An A to Z of Hungry Killer Whales

A Long Time Ago

Washington State was once a place where people captured killer whales—also known as orcas—and sent them to marine parks all over the world. More than one-third of all Southern Residents, a population of killer whales who live off the Pacific Northwest coast, were taken in these captures. Sixty-eight Southern Residents remained in the wild. When federal courts put an end to killer whale captures in 1976, the people of Washington thought they had Saved the Whales.

Belonging

There are three pods in the Southern Resident community: J, K, and L pods. Within each pod are families—grandmothers, mothers, offspring, and grand offspring. These families stay together for decades. For life.

Chinook

In faded jeans and a blue anorak, killer whale researcher John Ford maneuvers the red and yellow boat Squamish, while Graeme Ellis, his longtime friend and colleague, leans over the bow holding a long-handled fine-mesh dip net. The kind used to skim fall leaves out of a swimming pool. It’s the 1990s, and a group of killer whales has just finished feeding. Ellis makes a pass with the net and collects the fish scales and fish bits left on the water’s surface and winking in the glare.

Ford and Ellis return to the Pacific Biological Field Station on Vancouver Island to see what they have. What they found was not what they expected. Almost all the samples were from Chinook salmon. 

What scientists call genetically and culturally distinct, simply means irreplaceable.

Chinook. King. Blackmouth. Spring. Tule. Tyee. Quinnat. Oncorhynchus tshawytscha. All names for the same iconic fish, the grandest and richest of the Pacific salmon species. An adult Chinook’s shiny chrome body is as large and muscular as a lumberjack’s thigh; large enough to hang out either side of a killer whale’s mouth, and large enough for the whales to share. 

All Chinook? This couldn’t be right, thought Ford and Ellis. There must have been some bias in their collection. So they refined their technique and went out again. And again. But every time they went out, their samples came back as Chinook. They even collected samples when the sea was thick with sockeye or pink salmon, but the whales swam past these schools and favored Chinook. This discovery—first published in 1998—would become the crux of the Southern Residents’ story.

Distinct Beings

The Southern Residents are different from all other populations of killer whales. They are what scientists call genetically and culturally distinct. What does this mean? It means that even though they look like other killer whales, they don’t breed with them—not even with Bigg’s