August 24th: Some Js and Ks in Swanson Channel

On Saturday it looked like J-Pod might be leaving us and heading back out to the open ocean, but then late in the day they turned and came back in! Towards sunset all was quiet on the west side, except for the blows of some very spread out orcas....and then two much longer blows of a couple of surprising humpbacks!

J34 and another whale slowly head south on the evening of August 23rd

At the same time, two adult humpbacks head north!

Early on Sunday the 24th I was excited to hear that there were a lot of whales off the south end of San Juan Island. It was looking good for an evening whale watch with my brother and his family aboard Legacy Charters. As we left Snug Harbor, we went north to meet up with Js and Ks as they were entering Swanson Channel in the Canadian Gulf Islands.

On our way out we paused to watch a purse seiner haul in his catch - pretty dismal, I thought! Word is fishing in US waters is not good this season, even though projections were for another high return this year after the record-setting sockeye run in 2010 (young from that year should be returning this year). Unfortunately for US fishermen, warm oceanic conditions have pushed all the adult fish further north, and about 99% of them are returning to the Fraser River through Johnstone Strait in Canadian waters rather than a split between that route and the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

Not a lotta fish for humans (or whales?) in US waters this summer

K33 Tika must have heard I was having a hard time identifying him (see my last post), because not only was he the first whale he saw on this evening, but he kept popping up everywhere throughout the whole trip. I think I saw him from all angles, so maybe I can be better about identifying him from now on....at least until next year's growth spurt.

K33 Tika

His mom K22 Sekiu was nearby, and we got several nice looks at her as well.

K22 Sekiu

K22 Sekiu

The Hodgepod Summer continued, as we had yet another new combination of whales traveling together. Present were J2 and the J14s (without L87), the J19s, the J22s, the K12s, K13s, and K14s.

J14 Samish

Later we heard the rest of J-Pod (including L87) and a bunch of L-Pod whales were further south off San Juan Island! Surprise! No one saw the Ls coming in.

I love being on the water late in the day. The lighting is so beautiful. Watching whales in the Canadian Gulf Island is always pretty spectacular, too.

Another shot of K22 Sekiu

At one point, J32 Rhapsody came cruising by us out of nowhere

J32 Rhapsody

The whales were spread out traveling, occasionally stopping to forage. It was a very peaceful encounter.

Nothing better than sunset whales!

On the way back to port we cruised by the cormorant rookery on Henry Island:

We also pulled in Captain Spencer's crab trap and got a nice close up look at some Dungeness crabs of all sizes. My niece and nephew were fascinated but did not want to touch one!

We had a great evening on board the Legacy!

With members of all three pods around, I was assuming we might have a superpod kinda day on Monday. Not so! The mixed group of Js and Ls went west, and the northern group of Js and Ks continued north. So far north, in fact, that on Tuesday they were seen near Campbell River, BC! That's pretty unusual, and it's probably not a coincidence due to so many fish coming down the Inside Passage instead of through the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

No residents doesn't mean no orcas around, however! There have been a lot of transients around, and on Tuesday I would be in for an encounter like no other.

Southern Residents: Data Behind the Impressions

It's that time of year again, when us whale folks start anxiously anticipating the arrival of the Southern Residents in inland waters. Sure, it's light past 8 PM again, the swallows are patrolling the island's fields, and I can take a walk without a jacket, but it won't feel like the season has really started until hearing these three words: "Many whales inbound".

This year, like last year, we're waiting longer than we used to. The days slipped off the calendar from April into May, and other than a surprise brief visit from K-Pod, there's no sign of the Southern Residents in the Salish Sea.

I recently participated in two workshops about orcas and salmon: The Whale Museum's naturalist gear-up here on San Juan Island and a joint effort by several regional organizations of an orca and salmon recovery workshop in Seattle. Finally, thankfully, it seems like some discussion about the real issues facing these whales is starting to happen. There was a lot of public attention given to potential vessel impacts on the whales as NOAA went through the process of instituting new regulations for boating around the whales. General consensus is that the real issue facing these whales is not boats, not toxins, but salmon. No fish, no blackfish. It's that simple.

