All Eyes on Orcas

IN JUST FOUR DECADES the killer whale has changed in our perception from monster to environmental icon, from aqua-park sideshow to kidnap victim and movie star.

Which may say more about us than about the whale.

The tens of thousands who ooh and ah during whale-watching around the San Juan Islands each year may not know that in 1956 the American Navy deliberately killed hundreds of orcas in the North Atlantic with machine guns, rockets and depth charges - ostensibly to aid the Icelandic fishery.

A late as 1964 the Air Force was still using the whales for strafing practice. Canada did the same thing during World War II and in the 1950s mounted a .50-caliber machine gun at the entrance of Johnstone Strait, on the east side of Vancouver Island, to shoot whales that approached fishing grounds. (The weapon was never fired.)

The Navy Diving Manual of the 1960s called the killer whale "a ruthless and ferocious beast" and advised divers to leave the water if it was seen. In the Antarctic, the service claimed, whales "will attack human beings at every opportunity."

And of the 262 orcas captured worldwide between 1962 and 1973, a quarter had gunshot wounds delivered by fishermen and other boaters.

Cut to the dawn of the 21st century. Historians can find no evidence of killer whales killing humans. Orcas instead are the darlings of aquarium shows and whale-watching entrepreneurs. Millions of dollars have been spent to re-introduce Keiko, the Newport, Ore., aquarium star, back into the wild off Iceland, where he was captured 20 years before.

The change in our attitudes has been dramatic. But that is not the most astonishing thing about killer whales.

It is the fact that individual whales - specific animals that can be identified by experts in the San Juans - have lived through this entire transition of reputation. While birth dates could be off by as much as a dozen years, it is estimated one matriarch, dubbed Lummi, was born as early as 1910 and another, Granny, in 1911. Males are shorter-lived, but Ruffles dates back to 1951.

They've seen us at our gun-wielding, net-capturing worst, absorbed a century of our pollutants in their blubber and lived through a collapse of salmon numbers that threatens their own clans with hunger. Yet today they will, when the mood strikes them, frolic amidst the armada of boats that now come to watch them.

On one recent summery day off Whidbey Island, more than three dozen whales congregated to playfully socialize, their black dorsal fins looking like a regatta of dark sailboats tacking this way and that.

They breached in twisting corkscrews, slapped the water with fins and tails, and dove under our drifting whale-watching boat called the "Blackfish," named after a fishermen-slang term for orcas. Swimming with easy grace, they were pinto beautiful, submarine sleek and reeked, when they breathed, of fish.

What were the whales thinking when they "spy hopped" vertically out of the water to give us a once over with a dark liquid eye?

And what should we think of them, these marine mammals that stay in family pods for life and seem to have boundless tolerance for human curiosity?

WHAT ESSENTIALLY are gigantic dolphins are referred to as killer whales by Canadian scientists and orcas on the politically correct American side of the border, although the Latin Orcinus orca translates anyway as "killer whale." (Orcinus means "of the realm of the dead" and orca means whale. The Haida Indians had the same idea as the Romans, calling the mammal S'gan, for their chief of the underworld.)

The whales, indeed, do kill: Rich Osborne, curator at the Friday Harbor Whale Museum, has estimated the orcas of our resident pods average nearly 25 salmon a day each, which means their total consumption is more than 800,000 salmon a year. That's more than sport fishing catches in the same area.

They thrive worldwide, most numerously in colder waters, and were observed by the ancient Romans.

The whales have the biggest brain of any mammal on earth, a mass of gray matter five times larger than ours. "We don't really understand what that big brain is for," said John Ford, a marine-mammal scientist at the Vancouver Aquarium.

They can see fairly well both above and below water. One captive whale at the Vancouver Aquarium used to be fascinated by pictures Ford held up to its window of killer whales but showed no interest in pictures of other animals. Their distinctive white markings allow us to identify individuals and may help them to do the same.

They have a potential life span roughly equal to ours, and take the same number of years that humans do to reach sexual maturity.

Males grow to about 23 feet in length (the species record is 31.5 feet) and females just under 20 feet. They can weigh three to four tons and swim up to 30 mph.

Despite their Hollywood "Free Willy" charm, they are formidable predators, with 48 conical teeth and a skull that looks remarkably, Osborne noted, like that of a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Those "playful" whales of aquarium shows have nipped, bitten and nearly drowned some trainers in their off hours. They've been observed harassing dolphins for sport and once spent about two weeks locally playing a game in which they pushed dead salmon around with their heads like a ball.

Yet killer whales rarely fight each other and have repeatedly shown remarkable restraint when harassed by humans in boats. As predatory as they are, orcas still appear to be a far less violent species than our own.

WASHINGTON and British Columbia boast the most intensively studied group of whales in the world - and the most concentrated whale-watching fleet. At the peak a few years ago more than 80 commercial vessels were taking people to see whales. (The number since has fallen to just over 60.)

