J Pod’s Winter Absence Raises Concerns

Wednesday, February 28, 2007
VASHON ISLAND, WASHINGTON - Whale researchers on Vashon have come to expect the wintertime visits of J pod, the killer whales most frequently seen off the Island’s rugged shores during the grey days of winter.

But this year, even as many of them were writing comments for a proposed recovery plan for the just-listed endangered species, the Island’s whale experts were struck by their absence.

This winter, there have been no reported sightings of the 24-strong J pod, the “most resident” of the region’s resident orca whales, in southern Puget Sound.

“It’s heartbreaking,” said Ann Stateler, aka Orca Annie, who runs the Vashon Hydrophone Project, a whale research project that uses an underwater microphone to detect whales from miles away.

Like other observers, she believes they weren’t around because of a possible decline in salmon numbers.

“I hope it’s just a fluctuation,” she added. “But I’m afraid we’re looking at the future. Is this how it’s going to be from here on out?”

“The whales should be here and they’re not,” said Amy Carey, another Islander active on whale conservation issues. “This time of year, I’m usually bundled up and on the shores looking for them.”

Two years ago, Puget Sound’s so-called resident killer whales — considered separate from other orca whale groups because they routinely spend their summers and some portion of their winters in the Sound — were listed as endangered under the federal Endangered Species Act.

Last November, the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced what it considered the animal’s “critical habitat” — parts of Haro Strait, the Strait of Juan de Fuca and all of Puget Sound. It also announced a proposed recovery plan for the large predators, calling for new research on the wide-ranging animals, better coordination among state and federal agencies, clean-up of contaminated sites in the Sound and better response to the rescuing of live-stranded animals. Comments on the plan were due yesterday (Tuesday, Feb. 27).

As top-of-the-food-chain predators, orcas are considered significant indicators of ocean health. NOAA, in its proposed recovery plan for the Sound’s resident orcas, said their decline is likely due to prey availability, pollution, oil spills and the effects of vessel traffic and underwater noise.

Those who have been closely observing the animals for years say they’ve been seeing troubling trends for some time.

Three matriarchal clans — J, K and L pods — make up the Sound’s resident whales. NOAA puts their collective number at 90, although there have been recent reports of as many as four whales missing from the Sound’s population.

Mark Sears, a Puget Sound killer whale researcher who lives in West Seattle, said he’s been seeing strange fluctuations in numbers and sightings for the past 10 years or so.

“And it continues to just get weirder and weirder,” he said.

“When you have a population of large mammals and have a consistent pattern for years and years and all of the sudden it goes off the graph a bit, it’s generally not a good sign,” he added.

Like Stateler, Sears has been particularly struck by J pod’s absence this winter. The pod, he said, “has been the gold standard in the winter. When there were orcas in the Sound in the winter, 90 percent of the time it was the J pod.”

Now, he said, a shift seems to be occurring. J pod, the homebodies of the Sound, seems to be ranging farther and wider. And K and L pods, “normally a wilder bunch,” Sears said, have been making occasional wintertime visits.

This year, that pattern continued: J pod whales weren’t sighted in southern Puget Sound, but there were a few visits by K and L pods, whale researchers said.

No whales lingered, however, and sightings overall were few.

“When they (K pod whales) did come down this time, they turned around and left almost instantly,” said Jeff Hogan, director of Killer Whale Tales, an environmental education group based on Vashon.

“It’s like a big square dance,” Sears said. “You never know what you’re going to see.”

Sears, Stateler and Hogan said it was impossible to draw definitive conclusions from what appears to be a recent shift in the whales’ feeding and migration patterns. Despite their status in the region — a beloved icon and top-of-the-food-chain predator — the Sound’s orcas are not well-understood, they said.

Sears has been tracking the Sound’s whales for 30 years, first starting to carefully note their patterns “way back when nobody cared,” he said. But even his observations and research don’t provide enough data to fully understand the patterns of these long-lived creatures, especially changes that have occurred in just the past few years, he said.

Even so, all three researchers speculate that fluctuating salmon numbers likely play a role in the whales’ behavior. And all three expressed concern that these regular wintertime visitors were few in number this year.

Stateler, whose small apartment on Colvos Passage is virtually given over to her research work, nodded towards the computer that sits in her living room. The screen or “spectrogram” — a visual representation of marine sounds picked up by way of her underwater microphone — was flat and quiet. She has gotten lots of “squiggles” on the screen over the last two months, she noted — though nearly all of them have been generated by boats, ferries and other traffic noise.

Stateler installed her first microphone in January 2004. She replaced it a year later when it gave out and replaced that second one last summer after it was struck by lightning.

Now, as she looked at the quiet computer, which is attached to a cable that runs out of her living room window and down to the beach, she said she’s sad about this recent turn of events.

“I’m extremely worried,” she said.

But Stateler, who moved from the San Juans to Vashon 12 years ago in part because she heard that whales regularly frequent the Sound’s southern waters, said it’s too soon to say what it all means.

“For some reason, the last two winters have not held the same appeal for our resident whales,” she added. “But I’m not ready to throw in the towel.”

Source: The Vashon-Maury Island Beachcomber