Hopes were raised that real action would be taken a couple years ago when NOAA and Canada's DFO held a series of three joint workshops to discuss the potential impacts of fisheries on food availability for Southern Residents. Scientists from both sides of the border got together and presented a wealth of information about salmon, whales, and the interaction between the two. It was an impressive transboundary collaboration, but the result was a disappointing one. The scientific panel concluded at the end of the workshops that there's no evidence fisheries management will affect the number of salmon available for the Southern Residents. [Note: Many whale advocates were outraged at this conclusion, but in the panel's defense, they were asked to look at what was ultimately a very narrow question. The truth is, fisheries have been and are heavily managed, and current take from any given salmon run is a fairly small percentage of the whole, certainly a much smaller proportion of the number of fish available than used to be taking via fishing. Ceasing fishing altogether won't necessarily make the difference required to save the Southern Residents. The real issue is a broader one - there's not enough fish for anybody. Habitat restoration, at all levels of the salmon's life cycle, is what needs to happen. Still, we all hoped something positive for the whales would come out of NOAA's series of workshops, but in reality, not much has happened as a result.]

There are a couple of major conclusions I made as a result of attending and participating in the recent two orca-salmon workshops. One is that, amazingly, people just don't seem to talk to each other. The lack of communication - between salmon and whale biologists, between the US and Canada, etc. - is astounding. One would think - or at least hope - that the people doing salmon recovery and the people doing whale recovery would be working closely together. The truth is, they may not even know each other. A major comment from the salmon folks at the Seattle workshop was surprise at all the new faces in attendance. They've just never talked to the whale people before. As Jim Lichatowich, an author and retired salmon biologist, shared with us at the Friday Harbor workshop, it's worse even than that: the hatchery fish people and the wild fish people don't even communicate. It really seems like everyone is focused on their own slice of the pie and there's not much collaboration to look at the bigger picture.

A second truth that I was shocked to learn is that hatcheries are still seen by many as a major solution to our salmon problem. There's a wealth of evidence to the contrary, which I won't go into detail here, but I highly recommend Jim's book Salmon, People, Place as a good read to learn more about this and other relevant salmon issues. It really hit home when a WDFW biologist at the workshop in Seattle said, "That the jury is still out on whether or not fish farms [in Canada] have any effect on wild salmon populations." For those of you that don't gasp in outrage at this statement, I highly suggest you watch the documentary Salmon Confidential (viewable in its entirety at this link) and/or tune in to a special episode of 60 Minutes focusing on salmon farms that's airing this Sunday on CBS at 7 PM PST.

The final realization I made at the workshops is that those of us who have been around the whales for many years have many impressions of what has been changing in their behavior. The trends we've witnessed are universal across observers, but for the most part they're very anecdotal: the whales aren't here as much in the spring, there aren't as many superpods anymore, and so on. I think us naturalists are correct in our observations, the problem is, it's hard to demonstrate the truth behind these impressions without some sort of quantitative data. After giving it a lot of thought, I decided I wanted to try and put some numbers to some of these impressions. I've done some data mining in the last couple weeks, and I have the results to share with you here.

My friend and mentor Rich Osborne has always stressed to me the importance of long term data sets, and never have I agreed with that more than now. You may not realize what impact that data your collecting will have in the long term, but often the questions will come after the answers. If you have the data set, the information you can parse out of it as questions arise later is pretty amazing. The data presented here come from three such long-term data sets. The first is Bob Otis' data from Lime Kiln Lighthouse. For more than 20 years, Bob and a team of interns have collected data on whale passbys from May 20 to August 10 between the hours of 9 and 5 in a defined study area in front of the lighthouse. This collection of data, including a lot of behavioral data, is an amazing slice of what the whales were doing in one particular place over time. The second data set is The Whale Museum's Orca Master archive of whale sightings, in which they've compiled reports from many different sources into a single compendium of orca sightings in inland waters. Finally, I've also referenced the technical reports of the Pacific Salmon Commission, which date back to the 1970s. It's also worth mentioning that I know there are caveats, statistical and otherwise, to all the graphs I've made here, but I still wanted to share my first stab at quantifying these impressions of what we've seen the whales doing lately.

