert Michaud, the group’s president and scientific director….
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