by David Kirby
Naomi learned that Transients were skilled and forceful killers. They typically hunted in packs of three to five, often patrolling the waters around shoals, rocks, and reefs where harbor seals and huge Steller’s sea lions weighing up to twenty-five hundred pounds spent their days. Out in deeper water, Transients stalked Pacific white-sided dolphins, harbor porpoises, minke whales, and even young humpback and gray whales, which can grow several times their size. Some Transients even went after large sharks. A popular YouTube video shot near San Francisco shows a Transient orca ravaging a great white shark, then sharing its liver with another killer whale as the shark’s carcass descends into the deep.
Watching a pack of Transients pursue and catch their quarry is one of the most terrifying spectacles in the animal kingdom—though Naomi herself never saw a Transient kill. The orcas combine speed, power, and cunning to surround and overcome their victims, oftentimes hurling themselves forward, up and out of the water, in a behavior called porpoising, to vanquish their terror-stricken prey. In addition to eating marine mammals, killer whales, almost certainly Transients, have been seen harassing or feeding upon deer and at least one moose as the land mammals swam across the straits and narrow passages of the archipelago.
Once the Transients nabbed a meal, however, the ordeal for their victim—a mammal far more intelligent than a salmon—was often just beginning. Many killer whales played with their food; violently, mercilessly, and for what seemed like cruel lengths of time. It was not uncommon to see Transients batting a seal around with their flukes for up to an hour or more, slinging the victim far into the air like a beach ball; a pathetic howling missile waiting to die.
Scientists gave a few possible explanations for such prolonged and energy-consuming battery of prey. Unlike fish, many mammals fought back. Sea lions in particular were strong and ferocious, and seals delivered painful bites as well—one reason why Transients usually bore more scars than Residents. Dolphins and porpoises could ram hard with their beaks. It made sense that these orcas would expend extra calories wearing down their lunch before finally dispatching it.
Another explanation was that orcas liked to process their food. Despite their sharp teeth, killer whales did not chew; they tended to tear and swallow chunks of flesh whole. Resident whales might gingerly remove a salmon’s head before eating it; antarctic orcas used their tongues to surgically excise the breast muscle of penguins, leaving the rest of the bird intact. One advantage of beating up a seal might be that it made it easier to remove the skin and fur—a brutal form of tenderizing meat.
Killer whales in other parts of the world had equally fascinating cultures of hunting and eating. In the North Atlantic, some pods corralled large schools of herring into tight balls and then stunned the fish by slapping them with their flukes before taking turns eating from the dazed mass, Naomi had read. In the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans, some whales rode shallow waves onto remote beaches to snag unsuspecting seals or penguins. Around Antarctica, pods hunted seals cooperatively by lining up and charging an ice floe with a resting seal atop it, utterly unaware. Just before reaching the ice, the killers would dive, creating a wave that flushed the seal from the floe. The orcas often let the seal climb back up onto its icy refuge and then flushed it again, several times, before killing, skinning, and finally eating their meal.
Resident whales had also been seen chasing and harassing porpoises and seals. A number of Southern Residents were once observed killing harbor porpoises for no apparent reason off San Juan Island. But no Resident has ever been known to eat a mammal.
Transient killer whales were less vocal, less social, and less attached to their mother and matriline than Resident orcas. Unlike Residents, both female and male Transients were known to disperse from the pod of their birth; females left to join other Transient pods while some of the males remained solitary for much of their lives.
Naomi learned that Residents and Transients did not like to mix. “They really avoid each other,” she explained to friends back home. One morning out on the Sparrowhawk, she and her assistant had spotted a male orca swimming alone, hugging the shore on the far side of the strait. Older Resident males often traveled a mile or so away from the females and calves. Naomi assumed that was the case here.
“Let’s move in closer and try to ID him,” she said. That’s when she realized this was no Resident male. It was a lone male Transient. They followed him for several minutes before Naomi noticed a group of Residents traveling, in their leisurely manner, down the strait in the opposite direction. She had never seen Transients and Residents in the same waters simultaneously. Would there be blood?