First of all, I wrote a blog last summer entitled "Where are the whales?" which focused on what an anomalous year last summer was for whale sightings. I summarized how much less the whales had been around to that point in the season, but I wanted to add a more complete graph here that shows how the numbers ended up for the time period of Bob's study at Lime Kiln. Clearly, the whales just weren't around last summer as much as they usually are. [For all these graphs, you can click to see a larger view.]

Number of "whale days" at Lime Kiln Lighthouse. A whale day is defined as whales being in Bob Otis' defined study area between the hours of 9 AM and 5 PM. Data were collected each year from May 20 - August 10. The red line indicates the average. Last year, with just 18 whale days, was less than half of the average.

This summarizes the summer months nicely, but what about the spring? When I used to be just a seasonal resident on San Juan Island, I remember a friend of mine telling me I just had to find a way to get up here in April, because that's what she was having some of her best whale encounters of the year. "J-Pod is on the west side almost every day!" she exclaimed. By the time I did move here full time, things had changed. I've never seen the Residents much in April. This same trend has been expressed by many - that the whales used to be here routinely in the spring, but now are spending less and less time here in April and May. To try and quantify this, I looked at how many days in the month of April residents were seen in inland waters. Curious as to whether or not this has anything to do with fish, I also looked at spring runs of Chinook salmon on the Fraser River, and graphed these numbers on the same chart.

The blue line indicates the number of days Southern Residents were seen in inland waters in the month of April, with data from The Whale Museum's Orca Master data set. The red line indicates the total escapement (the number of fish that actually return to the freshwater spawning grounds) of Fraser River spring Chinook of both the age-1.3 and age-1.2 runs combined. These abundance of each of the two stocks was estimated off graphs in the Pacific Salmon Commission technical reports. Circled in green is where I think things changed - in 2007. The whales were here a lot, but salmon numbers were at their nadir. Perhaps this is when the whales decided it wasn't worth their time to visit the Salish Sea in April anymore - after that, their visits declined sharply, and spring salmon numbers remained depressed.

Another common impression is that the whales have been more spread out than they used to be. Again, I turned to Bob's data to try and put some numbers to this. In Bob's study area is an imaginary line that extends out from the lighthouse across Haro Strait. A note is made whenever a whale crosses this imaginary line. The time that passes between the first whale and the last whale to cross is noted as the spread out time. If all the whales are in one group and cross the line together, the spread out time is zero. If J2 Granny is way up ahead of everyone else, and the rest of the pod slowly follows her north in their matrilines, the spread out time might be an hour or more. To correct for the number of whales present (because it makes sense the spread out time would be a higher for a superpod of 80 whales than when it's just the L12 sub-group present), I looked at spread out time divided by the number of whales present. I came up with an average spread out time per whale across all the passbys Bob and his interns collected data for in a year, and that average is what's graphed here.

Average spread out time per whale for passbys in front of Lime Kiln Lighthouse during Bob's study period each year. A yellow trendline has been added to the graph, showing an upward trend in spread out time over the years. A change from an average of .5 to 2.0 might not seem like much, but think of it this way: In 2003 the whales were on average half a minute apart from each other. In 2012 this average was more like two minutes per whale. That means for a group of 10 whales to pass by, the average time it took changed from 5 minutes to 20 minutes, or a 4 fold increase.

Finally, people have also been saying that the whales seem to spend more time foraging and less time socializing in the Salish Sea in recent summers. There seem to be fewer superpods, and when they do happen, they seem to be shorter in duration. This is a harder one to quantify, because even when people do define whale behavior into categories such as foraging, traveling, resting, or socializing, it's a subjective definition and also may not apply to all the whales present - e.g. most whales might be resting while one juvenile is breaching repeatedly in apparent play, or all the whales might be traveling steadily in one direction when one animal breaks off and mills in one location in apparent pursuit of prey.

When I think of superpods or other groups of highly social whales, I think of lots of surface active behaviors: breaches, tail slaps, pec fin slaps, etc. All these behaviors are defined as surface percussive behaviors in Bob's study. I calculated an average number of percussive behaviors per whale for each passby in Bob's study, and then averaged this number across all the passbys in a season to get a single number for each year.

