The Killer Whale Who Changed the World. Mark Leiren-Young
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the moment after the film ran out or the battery died— before doing something spectacular. Is it too much of a stretch to wonder if they can sense friend or foe? Some longtime whale watchers are convinced that orcas will perform when they have the chance to endear themselves to humans who are working to save them. Says Erich Hoyt, author of Orca: The Whale Called Killer: “Fanatic whale watchers—I’ve heard them talk—suggest that the friendlies, ‘the crowd pleasers,’ know their fate rests on humans and that they are on their best behavior with us, putting on one last show as it were before the big curtain, extinction, falls.”
Killer whales have also helped humans hunt. In North America and Australia, there are stories of orcas herding fish—and even other whales—to make it easier for fishermen to catch them. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, orcas near Eden, Australia, would drive humpback whales into an area known as Twofold Bay in exchange for their favorite pieces of meat—the tongue and the lips. This working relationship where the killer whales worked as whale killers for more than a hundred years was referred to by local fishermen as “the law of the tongue.”
According to the Eden Killer Whale Museum, “In the early years of Eden whaling in the 1840s there were reportedly around 50 killers spread through 3 main pods. All three pods cooperated together. One pod stationed far out to sea would drive whales in towards the coast, another pod would attack the whale and another pod would be stationed ahead of the whale in case it broke loose.” The whale believed to be the leader was a twenty-two-foot, thirteen-thousand-pound killer the whalers named Old Tom. After a humpback had been trapped, Tom would alert the whalers by slapping his tail and repeatedly breaching (jumping out of the water and landing with a splash) to summon the humans to finish off the kill. There were also stories of fishermen falling into the shark-infested waters when their boats were swamped by a humpback and Tom and other orcas warding the sharks off and saving their partners’ lives.
In 1923, when a local whaler refused to share his catch and injured Tom in a tug of war that damaged his teeth, most of the pod stopped herding the humpbacks, proving that this wasn’t a natural behavior. It was a job, and if the orcas weren’t being paid, they weren’t showing up for work. But Tom continued to herd larger whales for his taste of tongue. When Tom died in 1930—as a result of the teeth he lost—the people of Eden built their whale museum to honor their longtime partner and display his bones. The Australians of Eden had worked with the orcas for almost a hundred years. The indigenous people of the area, the Koori, are believed to have worked in harmony with the whales for ten thousand years. And anyone who has ever seen a killer whale in captivity knows they can be trained to do practically anything in the water. Killer whales know how to work with humans—and save them—but humans have rarely been inclined to help the killers.
The whales off Saturna knew what humans usually did when they came close in their boats. The humans shot them. But as Burich and Bauer approach, the orcas can’t move quickly or far—even if it means risking being harpooned like their pod-mate. They won’t let their baby drown.
IN THE EARLY 1970s, Michael Bigg was working as a marine mammal research scientist for Canada’s Department of Fisheries, and part of his job was to assess the killer whale population now that orcas were being captured and displayed by marine parks. Fishermen and killer whale “collectors” believed there were thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of wild whales roaming the Pacific coast.
The initial plan was to tag the orcas, but after talking with Vancouver Aquarium curator Murray Newman, Bigg settled on a more radical idea—simultaneous observations. Over the course of a weekend, volunteers located along the coast would spot and count the killer whales. Bigg sent a questionnaire to fifteen thousand people who lived and worked on the water and asked them to report all the whales they saw on July 26, 1971. Only 549 whales were spotted by volunteer scouts between California and Alaska.
That first census shocked everyone. It didn’t seem possible that there were only a few hundred orcas in the region. Then Bigg adopted an even more rigorous—and controversial—approach. In 1973, he and Ian MacAskie—his colleague from Canada’s Pacific Biological Station in Nanaimo—were studying whales in the Johnstone Strait when they realized they could tell the individuals apart by the nicks, scratches, and marks on their dorsal fins and the shape of each whale’s “saddle patch”—a unique pattern located behind the dorsal fin. Researchers in Africa were identifying individual mammals based on their features, so why not attempt the same approach with killer whales?
Bigg and his partners soon identified all the local pods, designating every group with a letter of the alphabet and numbering each individual whale. The first killer they saw was number one, the second was number two, and so on. The term “pod” is said to have originated from the fact that whales stay close together like the proverbial peas in a pod—and Bigg proved these pods really did stick together.
The idea that every killer whale could be identified on sight was initially dismissed and even ridiculed by other researchers. Not only did photo identification strike other scientists as impossible; no one believed that there were so few orcas off the coast of Washington and British Columbia. The American government was skeptical of Bigg’s methods—and his math—and hired its own expert—zoologist Kenneth Balcomb—to determine whether there were more orcas in the U.S. Balcomb, who fondly refers to Bigg as “the crazy Canadian,” conducted his own population survey in 1976. Not only did he confirm Bigg’s findings, but after launching a whale museum in Friday Harbor on San Juan Island, he began giving all the numbered whales catchy names to raise money for his research and conservation efforts. He wanted to convince people to adopt their own orcas, and it was much easier to convince kids to raid their piggy banks to support Ruffles, Granny, or Princess Angeline than J1, J2, or J17. After the museum had been launched, Balcomb became executive director of the Center for Whale Research in Washington, which doubles as his home. Balcomb has conducted an annual population survey ever since his first count and devoted his life to studying the whales found in the Juan de Fuca Strait, Strait of Georgia, and Puget Sound— an area that was renamed the Salish Sea in 2009 to honor the area’s origins and future.
THE ORCA’S FIERCE reputation was well earned.
What Burich and Bauer didn’t know, what no one knew, was something else Bigg would discover—that there are multiple types of killer whales, which are so distinct that it is likely that, if they survive long enough, they will one day be considered different species. The different kinds of killer whales—known as ecotypes—don’t look exactly the same, and although they are capable of breeding with each other, and have mated when forced together in marine parks, there is no evidence that they have bred with each other in the wild in more than 700,000 years. The mammal-eating orcas that Bigg dubbed transients are as different from the fish-eating whales he called residents as lions are from house cats. Not only do residents and transients have different feeding and hunting habits, but they also have different languages, rules, and rituals. When the two types of whales meet in the wild, the transients tend to steer clear of the residents.
Thanks to aquariums where orcas serve time as star attractions, and movies like Free Willy, loveable, chatty resident whales with their close-knit families and seafood diet have captured the global imagination and become the default image not just for orcas but for every whale from belugas to blues. Resident killer whales travel and hunt in close-knit family groups, constantly communicate, and feed on specific types of fish, determined by the part of the world they live in. Studies of dead residents have revealed that their diets are so specialized that when they’re living in the wild, they will almost never deviate from it, even if the alternative is starvation. On the west coast of North America there are two groups of residents— the northerns, who roam between southeast Alaska and southern Vancouver Island, and the southerns, who live along the rest of Vancouver Island, including the waters near Saturna. These whales travel all the way down to California.
The orcas who earned killer whales their reputations as monsters were the transients, which scientists now refer to as Bigg’s whales. Bigg’s whales are less social, less chatty, and less picky about their food. These whales are larger, with sharper dorsal fins. They hunt in packs like wolves—the mammal they have often been compared with by anyone who has seen them hunt.
Humans watching