There would not be. The Transient stayed on the far edge of his side of the strait, and the Residents kept to the far edge of theirs. “I think they were perfectly well aware of each other,” Naomi speculated. “They were just staying as far away from each other as they could.”
Naomi was coming to know these animals personally. Though scientific circles hugely frowned upon thinking of any animal in anthropomorphic terms, she couldn’t resist a human analogy. The small groups of Transients were “kind of like the local trash family; people that nobody in town really gets along with,” Naomi joked. “And every time they come through town, everybody sort of closes ranks and shuns them. There’s only three or four of them versus a whole village of Residents, who are not going to be threatened by a few Transients. If it comes down to a street fight, the Transients are going to lose.”
A few years later, one of Naomi’s colleagues, Canadian whale scientist Graeme Ellis, would witness something close to what she imagined. Graeme, working at the Pacific Biological Station in Nanaimo, was alerted to a Transient pod nearby. He jumped in a boat to locate them and came across ten members of a Southern Resident group called J pod, tearing southward at high speeds toward Descanso Bay on Gabriola Island. Graeme saw convulsions in the water ahead, just outside the bay. It was the rest of J pod, acutely agitated, milling about like big, black torpedoes. Once the rest of the pod caught up with them, they charged into Descanso Bay (ironically descanso means “rest” in Spanish) heading straight for the beach.
Graeme spotted three other orcas, swimming away quickly about a hundred yards ahead of the pack. He recognized the trio: members of the T20 Transient group—a mother, her daughter, and her presumed son. The Transients made a run for it, trying to skirt out of the bay along its rocky shoreline, but the twenty or so members of J pod would have none of it. They pursued the aliens with ferocious determination, pushing them up along the rocks. Graeme observed white-water churning, fins and flukes flailing, heads pressed hard against the flanks of other animals, the nipping of skin. The screeches coming from all the whales reverberated through the boat’s hull.
It only lasted a few minutes. After a ferryboat cruised by, the three Transients made another break for it, and this time they got away. Graeme followed them, only to discover fresh bloody teeth marks, or rakes, on their skin. “Whatever the reason,” he said after the incident, “the T20s definitely got their butts kicked, in my view.” Still, after nearly forty years of continuous research on the local orca population, this was the first act of aggression among wild orcas he had ever witnessed.
Resident orcas did not like hanging around Transients, but Naomi could tell they enjoyed the company of each other. All orcas are social animals, but the close-knit bonds between Resident whales are the most precisely documented. Routine socializing among Northern and Southern Residents might involve the entire pod, or just a few individuals, Naomi observed. It usually included play behaviors, especially among juveniles, such as spy-hopping, breaching, fin and fluke slapping, head standing, swimming upside down, rolling over other orcas, or playing with toys such as kelp or even jellyfish. Physical and sexual contact often occurred in these behaviors, especially among males. “When the males get together,” Naomi said to incredulous friends back home, “the penises come out and start flying all over the place.” A mature sex organ can reach eight feet in
length.
Socialization consumed about 12 to 15 percent of a Resident orca’s “activity budget,” more than that for Transient whales, and it varied between the Northern and Southern communities. Southern Residents were more likely to perform exuberant aerial displays while socializing. They commenced their annual start-of-the-summer reunion with other pods by staging elaborate “greeting ceremonies.” The whales approached each other in two facing rows until they were 30 to 150 feet apart, then halted and waited at the surface for about half a minute. Then, perhaps following a signal from the ranking matriarch(s), they rushed toward each other and merged underwater in a felicitous riot of body rubbing and excited, high-pitched vocalizing.