Average number of percussive behaviors per whale across all the passbys in a season. A yellow trendline has been added to the graph, indicating a slight downward trend in the number of surface percussive behaviors over the study period. According to this trendline, twenty years ago in an average passby of 20 whales you may have expected to see about 12 surface percussive behaviors. Last year, with a passby of 20 whales, on average you would have only expected to see 4 such behaviors.

I'm excited that discussions about the changing behavior of our Southern Residents has been happening, and I hope I've been able to contribute further to those discussions here. What do you think, do these data support your own observations? What other trends have you noticed over the years in watching the Southern Residents?

Literally as I was writing this I got word that some Residents were found near Active Pass. Here's hoping that this is the beginning of a summer season with a little more "whale time" than last year!

September Whale Update

After July and August were dismal in terms of Southern Resident Killer Whale sightings around San Juan Island, it didn't take long into September for things to change. On September 3rd, all three pods returned and Southern Residents were seen in inland waters for the next twelve days straight. From September 16th they were gone for a few days, but returned before long and made their first foray into Puget Sound for the fall on September 21st. Since then, the only day without Residents was the 24th.

L92 Crewser in Haro Strait - September 23rd

For a few weeks, things in the whale world have started to feel a little more normal again. The Residents are making regular trips up to the Fraser River, sometimes staying up there for a day or two foraging, and are utilizing their regular traveling routes like Boundary Pass and Rosario Strait on a more frequent basis - they're not just staying off the south end of San Juan Island like they often did when they were here earlier this summer.

Whale-watching in September often looks like this: lots of open space and no boats

Checking back in with the Albion Chinook test catch fishery on the lower Fraser River, it's no surprise the whales have been here more: there's also been more fish.

Daily catch numbers (red line) from the Albion test fishery through late September compared to the historical average from 1961-2012

Cumulative catch numbers (purple line) for 2013 compared to the historical average from 1961-2012

September 23rd was the first time I've seen K13 Skagit all summer. The K13 matriline is one of the family groups I know the best because I've seen them so much over the years, and they've been here off and on this year, but this was amazingly the first time I've crossed paths with them.

K13 Skagit - September 23, 2013 in Haro Strait

On September 25th, we had what was perhaps our last summer-like day of the year. The skies were blue, the sunshine was warm, the waters were flat calm. I spent four hours in the afternoon on the west side of San Juan Island with foraging whales in sight (mostly distant blows) the entire time. Over the course of an hour, J2 Granny, J8 Speiden, L87 Onyx, and the J14 matriline made their way slowly north of Lime Kiln Lighthouse.

J2 Granny heading north on September 25, 2013

Even though the whales weren't super close, it was so peaceful to just sit (in a T-shirt! In September!) and listen to their blows while they did their thing without a boat in sight.

L87 Onyx - September 25, 2013

It will be interesting to see what the next few weeks bring. Will there continue to be a late season salmon surge, keeping the whales around later into the fall than some years? Will they start going down into Puget Sound more regularly? Or will they take off again to waters unknown? Only time will tell, but I'll be watching!

An August Whale Update

No Southern Resident Killer Whales were seen from July 20 to August 7, an unusually lengthy absence during the summer months though not entirely unheard of (in 2000 they were gone for five weeks!) On August 7th a somewhat surprising group of whales returned to the westside of San Juan Island - the L54 matriline along with orphaned boys L88 Wavewalker and L84 Nyssa. Last year, these whales only came into inland waters two or three times over the course of the whole summer, so it was interesting that they should spend some time here by themselves for several days in mid August. What's good to see is that Wavewalker and Nyssa have seemingly found themselves an adopted mom in L54 Ino; often adult males that lose their mothers as these two have don't live much longer unless they find another adult female to latch on to. 

Starting on August 11 all members of J-, K-, and L-Pods made a brief visit to the Salish Sea, the first of several. Each time, they have stayed less than 48 hours, and only on that first visit did they go north to the Fraser River; every other time they've stayed off the south end of San Juan Island before departing out the Strait of Juan de Fuca again. We expect all three pods to be traveling together as we approach fall, but the consensus is there must not be enough fish (Chinook) here to sustain them all for more than about a day.

