Spending time on extinction

“Pssssss…(static)…We’re gonna…(static)…yield to some oncoming traffic here…(static)…ah, if you look off our starboard bow you’ll see a pod of, ah, killer whales (static)…”

Excitement took my feet and ran me outside onto the chilly deck of the Victoria-bound clipper ferry from a recent trip to Seattle. Sure enough, the anonymous voice with the captainly tone had been right and before my weary travelling eyes breached a dozen killer whales, many of them juveniles, their slippery black and white bodies bursting through a landscape of wind-swept white capped waves.

The moment was, for lack of a better word, bitter-sweet. Orcas are clearly majestic creatures. They have a strikingly imposing beauty and grace that can drown out the fake shutter sounds of digital cameras and the “I wonder who would win in a fight: an orca or shark?” comments commonly heard on the numerous whale watching vessels that track their every movement. In our typically mechanical nine-to-five lives full of all things modern and neurotic, seeing wild creatures like these orcas can ‘rattle the cage’ of daily routine and create a welcoming sense of awe and focus.

But recent reports on the Southern Resident Killer Whales (likely the ones I was witnessing) show that they are “just hanging on by the skin of their teeth”. With seven deaths this year alone, 2008 has so far proven to be the worst in a decade, and experts are ringing bells warning that if drastic action is not taken soon, the Southern Residents are likely headed for extinction. This year the whales (actually closely related to dolphins) have lost so much blubber that they’ve developed a distinctive ‘peanut head’, and are spending much more of their time spread out, hunting for their staple food of Chinook salmon. Not only that, but they are wintering further south in California, likely in hopes of finding greater numbers of salmon. Essentially, the Southern Residents are starving to death.

Of the seven dead this year, the most concerning are the two breeding-age females. Females are central to killer whale pods. The pods themselves are held together by a matriarchy where males stay with their mothers throughout their entire lives. One of the dead females included the mother of Luna, the lovable and tragic orca persona who was separated from his pod group in Nootka Sound and instead adopted the local fisherpeople (and their dogs!) as his family members, only to be struck by a tugboat propeller in 2006 (documented in the upcoming documentary Saving Luna).

Unthinking killers

This public image of killer whales as something less of a killer, more of a lover, is one that today is often taken for granted. And rightly so. Orcas truly are inquisitive and even crafty beings. But they weren’t always looked at with such respect.

While First Nations culture has for centuries revered killer whales as spiritual guardians of the sea, Western society has decided on culling them and put them in captivity, only to do party tricks in the cramped confines of aquarium entertainment complexes everywhere. From the time of the first live orca capture in 1964 until the end of the subsequent ‘orca gold rush’ in 1976, a total of 47 Southern Resident orcas had been ripped away from their families and sent to places like Vancouver Aquarium and Victoria’s oxymoronic SeaLand (which is it?! Sea or Land?!). At least a dozen others were killed in the process of capture which included bombing them from the air in order to herd them into nets.

As a barometer of the public ire for these great beasts it is instructive to note that an entire one quarter of these whales had gun shot wounds at the time of their capture, a testimony to the ignorance that spearheaded such a surefooted campaign to kill en masse. Killer whales were generally feared and loathed as competitors for the valuable B.C. salmon that once teemed in the waters up and down the coast, so in 1961 the Canadian Department of Fisheries mounted a machine gun near the sportsfishing mecca of Campbell River, to mow down any fearsome creature that might surface for air (luckily nary a shot was fired).

Paradoxically, this insane cowboy era of killing and corralling orcas led to a rapid and dramatic shift in public attitude towards the species and spurred almost all the scientific research we have to date. By the time of the last orca kidnapping in 1976, over a thousand demonstrators had showed up to protest the final capture near Olympia, Washington, and the group of floatplanes and speedboats led by the cavalier collecters of SeaWorld were sent home empty-handed. After only a decade or so of seeing killer whales in captivity both the general public and the scientific community were quickly dawning on the grave injustice of keeping such sentient animals confined.

Today killer whales are championed as a sort of centerpiece on the mantle of West Coast consciousness. Their images are splashed across hockey jerseys, travel brochures, beer bottles, and book publishing logos. Whale watching along the coast is big business and in B.C. it brings in millions of sought after tourist dollars to the provincial economy.

Considering this, it seems rather surprising that more racket isn’t being made over the losses of Southern Residents, especially with the recent broad-based environmental movement that brought nearly 3000 citizens to the B.C. Legislature to protest the continued decimation of ancient old-growth forests across Vancouver Island and the lower mainland.

So far citizen action has centred on lawsuits like the one recently spearheaded by Ecojustice that sues the federal government over its refusal to protect critical habitat of endangered species under the protection of the Species at Risk Act. Also of note is the current campaign to force the provincial government to likewise protect critical habitat. Though B.C. is the province with the most biodiversity in Canada it has over 1600 threatened species and no endangered species act (Alberta is the only other laggard without such a law. You can lay your John/Jane Hancock here on this online petition to help).

