Several Pacific Northwest newspapers reported last week on the disapperance and presumed death of three orca whales from the San Juan Islands pods: Hugo, Jellyroll and Raven have vanished from their usual haunts and hunting grounds. This is a distinct departure from the good news of last spring, when several new orca whalets were discovered, and a terrible turn for the precarious local population. In general, they've been seen as slightly rebounding in numbers, but the mysterious recent disapearances reinforces the reality that Puget Sound's orcas are being pummeled by multiple threats all at once.
What happened to these particular three swimmers? Was it the built-up levels of PCBs biomagnified and stored in their blubber, bestowing upon them the dubious distinction of "most polluted marine mammals in the world"? Or did they starve to death from a lack of salmon, another species not doing so hot in our troubled waters?
"When salmon are plentiful, the whales tend to travel close together," the Seattle P-I reported on Wednesday, "but this year's sightings revealed the whales as spread out, indicating they were foraging and food supplies are short."
The Seattle P-I just published a commendable series on the state of the Puget Sound, written by their crack team of environmental investigators, Robert McClure and Lisa Stiffler. You can read their entire series "Broken Promises" here. Part of the series is a dramatization of the life of one particular Puget Sound orca named "Granny" written by M.L. Lyke. "She has lived long, seen much, some of it best forgotten: Bullets, bombs, nets, babies born dead. She understands the world of orcas. It's always about survival, always about community." You can follow Granny's story here.
Read more about the lost orcas here or here.
Incidentally, while researching the web for orca information, I came across this fascinating movie on YouTube--check it out.
orcas
puget sound
endangered species
1 comment:
thanks for the info and video
-m
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