Looking again at the Albion Chinook test catch data in the lower Fraser River, we see perhaps why this is. There have been a few spikes in Chinook numbers, perhaps luring the Southern Residents back to their traditional foraging grounds here near San Juan Island:

The cumulative numbers are still pretty dismal, however:

People often ask me how I manage to get close photos of the whales so often. The honest answer is: I don't! For many weeks, this is about as close as I got to a killer whale:

Adult male orca off Eagle Point of San Juan Island August 18, 2013

While selfishly I of course want to be seeing the whales every day, the most important thing is that they're finding food wherever they are hanging out. I'm okay with them not being here as long as they're eating! Still, I've been making every attempt to see them when I can, though often it's when you're not trying to hard that things work out. On August 17th I had an appointment to meet someone at Lime Kiln, and was surprised when the L54s and Co. were out off the lighthouse most of the afternoon. They had been around several times, but like the visiting superpods lately, I was beginning not to expect them to go far enough north for shore-based whale watchers like myself to be able to see them. So it was a nice treat.

One big spyhop from L54 Ino was a surprise admist all the foraging these six whales were doing

L88 Wavewalker, a twenty year-old male who is the last living member of his matriline, seems to have found a pal in L108 Coho, a seven year-old male that is one of L54 Ino's offspring. The two were fishing together on this afternoon, and I've heard from others this seems to be a bond in the making.

The superpod visits have been so brief and far from the best shore-based whale watch sites that I had a feeling I was going to have to get out on a boat to see them. The stars aligned for me on the evening of August 22nd, when the news of an incoming superpod aligned with a friend and co-worker being willing and able to take his boat out for a little evening cruise. We headed out from Roche Harbor and met up with the incoming whales in the middle of Haro Strait a little to the northwest of False Bay at about 7:15 PM.

The first group of whales we came across was the L47s. I'd be remiss if I didn't say that seeing this family group of five whales brought a tear to my eye, it was so good to see Southern Residents after weeks and weeks of hoping for this sort of encounter.

From left to right: L91 Muncher, L83 Moonlight, L110 Midnight, L115Mystic

The whales were super spread out over dozens of square miles. In this shot of L91 Muncher surfacing, I didn't even notice until looking at the image on the computer that there's a breaching whale in the background (the little black and white speck on the horizon to her left).

L91 Muncher

L-Pod, in addition to having several "dead end" matrilines with no juvenile or reproductive age females, also has a strongly male-skewed ratio among its young whales. The L47 matriline thus holds an even bigger importance when it comes to the future of the pod. Both juveniles in this family group are males, but there are two reproductive age females. We hope to see Muncher with her first calf soon, and with her first offspring being six years old, L83 Moonlight is could also have another calf at any time.

L83 Moonlight and her six year-old son L110 Midnight. We would expect and hope Moonlight to be having another calf soon; for L-Pod's sake we hope she will have a female!

The L47s were traveling steadily along until Moonlight started feeling a little playful. She did a couple of tail slaps and then a huge breach! I could hardly believe my eyes - such perfect lighting!

Breach by L83 Moonlight

As the L47s continued heading towards the shore of San Juan Island, we moved a little further south where we came across the J22s. We followed along with J32 Rhapsody for a while. She was having a grand old time by herself! While we only saw one breach from Moonlight, Rhapsody must have breached about ten times, with some tail slaps thrown in for good measure.

Breach by J32 Rhapsody

Another breach from J32 Rhapsody

As she continued south, we went a little ways further offshore where we found the K12 matriline. While the sunset lighting on the breaches above was perfect, it was also pretty neat to look in the other direction and have the whales silhouetted against the background of the Olympic Mountains or Vancouver Island.

K37 Rainshadow (left) with his mom K12 Sequim

K33 Tika, who at age 12 has a fin "sprout" - he'll have a towering dorsal fin before too long!

All too soon the sun was setting and it was time to head back. We left the whales heading southeast as we turned back to the north, making a stop along the way to see Lime Kiln Lighthouse from the water side - opposite of where I usually am!

Usually I watch sunsets from the rocks below the lighthouse - this time I was out on the water looking back towards shore

It was a pretty special evening out there, made all the more extraordinary by the news the following morning that the whales were already heading west again back out towards the open ocean, presumably in search of the Chinook they are still not finding here.

