Public Invited To Discuss Fate Of Troubled
Seal-eating Orcas

Thursday, November 4, 2004
ALASKA – Can people help a dwindling family of killer whales known for hunting seals in Prince William Sound and the ocean south of Seward?

Or has exposure to Exxon Valdez oil, industrial poisons and lack of prey doomed these genetically unique predators to extinction?

A public meeting on the fate and conservation of the AT-1 group of killer whales will be held from 9 a.m. to noon Wednesday at the Anchorage Federal Building. Biologists and managers say they want information about the whales and their habits, and ideas about what actions might keep them alive.

"What are the possibilities?" said Homer killer whale biologist Craig Matkin, of the North Gulf Oceanic Society. "It's easy to get discouraged in this situation, but I think it's an exercise that we need to go through."

Last summer, seven of the group's remaining whales repeatedly hunted in Kenai Fjords and Resurrection Bay, once killing a harbor seal off Seward's downtown camper park. Matkin speculated that an increase in the seals along the Kenai Peninsula's outer coast is attracting them.

But he worried that some boaters were following the whales too closely and too often.

"Sometimes they were the only whales around, and sometimes they weren't given any space," Matkin said. "The tour boat situation this year was pretty intense, and it's something that has to be addressed."

In a decline never documented before among the region's killer whales, the AT-1 group lost more than half its members over the past 15 years, dropping from 22 animals in the 1980s to seven or eight still alive this summer. Killer whales can live for decades.

After federal biologists agreed that the whales never associate with other marine-mammal-eating orcas in the eastern North Pacific, the AT-1 group was designated as a separate stock and listed as depleted under the Marine Mammal Protection Act in July.

Writing a conservation plan is the next step. But it's not clear what, if anything, people can do.

"We want recommendations and management measures that might be implemented, and research that would address the decline," said Kaja Brix, head of protected resources for the National marine Fisheries Service in Alaska.

"We're looking for ideas," added James Balsiger, the agency's Alaska administrator, in a written statement.

Unlike most other killer whales that eat only marine mammals, all of the AT-1 whales were once seen by Matkin and other biologists almost every year. The 22-member whale family was once so regular in its migratory habits that Prince William Sound mariners had given several individual animals nicknames. Secretive and quiet, the whales stalked harbor seals in the Sound's bays and made eerie sirenlike calls after their kills.

But several whales were photographed swimming through oil spilled by the Exxon Valdez tanker in 1989 and were never seen again, Matkin said. Since 1990, 14 of the whales have either washed up dead and been identified through genetic testing, or simply disappeared.

Over the same period, tissue samples showed some AT-1 whales carrying some of the highest levels of industrial contaminants ever measured in marine mammals. Their favorite prey, harbor seals, has crashed while boat traffic has gone up.

A research program ought to investigate the harm caused by the oil spill and whether exposure to contaminants could prevent the whales from reproducing, said Pat Lavin, coordinator of the Prince William Sound Alliance for the National Wildlife Federation. Another question: Is the regional plunge in harbor seals, combined with additional boat traffic, making it harder for the whales to find enough to eat? "More fundamental than any of that is that this group has never really been studied directly," Lavin said. "We need to know where they are throughout the year, where they forage -- all that to a greater degree than we know now."

At one point last summer, several of the AT-1 whales were breaching and crashing on the surface in Resurrection Bay, putting on dramatic aerial displays that attracted lots of boats, Matkin said.

While exhilarating for human observers, such behavior might mean the whales are feeling pressure, Matkin said.

"They can get irritated -- I guarantee it," he said. "You've got to give them space. People should be treating them differently" than other killer whales.

Lavin, whose group petitioned to get federal protection for the whales, said the fisheries agency has a legal responsibility to find out as much as possible, even if the AT-1 group can't be saved.

"These animals were going extinct pretty much without a word or even understanding why," he said.