Tourists are viewing a resident population that may be in trouble in the San Juan-Strait of Georgia region known as the Salish Sea. The current count of J, K and L pods is about 81 whales, a swift, disturbing decline of roughly 10 from their peak in the mid-1990s. Their mean number in the pods over the last quarter century is 84 whales.

If the slump is something other than natural variation, whale scientists suspect a combination of circumstances are to blame. K pod presently has no males, possibly hampering reproduction in J and L pods, which rely on neighbor whales to prevent in-breeding. Resident whales are finicky eaters, using salmon for 90 percent of their diet and chinook for two thirds of that, and salmon numbers have fallen precipitously. And if hunger strikes, the whales may have to draw on blubber that has stored decades of pollutants such as PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) passed up the food chain, weakening their immune systems.

One young whale, J-18, was found dead this year in B.C.'s Boundary Bay of a massive infection that possibly could be linked to an immune system hampered by pollution.

"Since PCBs were banned in the 1970s, we're perplexed we still have such toxic whales," Osborne said. Yet the chemicals are so persistent in the environment that, "The last 50 years of pollution is still in them, just like it is in us."

Transient killer whales that swoop in from the ocean to prey on other marine mammals (each can eat a harbor seal every three hours) have even higher levels of toxins in their blubber.

"One of the problems with toxic chemicals is a time lag of up to 40 years between the time we clean up our act and top predators become clean," explained David Bain, an animal behavioralist with the University of Washington and research director of Six Flags Marine World in Vallejo, Calif.

And pollutants are still being released into the atmosphere from Asia. They drift over the Pacific and rain into the water, where they are absorbed by lower animals that are in turn eaten by bigger ones. Killer whales, at the top of the food chain, absorb the most.

Whales may also be increasingly distracted by the armadas of whale-watching boats. When 19 orcas from pod L-25 were trapped in Bremerton's Dyes Inlet for a month in the fall of 1997, the number of sightseeing boats soared as high as 500 in a single day.

Yet usually the whales seem to be capable of ignoring boats when they wish and playing with them at their whim. "I think they find humans amusing from time to time," Osborne said.

THE CHANGE in the reputation of orcas from killer to nobility began in 1964, when Samuel Burich, a sculptor, was commissioned by the Vancouver Aquarium to kill a whale in order to fashion a life-size model of it. When he and an assistant harpooned and shot a small one-ton orca, the tough little critter refused to die. Aquarium director Murray Newman decided to tow the feared predator, only 15 feet long, back to Vancouver. Excited spectators gathered to see a monster long reputed to be as vicious as a great white shark.

The whale surprised everyone by being docile and depressed. Dubbed Moby Doll, it went on a hunger strike for 55 days and died after 87 days in captivity. "It was a nice whale but it was still a predatory, carnivorous creature," Newman insisted to reporters. "It could swallow you alive." Embarrassingly, examination revealed Moby Doll was really a Moby Dick: male, not female.

A year later, two fishermen accidentally caught a bull killer whale in their gill net near Namu, B.C. They offered to sell it for $8,000 and Ted Griffin, owner of the then-private Seattle Aquarium, bought the animal and towed it back in a floating cage.

Namu was an immediate public sensation: It was like dragging Bigfoot home. Suddenly the hunt was on - every aquarium wanted its own killer whale. Some 48 resident whales were captured in local waters and hundreds more were taken world-wide. Yet as the whales proved intelligent and friendly, doubts about whale capture grew.

It ended in Washington first. In 1976 future Secretary of State Ralph Munro - then an aide to Washington Gov. Dan Evans - was sailing off Olympia when he witnessed a whale hunt sponsored by Sea World. Incensed at the harassing tactics, Munro convinced Evans and then-Attorney General Slade Gorton to file suit to block the hunt. Protesters rallied. Sea World reaped so much bad publicity over the flap that the Budd Inlet roundup marked the end of the capture era in Puget Sound. Other countries followed suit, with even Iceland halting captures in 1989.

Meanwhile, in 1974 researcher Michael Bigg had begun to identify individual wild whales in the San Juans by photograph. He discovered there were fewer individuals than previously estimated and that their family pods were more tightly knit than the Waltons. Killer whales became the family-value champs of the animal kingdom.

In 1976 Ken Balcomb began a regular orca survey at the Center for Whale Research on San Juan Island, a daily census that still goes on today. As humans turned from capturing to studying the whales, we began to realize just how remarkable these animals are.

Their social system is based on mothers and grandmothers: Male killer whales stay close to Mom their entire life and females until they have their first calf in their teens. The whales form complex family pods and broader clans, linked by a complex system of calls.

Just as humans live in a world of sight and many mammals, such as dogs, live in a world of smell, killer whales live in a world of sound. Not only do they use sonar to help find prey but pod members have at least a dozen distinctive sounds to communicate with each other. J Pod, Ford said, has been using the same set of calls since listening began in the 1950s. Much of it goes on at high frequencies we can't easily hear.