Where Are The Whales?

It's a question we island residents patiently put up with from May through September, the best time of year to see whales in local waters. Second only to, "What time do the whales come by?" the question "Where are the whales?" is a common one from not just tourists, but also among researchers, boat captains, naturalists, and all members of the whale-watch community. Often, the answer to the question in the summer months is something like "On the west side of San Juan Island" or "Swimming past Victoria" or "Near the mouth of the Fraser River by Vancouver, BC". The eighty-plus members of the Southern Resident Community of killer whales can travel up to a hundred miles a day, and without any of the animals being tagged it's visual spotting that finds them on a day-to-day basis. Despite a fleet of dozens of whale-watching vessels looking for whales during about 12 hours of every summer day, every morning it's sort of a whole new ballgame as to where they will show up after a nighttime's worth of traveling. More often than not in the summer months, they're somewhere within the Salish Sea, just taking occasional forays out the Strait of Juan de Fuca to the open ocean.

This year, however, the question, "Where are the whales?" has taken on a different meaning among the whale watch community. It's not just a curious question among hopeful whale watchers trying to track the movements of J-, K-, and L-Pods. It's a sadder, more anxious question this year because, quite simply, the whales aren't here.

It's true we've seen all members of all three pods in inland waters this season, but among those of us that watch these whales year after year, the consensus is something different is going on this year. They came back later than usual. They've been spending less time here. For a couple of bizarre weeks, the only whales here were the three members of the L22 matriline, something that has never happened before. But a hunch or anecdotal evidence isn't enough to prove something different is going on. Where's the data?

April and May used to be considered good whale-watching months here in the Salish Sea. According to The Whale Museum's Orca Master data set, from 1978 to 2008, members of at least one of the three pods of Southern Residents were documented in inland waters in every single month of every single year. Often, this may have just been for one day, but some years J-Pod was around nearly every day in the spring. In 2009, for the first time on record, there were no sightings in the month of April. J-Pod returned on May 4th of that year. This year, again, there were no resident killer whales in the month of April and beyond until Js returned on May 15th. It was definitely a late return, but what's been going on since then?

Dr. Bob Otis, now a retired professor from Ripon College, has been collecting killer whale data at Lime Kiln Lighthouse for 23 years. Every year, from May 20th to August 10th, between the hours of 9 AM and 5 PM, he and his team of interns records data on every group of killer whales that passes within half of a mile of the lighthouse in any direction. While his data of course doesn't fully document every time the whales are in inland waters, it's a valuable long-term data set collected in the heart of the summer range of the Southern Residents, and its consistent collection provides a reliable benchmark. Bob generously provided me with his data, from which I extracted the following information showing the number of "whale days" between May 20 and July 27th (today) for each of the last 23 years. (A "whale day" is defined as any day when killer whales passed by Lime Kiln between the hours of 9 AM and 5 PM.) Click the chart to see a larger version.

The 17 whale days so far this year are by far the lowest since Bob started collecting data in 1990. In fact, it's less than half of the 20+ year average of 40 whale days (red line) in this time period and 12 days lower than any year on record.

So why haven't you been hearing about this? I've been asking myself the same question. The truth is, the whale-watching industry hasn't really suffered *too* much as a result of the lack of Southern Residents. The transient, marine mammal eating killer whales that are distant cousins of the fish-eating Southern Residents have been thriving, perhaps benefiting from a boon of the local harbor seal and Steller sea lion populations. I remember when I first started watching whales here, transients seemed like elusive creatures to me. It took years before I saw my first one. Now, I see them several times a year just from shore on San Juan Island, and the whale watch boats see them almost daily during certain times of year. Transients have been getting a lot of good press lately, including being on the cover of a recent edition of the Seattle Times after wowing viewers right off the docks of Liberty Bay deep in Puget Sound, not far from downtown Seattle. The article mentions the Southern Residents, but says nothing about their scarcity this summer.

The sporadic transient orcas are still not a sure bet, but in addition there have been more humpback whales than usual, an abundance of lunge-feeding minke whales, lots of harbor seals with brand new pups, and fledgling bald eagles to help keep the tour companies occupied. I've heard it been suggested that local press may be staying away from the issue of the "missing" resident whales out of fear of driving away the tourists who flock here to see them. But there's no doubt in my mind: this is an issue that needs to be talked about.

