Northern Resident Orca Roaming Around

Check out this recently-published video showing a thrilling morning encounter with three orcas in Howe Sound.

The videographer: Former Bowen Island mayor Bob Turner, who shares information about the whales in his thoughtful narration, as he follows the trio of orcas from his kayak. It’s pretty magical….
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Scientists who are trying to treat an ailing killer whale off the Washington state coast are looking at injecting the animal with a second dose of antibiotics and a deworming drug.

For the past few weeks, the endangered female orca known as J-50 has been at the centre of an international rescue effort. She was last spotted Friday.

A veterinarian was able to dart J-50 with a broad-spectrum antibiotic on Aug. 9.

“In the most obvious sense, she’s not getting enough to eat. She’s not getting enough nutrition. That’s the fundamental problem,” he said in a telephone interview Monday.

“But whether that’s caused by the fact that she’s weak and she’s not able to forage, or because perhaps she also has some type of infection or other condition that’s affecting her – we don’t know those specifics.”…
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Hundreds of people showed up at the Swinomish Casino in Anacortes on Tuesday, but not to gamble. They wanted to have their say on the state’s endangered orcas.

Governor Jay Inslee’s killer whale task force, with the urgent task of figuring out how to keep Washington’s orcas from going extinct, met there. The task force is focusing on pollution, boat noise, and the shortage of salmon for the surviving 75 members of the southern resident killer whales.

Those orcas’ numbers have been in trouble for decades, but public interest surged this summer after the orca known as J-35 or Tahlequah carried her dead, newborn calf around for weeks.

Whether they were from the standing-room-only crowd or the sprawling, 44-member task force, almost everyone at the day-long meeting spoke of the urgency of action for orcas, the salmon they eat and the habitats they depend on.

"If we’re going to make a difference, then we need to start making a difference today,” said Debra Lekanof, intergovernmental affairs liaison with the Swinomish Tribe, which hosted the meeting. “It all comes down to the political will of Washington state."…
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An unbelievable video captured by a Vernon resident perfectly demonstrates both the beauty and brutality of nature.

Klaus Gretzmacher was fishing off the northern coast of Vancouver Island when he captured video on his iPhone of three transient killer whales hunting a seal.

Gretzmacher says it appeared that the two larger orcas were teaching a smaller orca to hunt.

“They played with this poor animal for at least half an hour before they took it down,” explains Gretzmacher. “There were three orcas, two regular sized one and one small one.”

Gretzmacher, who lives in Vernon but has a vacation home on Vancouver Island has seen killer whales attack sea lions before, but he says he has never had an experience like the one he captured on video.

“I have never seen it that close,” Gretzmacher says. “I have never had a seal try and hide under my boat for protection.”

Gretzmacher turned off his boat motor so not injure the whales or the seal.

As the boat drifted, the killer whales bumped and rubbed against its hull….
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The short-beaked common dolphin, nicknamed Kylie by locals, has made his home around a navigational buoy between Fairlie and the Isle of Cumbrae, after he is thought to have got lost from his group.

The area is not commonly visited by dolphins and Kylie has mostly been exposed to sounds produced by other species, particularly the harbour porpoise.

Now audio testing suggests the dolphin has altered the frequency of the clicking he makes so as to be understood by the porpoises.

If validated by further research, the findings would mark the first time a common dolphin has shown it can imitate other species in order to communicate….
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Wild dolphins have learned how to walk on water by copying tricks developed by captive animals, a 30-year study found.

Scientists in Australia observed that dolphins in Adelaide learned tail-walking – when the animal rises vertically out of the water and moves forward or backwards across it – from a dolphin called Billie which had spent time in a dolphinarium.

Dolphins rarely do this in the wild but it is a standard part of the routine in almost all dolphinaria.

Billie learned tail-walking by observing the performing dolphins and, when released, began performing the trick regularly in the wild.

The behaviour then faded away after a number of years, with the most prolific tail-walker dying in 2014….
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Scientists have discovered that beluga whales and narwhals go through the menopause — taking the total number of species known to experience this to five.

Aside from humans, the species now known to experience menopause are all toothed whales — belugas, narwhals, killer whales and short-finned pilot whales.

Almost all animals continue reproducing throughout their lives, and scientists have long been puzzled about why some have evolved to stop.

The new study, by the universities of Exeter and York and the Center for Whale Research, suggests menopause has evolved independently in three whale species (it may have evolved in a common ancestor of belugas and narwhals).

“For menopause to make sense in evolutionary terms, a species needs both a reason to stop reproducing and a reason to live on afterwards,” said first author Dr Sam Ellis, of the University of Exeter.

“In killer whales, the reason to stop comes because both male and female offspring stay with their mothers for life — so as a female ages, her group contains more and more of her children and grandchildren.

“This increasing relatedness means that, if she keeps having young, they compete with her own direct descendants for resources such as food….
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