"They don't have a language the way humans do but they do communicate with each other," said Bain. He and Osborne are planning to set up a system of 13 hydrophones in Haro Strait, west of San Juan Island, and put a listening post in nearby Lime Kiln State Park that will use a computer to sort out conversations and track, with sound, the movements of individual whales. If all goes well, the eavesdropping should be operational next summer and anyone can listen in via the Internet.

SOUND COULD HELP answer pressing questions. Observations suggest the whales spend about two thirds of their time foraging for food, 15 percent socializing and the rest resting in a rhythmic kind of sleep. But tracking them consistently is difficult. We have little idea what they do at night and almost no idea where they go in winter. (Scientists were recently surprised that our "resident" whales showed up off Monterey, Calif.)

K pod migrates into local waters as early as March and L joins in June. L typically departs around October, K in that month or November, while J stays here in winter, ranging as far south as Olympia. In summer, the peak feeding and whale-watching time, the pods tend to make a circuit between the mouth of the Fraser River at Vancouver and the Strait of Juan de Fuca, traveling up to a hundred miles a day and swimming through the San Juan Islands to feed on migrating salmon.

A separate group of transient killer whales, numbering 174 in all but often visiting individually, swims in from the ocean to prey on seals and sea lions. J Pod once chased these interlopers off so aggressively that the transients hid behind a departing ferry boat to get away from their pursuers.

A northern group of 215 orcas is centered on Johnstone Strait east of Vancouver Island. Another 250 orcas are offshore in Canadian waters. Genetic research by University of British Columbia doctoral student Lance Barrett-Lennard shows the northern and southern groups are not interbreeding but that the southern group does appear to have some historical genetic connection to whales in Alaska's Prince William Sound.

Scientists would like to fit some killer whales with tracking devices but it's illegal and disruptive to capture them to fit anything elaborate. Satellite transmitters used on larger whales are not yet small enough to be reliably fixed to an orca's hide with a light crossbow or air rifle.

Osborne said time-depth recorders attached with suction cups have stayed on as long as 36 hours before falling off. One finding is that whale watching has pushed the whales into sleeping less during the day and more at night, with unknown consequences. Another is that while orcas spend most of their time near the surface, they occasionally dive to the deepest parts of Puget Sound, 400 feet down.

Stomach content analysis of dead whales suggest they are finicky eaters, sticking with a narrow range of prey even if starving.

The research is important because killer whales, like grizzly bears or spotted owls, are at the top of a food chain. Their health relies on the vigor of all the sea animals below them, particularly salmon, and thus their population is a meter of how we are doing with the Northwest environment.

As killer whales go, so has gone Puget Sound and the Salish Sea.

"If we can ensure the survival and prosperity of killer whales on this coast," said Ford, "we can be certain that the underlying marine ecosystem is being preserved."

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William Dietrich, author and former Seattle Times reporter, writes Our Northwest for Pacific Northwest magazine. Benjamin Benschneider is staff photographer for the magazine. Paul Schmid is a Times news artist.

--------------------------- Getting to know them

MORE THAN 60 commercial whale-watching craft track orcas from La Conner to Victoria in the peak summer months. Being in the midst of a pod of spouting whales can be a magical experience, but is all this attention a good thing?

Certainly it has raised public awareness and is far better for the animals than being penned in an aquarium. But over-eager whale watching can force orcas to break off their feeding, swerve to avoid craft, swim too close to shore to get away, or panic.

Research suggests that whales along the northern half of Vancouver Island are less used to boats and more bothered, while those in the San Juans and Puget Sound show few obvious signs of being perturbed by watercraft.

If you are a private boater, don't approach closer than a hundred yards. If the whale wants to swim to you, fine, but don't charge ahead to get in its path. Stop your boat when they are close and turn off your engine if possible. On the west side of San Juan Island stay at least a quarter-mile offshore to prevent pinning the whales near the rocks.

Kayakers have the ability to sneak up on and thus surprise the whales, causing them to startle. Keep a prudent distance and, if a pod is swimming by, stop paddling.

I went on a commercial-whale watching trip with skipper Darryl Roberts, a 12-year veteran of the business, and naturalist Amy Traxler of the Friday Harbor Whale Museum. The pair advised that if booking a tour:

-- Ask if the boat is a member of the Whale Watch Operators Association Northwest, an industry group that tries to self-police activity.

-- Ask if the boat follows federal and Soundwatch whale-watching guidelines. Even if you don't know what the guidelines are, simply expressing your interest in whale well-being will encourage operators to act correctly.

-- Costs are similar so boats are generally selected by their ports, the time they go and their sizes, which range from inflatables to craft the size of small ferries. Smaller boats generally provide a more intimate experience, larger ones more comfort.

-- Wild animals don't show up on schedule. Ask if whales have been seen recently. June and September have traditionally been good months to encounter orcas.

- William Dietrich