Resident orcas maintained their tight social bonds through additional gestures of trust and cooperation. Naomi occasionally saw them sharing food. She read in one study of Northern Residents that prey items were shared in 76 percent of 235 feeding events—though adult males were much less likely to share food than females and juveniles.1
Orcas were also known to assist pregnant mothers in giving birth. In one case, a female was seen swimming rapidly in circles in a thirty-second period before giving birth beneath the surface. Immediately after that, three other pod members were seen lifting the baby up and out of the water for a number of seconds. Over the next two hours, other members were seen in unusual swimming patterns, making celebratory tail slappings and continuing to lift the calf above the surface.2
Resident whales also provide succor to their wounded. In 1973, a calf was severely gashed by a ferryboat propeller in the Strait of Georgia, off British Columbia. An older male and female swam close to the injured youngster, cradling the calf between them to ensure it did not turn upside down and suffocate. The male repeatedly repositioned himself during the complicated maneuvering to maintain his support.3
Naomi was fascinated by how caring and compassionate these huge animals were. We sure have a lot to learn from them, she thought.
8
OrcaLab
Early summer on Johnstone Strait always ushered in a season of socializing. Boaters crisscrossing the waters often stopped to chat with each other, or called at Telegraph Cove, Alert Bay, or West Cracroft Island, where those intrepid American students were camped out. Life grew more festive as the weather warmed. The area is rich with First Nations’ traditions dating back centuries: gift-swapping potlatches, canoe races, or salmon celebrations. Besides that, most Canadians are friendly people, and British Columbians are friendly Canadians.
Naomi did not have much free time, but she did try to socialize with people such as Jim Borrowman and his wife, Anne, and Bill and Donna MacKay. They were kind and hospitable, almost more like family than friends. Bill and Jim would check in with the students almost every day by radio. The Gikumi and later the Lukwa regularly idled off Cliff or Boat Camp, usually accompanied by camera-wielding tourists. Hot soup was always on board, and the students welcomed the meal. On cloudy days, it could get damp, cool, and raw out there. Warm soup was like student bait. “It’s just a little bribe to keep you kids coming back each year,” Bill joked. “We don’t want to lose you. You’re friendly … and you’re foreigners. And you’re teaching everybody a whole lot about our killer whales.”
Naomi and other students often climbed aboard the tour boat to deliver impromptu talks about orca behavior and society. For the tourists, it was a definite bonus. The young people truly enjoyed sharing their knowledge, not to mention the hot soup.
One day Bill pulled up with a small group of Americans, including Naomi’s father and stepmother. They had traveled from Los Angeles for a brief visit to the area, and now Raymond Rose was heading out to West Cracroft to see his daughter at her “office.” Naomi got in the Sparrowhawk with two of her assistants and putted out to meet the Gikumi. She stood in the rear of the inflatable, steering the outboard engine as they approached, eager to see her dad. Naomi had a red cap with a visor on, with her hair braided into pigtails. As she got closer, one of the tourists, a middle-aged woman, reached for a camera and elbowed Mr. Rose in the ribs. “Look at that!” she cried. “A little Indian girl’s coming out to greet us!”
The social event of the season on northern Vancouver Island in the late 1980s, from an orca researcher’s perspective, was the annual summer gathering on Hanson Island, a craggy outpost crowded with evergreens at the far northwestern reach of Johnstone Strait, tucked between West Cracroft Island and Telegraph Cove.
Hanson had no permanent residents, though it was home to one of the most innovative killer whale research facilities in the world: OrcaLab, run by Dr. Paul Spong and his second wife, Helena Symonds. The main building, a high-tech, off-the-grid whale observatory, is a genuine 1970s Pacific-coast contemporary: weather-bleached timbers set on a rustic lattice of cedar piles astride a black-rock outcropping. Its solar panels, slanted, dark skylights, and sloping, shingled roof make OrcaLab look like an Earthship built by Marin County hippies during the Nixon era.
The location could not be more ideal: a tranquil cove often visited by Northern Residents that opens onto Blackney Pass. The pass is a narrow channel, an orca superhighway of sorts, linking Johnstone Strait and points south with Blackfish Sound and northern destinations such as the Queen Charlotte Islands, now known by their First Nation name, Haida Gwaii.
