How to Save Orcas? A Report Says “Old Fish”

Everybody likes Southern Resident Killer Whales (especially when SRKWs are billed as our friendly neighborhood “orcas”), but collectively, we aren’t doing enough to save them.

Since the SRKWs were listed as an endangered species in 2005 (after courts forced the reluctant feds into taking action), they haven’t gone extinct, but they’re way too close to that for comfort.  Their numbers stay low, and aerial surveillance now suggests that roughly one-third of the current population isn’t doing well.

We have a pretty good idea what Southern Resident Killer Whales need and what they’re not getting.  Now, a group of 31 orca scientists has released a report that sets out a large number of things that we should be doing to save the whales we claim to value.  Most of these recommendations are pretty familiar. But some are explosive and they have largely been off-limits for discussion by government groups reluctant to enrage commercial fishers, recreational fishers, or tribes.

The scientists involved work in both the U.S. and Canada. They developed this consensus report at a three-day March workshop in Vancouver. The new report talks about familiar stresses caused by underwater noise from vessels large and small, and by the toxic chemicals that wind up in SRKWs’ fat, and it recommends steps toward mitigating them.

But the bottom line is that “[p]rey limitation [that is, the scarcity of their preferred food, Chinook salmon, which are in trouble all along the Pacific coast from California to Alaska] remains the primary constraint on SRKW recovery, and the panel deemed current government initiatives on both sides of the Canada-US border to address this issue to be insufficient.” Those are fighting words.

Much of the science is indeed familiar, says Lance Barrett-Lennard, who directs the Cetacean Research Program of the British-Columbia-based Raincoast Conservation Foundation and who participated in the workshiop that produced this report.  But “a couple of things . . . are a bit novel.”  The fact that SRKWs eat mostly Chinook salmon has been discussed for years.  Of course this report recommends protecting the freshwater habitat in which chinook spawn and removing obstacles (including dams) that keep them from reaching that habitat.  But this report also makes it clear that not all Chinook are created equal.

SRKWs prefer Chinook (as many of us do) presumably because they’re bigger and fattier than other kinds of salmon, and therefore provide more nutritional payoff for each unit of energy spent foraging.  The whales benefit most from the Chinook that have grown largest and richest in fat, which means the oldest fish. They also need calories early in the season, and a steady supply as the months go by.

The fact that a big fish is an old fish takes a leading role.  A Chinook will never make the fish equivalent of AARP if it is caught while young in an ocean fishery far from its native river.  Or if it has been released by a hatchery that has chosen to breed fish that return home while they’re still young.  Therefore, the report says that “use of hatchery salmon should ensure production aligns with SRKW prey preferences, particularly run timing, fat content, size, and age of the adult Chinook salmon, and prioritizes production for SRKWs over fisheries needs.”

And the scientists suggests that we “[a]ssess benefits of shifting marine fisheries to terminal areas (i.e., the terminus of salmon migration where immature Chinook are not encountered) to increase Chinook abundance, restore larger prey, and enhance SRKW access prior to fisheries.”

“Terminal fisheries” implies fixed gear in or near river mouths.  Instead of people in boats chasing fish, fixed gear lets the fish come to it. Fish traps and weirs were used widely by tribes that lived round the Salish Sea, and traps were used extensively by the salmon canneries that dominated the fishery from the late 19^th century up through the first years of the Depression.

Because salmon return to their home streams, chasing them around open water isn’t necessary or efficient.  But the number of spots for fixed gear is limited, while small boats with nets or trolling gear let a lot more people get in on the action — which is why the canneries’ traps were widely resented until they were abolished in Washington by an initiative passed in 1934.

This is not an idea likely to gain favor with commercial fishers, recreational fishers, or treaty tribes. Former University of Washington professor of environmental studies and political science Kai Lee once called it the “third rail” of fisheries management; like the electrified rail among subway tracks, touch it, and you’ll get zapped. No wonder that  government panels tend to avoid this third rail.

The report doesn’t neglect underwater noise.  “We need fish for the whales,” Barrett-Lennard says, “and we need the whales to be able to find them.”  The report calls for “enforceable noise output standards to large commercial vessels, focusing particularly on the noisiest vessel classes that disproportionately contribute to underwater noise.”

It also wants an 11-knot slowdown [for] all classes, expanding slowdown zones, adopting a seasonal approach that is fixed in summer and responsive to whale presence in winter,” and expanding “vessel notifications of whale presence, and predictive whale forecasting tools, especially for ferries.  Some of the big asks (like building quieter ships) aren’t technically impossible, he says.  It would take generation or two to replace the large vessels that share water with SRKWs, but, Barrett-Lennard explains, “we’ve known how to build a quiet ship since World War II.”  But things like slowing ships down so they aren’t as loud, some of which exist now as voluntary nice ideas, must become requirements.

A natural question: What are the odds that much of this heavy lifting will get done?  At this point, with the current administration deliberately thumbing its nose at the idea of protecting the natural world, the chance of the federal government doing anything seems slim.  But there are plenty of other governments with authority over some activities in some parts of the SRKWs’ range.  (The tangle of overlapping jurisdictions has long been recognized as a key problem for salmon management, and it is also a problem for protecting far-ranging Killer Whales.)

These agencies may be willing to act.  The report’s authors certainly hope so.  The scientists did not want to just toss out a pie-in-the-sky scenario, Barrett-Lennard says.  Instead, “we focused on being reasonable.”

Anyon anyone else want to be reasonable?