Many Whales Around for the Start of Autumn

A test fishery for chinook salmon on the Fraser River this year is reporting dismal returns, raising new concerns for the endangered southern resident killer whales who rely heavily on these fish for their survival.

The federal government announced in May a reduction in harvest of chinook by roughly one-third and closures in some key whale foraging areas after declaring the southern resident killer whales are facing an imminent threat to their survival. The federal government acknowledges that lack of prey is one of the critical factors affecting the whales’ recovery.

But Misty MacDuffee, wild salmon program director for the Raincoast Conservation Foundation, said the daily results from the Albion test fishery on the Fraser had already demonstrated the need for a complete closure of both marine commercial and sport fisheries on chinook, in order to leave prey for the whales….
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.. the Snake River winding through these fields connects the critically endangered killer whales to this dryland wheat country. The river is home to some of the salmon orcas need: chinook, swimming home to the mighty Columbia and its major tributary, the Snake.

Now, a decades-long battle to take down the dams is finding new energy. The dam busters are seizing on a new star witness: mother orca whale Tahlequah. She swam with her dead calf through the Salish Sea for weeks in July, in a searing vision of loss watched around the world. Then came J50, a 3-year-old orca wasting away, the third orca dead in four months.

The losses galvanized orca champions now joining forces with those who have long wanted the dams gone because they hurt salmon. A new hybrid social movement is stirring. The word orca has become its own hashtag. Restaurants and markets have yanked chinook. Tahlequah is turning up in street art. On Friday, mourners staged an orca funeral procession in downtown Seattle, wearing black and white as they marched to the federal building, where they remembered Tahlequah and her calf and rallied for dam removal….
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Fisheries Minister Jonathan Wilkinson said Friday the government knew when it took office that more needed to be done to help keep the whales from going extinct and further protections the Liberals have put in place will be taken into account in the NEB review.

"The plight of the killer whale doesn’t relate directly to this project alone," he said. "It relates to lack of availability of chinook salmon, contaminants in the water and all vessels in the Salish Sea, the 3,200 large container ships and cruise ships, thousands of B.C. ferries, tens of thousands of recreational boats … six more oil tankers a week is something that is important to mitigate, but this is a far bigger issue."…
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FRIDAY HARBOR, Washington – By now, the millions of people around the world who followed the saga of a mother orca carrying her dead calf know the endangered southern-resident orca whales exclusively eat chinook salmon. But what do the chinook eat?

A team of research scientists climbed into a small submarine and plunged to the bottom of the Salish Sea off San Juan Island last week, in search of the forage fish that are a staple of the chinook’s diet.

They were looking for sand lance – a bottom-dwelling fish rich in fats and protein. Scientists know very little about its life and habitat in the Salish Sea. But they know it’s a critical link in the food chain.

"If this forage fish disappears, the salmon will disappear," said Gary Greene, a marine geologist who works with the nonprofit SeaDoc Society.

"We’re just starting to get a handle on these things now."

The scientists had a rare opportunity to view the sand lance’s habitat through the porthole of the small sub, which was built by Everett-based OceanGate.

The submersible has a bulbous viewing window on the front, and can hold five people and dive about 500 metres – about twice the height of Saanich’s Mount Douglas….
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FRIDAY HARBOR, Wash. — Southern resident orca numbers are the lowest they’ve been in more than three decades.

But you’d never know it by the bustling port of Friday Harbor on a bright September day.

Bold white letters on red signs say it everywhere: Whale Watching. Tours depart multiple times daily, taking literal boatloads of tourists from places like New Jersey and Texas out to see the majestic plumes of humpbacks and orcas.

It’s not just Friday Harbor. The whale watch industry brings in roughly $60 million annually to the region’s economy. Boats with the Pacific Whale Watching Association, a trans-boundary trade group made up of 32 whale watching and ecotourism companies, launch daily from 19 locations in Washington and British Columbia. The group has roughly 100 vessels.

Some whale watching organizations guarantee a sighting. And each day, smiling tourists come back to port telling tales of whale fins and soaring marine mammals.

But does it come at a cost?

With the southern residents starving, people are pointing fingers at the whale watching industry.

The constant presence of vessels disrupts the whales’ foraging; their clicks muted by motors.

Leaders of the local industry say they are not the problem for these endangered whales.

Yet even some whale watchers admit: They play a part….
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Canada’s coastline is over 200,000 kilometres long – nearly four times longer than that of Norway – which has the second longest in the world. At least eight species of great whales inhabit these Canadian waters (humpback, fin, sperm, sei, blue, northern right, minke and gray) along with a number of smaller whales and other cetaceans (orca, beaked, beluga and short-finned pilot whales).

Outside of the obvious environmental factors, Canada has many reasons to concern itself with the conservation and management of whales. We have a significant whale-watching industry, serving hundreds of thousands of visitors yearly.

Meanwhile, fish and seafood are among Canada’s largest exports of food products – an industry worth $6.6 billion in 2016. Some fishing communities have argued that the recovery of whale populations since the moratorium has hit fish stocks, but we now understand that whales are net contributors to healthy fish stocks.

Also, Canada is one of the few places in the world where Indigenous hunters still hunt whales. Similar hunts in Alaska, Eastern Russia, Greenland and the Caribbean island of Bequia are protected by the IWC under its Aboriginal Subsistence Whaling program.

Canada should be protecting its interests at the IWC and, given the fragile nature of the commission, should be providing leadership to a vital international forum for the protection of one of the most important species on the planet (the commissioner for Monaco, Professor Frederic Briand, an expert in marine food webs, describes whales as the "architects of biodiversity in our oceans.") It astonishes me that Mali, a landlocked African nation, is a member of the IWC, while Canada is not.

Canada does collaborate with the IWC on its research initiatives. Canadian scientists provide vital data to the IWC, helping to inform the commission’s science committee on whale stocks. It also sent an observer to the Florianopolis meeting. But its long absence as a member of the commission is both baffling and shameful, given our interest in the health of our oceans….
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