Paul Spong is a five-foot-six New Zealander with a receding line of wispy hair. During the sixties and seventies he looked more like a hippie than a gifted and visionary scientist. Naomi would occasionally drop in on Paul at OrcaLab. By this point, he was a bit older, a little more clean-cut, and very much a legend in his time.
Naomi enjoyed spending time with Paul and Helena, and the whale researcher was happy to regale grad students with stories of captive killer whales back in the early days—the 1960s—when research on the social behavior of Orcinus orca was in its infancy. Paul spoke in a soft New Zealand accent, almost flattened by decades in North America.
Paul had quit law school in New Zealand to pursue a BA and a master’s in experimental psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he worked on groundbreaking investigations that mapped the effect of different stimuli on various parts of the brain. While in California, Paul also met and married his first wife, Linda.
In 1967 Paul interviewed for the principal investigator position at the University of British Columbia’s neurological lab. But there was an unexpected catch: The Vancouver Public Aquarium had just acquired an adult female killer whale. She was the first orca to be made available for scientific research. The aquarium needed a scientist, preferably with a neuropsych background, to study her. If Paul wanted the lab job, he would have to spend half his time at the aquarium doing whale science. Paul knew virtually nothing about whales, but he accepted the offer.
He began work that fall, spending mornings at the neurological lab implanting electrodes into the brains of live cats. The lab housed a collection of mammal brains in glass jars, including a twelve-pound brain from a killer whale. He’d never seen anything like it. Its sheer size and heft, its multitude of convolutions—far more than a human brain—told him that this was an exceedingly complex and sophisticated organ. Clearly this animal had a lot of intellectual power. Paul stared at the jar and wondered, What on earth does a killer whale do with a brain like that?
Paul quickly found that his aquarium work with the female orca was much more enjoyable than implanting electrodes in felines at the university. The whale was named Skana (from the Haida language for “supernatural one”). Skana had been caught in Yukon Harbor, Washington, a peaceful cove on the Olympic Peninsula about seven miles west of Seattle. She was netted with other members of her Southern Resident group, K pod, in a large purse seine. Purse seines are nets used to catch large schools of fish that aggregate near the surface, such as salmon, herring, or mackerel. Along the bottom of each net is a series of rings connected by a rope. When a school of fish swims into place, the rope is pulled and the net closes into a “purse,” trapping all
living things inside.
Purse seines were also ideal for catching orcas. Killer whales travel and forage near the surface and they fear nothing—including nets, at least on their first encounter. Some orcas swim right into purse seines, especially if they are full of salmon or herring.
That day in Yukon Harbor was the first time an entire pod had been captured at once. It was a cold afternoon, February 16, 1967. Ted Griffin, the young, rambunctious director of the Seattle Marine Aquarium, was looking for killer whales. Seven months earlier, Griffin’s cherished pet, Namu—the second orca ever to go on public display—had developed a bacterial infection that racked his nervous system. Namu became disoriented, got stuck in the net that formed his sea pen, and drowned.1
Griffin was devastated. But he also learned that killer whales were profitable—both in terms of selling them to marine parks and selling tickets to see them. He had spent weeks trying to catch some whales. Now he had gotten a tip from the coast guard: Killer whales were spotted swimming off Port Angeles, along Juan de Fuca Strait, the broad and beautiful waterway that separates the Olympic Peninsula on the US side from Vancouver Island in Canada. The whales were headed east, for Puget Sound.
The following morning, Griffin amassed a platoon of men and machines, including a purse seiner, a helicopter, and a prop plane, to go find the pod. It took all day to locate the whales and corral them into a purse seine at sunset near Yukon Harbor.
In the morning, Griffin realized he had caught fifteen specimens. The next few days were spent sorting the animals into different pens separated by netting and deciding which whales would go to Seattle and which would be released. Three whales died while awaiting their fate. Seven were let go. That left five—all infants or juveniles. Griffin towed them across the sound in a floating sea pen to the Seattle Marine Aquarium.2
