Troubled Waters

Southern Resident Whales face the threat of extinction

STORY BY MAEGHAN CALLEGARI
photo by Annmarie Kent

Southern resident killer whale Lolita has entertained visitors to the Miami Seaquarium since 1970. Her companion, Hugo, rammed the walls of the solitary confinement and died of a brain aneurysm. Her only companions now are a wet suit and an inflatable toy. To this day she calls out to L pod, her group of southern residents relatives. She is one of 47 Southern Residents captured in the 1970s for marine parks.

Today, only 79 Southern Resident Killer Whales are left in the wild. The Center for Whale Research tracks their drastic population decline, which started in the 1960s when killer whales were captured for marine parks. Before then, the lowest recorded population was 140.

In 2003, Congress awarded funding specifically for killer whale research and management to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Between 2003 and 2012, NOAA dedicated $15.7 million to southern residents research. The animals were listed under the United States Endangered Species Act in 2005.

Even after a decade of recovery programs dedicated to the southern residents, which migrate from Central California up to British Columbia, scientists have not seen the population increase. Scientists from NOAA have discovered that southern residents favor a diet of Chinook salmon, burn more calories around boat noise and their bodies contain high levels of pollutants like PCBs, which are man-made chemicals.

“It is likely that all three of those threats work together in concert to create a problem for the whales,” says Lynne Barre, the Seattle branch chief for the Protective Resources Division at NOAA Fisheries.

Founder of the Center for Whale Research Ken Balcomb, who was interviewed in the documentary Blackfish, says the biggest threat to southern residents is the limited amounts of their food, Chinook salmon.

“The wild Chinook salmon situation on the whole West Coast has been a continuing downward trend disaster,” he says. Chinook salmon travel along the West Coast between rivers in Southern California and Alaska.

The primary threats to salmon runs are what Barre calls “the four H’s:” harvesting of fish, hatchery practices, hydropower and habitat alteration. Dam operations and farming practices affect the quality and temperature of water in salmon habitats.

Balcomb includes a fifth “H.”

“The biggest one is hubris,” he says. “We are such an arrogant species, we figure the world is for us.” Creating more salmon hatcheries, which dilutes the wild salmon populations to almost extinction, is not a long-term solution, Balcomb says.

“[Hatcheries] do not provide an ecosystem, they provide a factory,” he says.

Wild salmon will be extinct by the year 2100, so the whales will not exist beyond that, Balcomb says. The whales will be extinct anywhere between 30 and 200 years, he says.