Reasons, reasons, reasons

Which brings us to the reasons for the orcas’ decline. The problems facing the Southern Residents are complex and many.

An obvious start is the lack of salmon. Many populations of Chinook salmon (the Southern Resident’s primary prey) are threatened with extinction or are now extinct. Overall, 2008 was the worst harvest in the history of West Coast salmon fishing. Virtually all Chinook fisheries were closed from California to Oregon, and Washington and B.C. were not much better, including the main feeding populations of the Fraser River, the Columbia River and Puget Sound, as well as the Sacramento River and Klamath River further south.

The reasons for Chinook population crashes are primarily overfishing and poor management practices that allow too many large open ocean operations to fish further out to sea where they increase their bycatch of the threatened Chinook. Other factors include destruction of inland habitat through urbanization, farming, foresting and mining; damming of rivers and diversion of water for irrigation; and perhaps not surprisingly, global climate change is affecting the temperature of the Pacific Ocean which has many complex consequences on the webs of life that inhabitat it.

Orca extinction threat number 2: toxic pollution. North Americans use around 85,000 different chemicals today and that number is increasing each year by more than a thousand new pollutants introduced into our industrial vocabulary. Pick a letter, the killer whales have ‘em. Toxins like PCB, DDT, and PBDE make our orcas the most toxic marine mammals in the world. In fact, in 2000 the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans considered incinerating the body of a dead orca in an Alberta toxic waste facility because its carcass exceeded ocean dumping standards for toxic waste. All these chemicals are said to affect whale fertility, increase mortality by weakening their immune systems, leaving them vulnerable to disease and infection.

Which brings up another white (or brown?) elephant in the room: human sewage. Recent analysis of blow spout saliva shows that the Southern Resident killer whales harbour more than a dozen types of dangerous antibiotic-resistant bacteria likely transmitted from human waste. One massive source of waste in the area is the over 20 million gallons of raw sewage pumped out into the ocean each day by the city of Victoria (that’s more than 34 billion litres of sewage each year!) as well as the enormous amounts of sewage released by Metro Vancouver each day. Environmental groups recently lost their second lawsuit against Metro Vancouver for its release of toxic effluent into the paths of an estimated billion juvenile salmon in the Fraser river. All this wasn't enough to make you slightly ill, there's another 400 million gallons flushed into Puget Sound every day.

And finally, daunting challenge number 3: vessel traffic. The area that makes up the Pacific Northwest is among the busiest waterways in the world. Commercial freighter traffic moving goods in and out of the metropolises of Vancouver and Seattle make the area a natural gateway to China and the Pacific economies. Combine this with record cruise ships seasons in Victoria, Vancouver and Seattle and that’s a lot of vessel noise, not to mention waste. The Conservative government further deregulated the cruise industry in 2007, an industry that was already distinguished as one of the worst environmental polluters on record.

All this noise becomes a real problem for the orcas because, like other whales and dolphins, they rely on echolocation to communicate, socialize, navigate and hunt. Ship noise, especially naval sonar like that used by the Canadian Department of National Defence in the Straight of Georgia, is a severe physical and social threat to many whale species including orcas and can even kill them (often the high intensity of the naval sonar creates bubbles in their organ tissues leading to internal bleeding in the brain and ears). Environmentalists have accused the DND of attempting to rewrite vital passages in the scientific assessment of the Killer Whale Recovery strategy that identified key habitat to the orcas.

With so many hazards in their midst it's astounding there are still 83 Southern Residents left and that there is any hope at all of recovering from their recent decline. Though their numbers dipped as low as 68 during the bonanza of captures that occurred throughout much of the 1960's and 70's, the Southern Residents rebounded, presumably in part because juveniles captives were preferred to their larger guardians. Still, if there is some chance of nursing our ecosystem and its inhabitants back to health it lies in a greater force of organized action by people who are affected by the stories of the orca and understand their own place within that narrative.

Today's environmental movement often finds itself forced to appeal to the economic value of environmental stewardship. We look to economists like Nicholas Stern to tell us that delaying action on global climate change will hit us harder in the pocketbook than acting now, or that by turning wetlands and marshes into suburbs and industrial parks we lose natural aquifers that purify water that would otherwise cost us millions to purify ourselves. This emphasis on the utility of conservation is, I think, clearly powerful, but all too often we lose focus of the notion that nature should be not only preserved but cherished simply because its beauty defies words and straightforward explanations. It has profound value all on its own. And if all that seems a little too slippery for you, let's lay down the law together:

“…wildlife, in all its forms, has value in and of itself and is valued by Canadians for aesthetic, cultural, spiritual, recreational, educational, historical, economic, medical, ecological and scientific reasons..." - Canada's Species at Risk Act


Follow-up links:

If you are interested in helping the historic lawsuit headed by Ecojustice to protect our orcas you can donate to the 'Honour an Orca' campaign.

For more info on cruise ship and freighter pollution, as well as issues involving navy sonar, you can find it at the Georgia Straight Alliance here and here and here.