More importantly than why it hasn't received more press is the underlying question of why the whales aren't here in the first place. The answer is most likely an obvious one: there's no fish here for them to eat.

Killer whales were formally thought of as generalist feeders as the species as a whole has been documented feeding on over 50 prey species. We now know that the Orcinus orca species is really a species complex made up of various ecotytpes of killer whales, each population specializing on a smaller subset of prey species. The Southern Residents have long been known to be fish eaters with a preference for salmon. In particular, they like Chinook salmon. Recent prey studies, like those conducted by Brad Hanson of NOAA's Northwest Fisheries Science Center, have shown just how strong this dietary specialization is. From genetic evidence from prey samples taken in the San Juan Islands, Brad's research team has found that not only do the Southern Residents preferentially feed on Chinook (despite being most likely to encounter pink, sockeye, and chum salmon), but they specifically feed heavily on Fraser River Chinook in June through August. The Fraser River, the longest river in British Columbia, enters the Salish Sea not far from the city of Vancouver and is one of the largest salmon-producing rivers in the region. Brad and other researchers have also conducted genetic analysis of fecal samples from the whales to help determine diet - in these studies, which look at percent composition of different prey species in the samples as opposed to frequency of occurrence with which the prey item is taken, Fraser Chinook dominate the diet by an even stronger ratio.

If you talk to a local salmon fisherman, they'll probably tell you the fishing has been great so far this year. The salmon are abundant right now, it's true - but they're pink salmon, the smallest of the local salmonid species. The residents probably preferentially feed on Chinook because they get the most bang for their buck: Chinook are the largest, fattiest salmon species. In the fall the whales switch to chum, the next largest species, but from genetic analysis of fecal samples, it doesn't look like the whales eat sockeye or pink salmon at all.

So how are those all-important Fraser River Chinook salmon runs doing this year? It's not a pretty picture. Here's the data from the Albion test fishery near Fort Langley on the lower Fraser, which is able to monitor fish stocks returning to different regions of the river. This first chart shows the catch data (CPUE = catch per unit effort) through July 22 compared to the yearly average from 1981-2012:

The picture is even more striking when you look at the cumulative catch per unit effort from this year compared to the average over the same time period (taking note that unlike most years data was not taken this year from April 1-20 - but that seems to be a small contributor to the cumulative total):

So, with the salmon clearly not here, it's perhaps not such a surprise the whales are not here either. The question still stands, however: where are they?

There have been a few reports over the last few months of the Southern Residents off Tofino on the central west coast of Vancouver Island. Since the whales haven't looked particularly emaciated (to me) when they have been here, we can only assume (hope?) that they're finding an abundance of Chinook wherever they are hanging out, somewhere out in the open ocean. It sucks that we aren't able to see them more, but really what's most important is that they're finding enough to eat. As an admittedly potentially unrelated side note, we have yet to see any new calves born to any whale in any pod in 2013.

A fair question, too, is why the residents don't switch to eating pink salmon or other species when the Chinook are not abundant. The answer is a complicated one, but my best guess is that these highly social animals are extremely culturally rigid. Despite the stresses this population has been under from events like the live capture era (which resulted in maybe a third of the population being removed) they don't stretch their social associations to include transients, or offshores, or even Northern Residents. It seems no matter what happens, they will only associate with their own kind. There is also some kind of treaty, if you can call it that, in place that divides up the food sources, giving the two co-existing populations different shares of the food web: marine mammals for transients and fish for residents. They don't seem likely to break this treaty, even when it's a matter of survival, and it seems the rules are even more severe than we first thought, as not only will they not eat mammals but they won't even settle for less than Chinook salmon. One can only hope we don't find out what happens when we, as humans, push the Southern Residents to their cultural limits. They shouldn't have to choose (they may not be able to choose) between tradition and survival.

In the meantime, all I can do is witness what I see before me: that the whales are not here like they usually are this time of year. Witness, and pass on my observations to you, which hopefully you will then share with others. It's easy to gloss over this storyline because it's true, it's not a happy one. But that doesn't make it any less important to talk about.