Endangered listing for elusive orcas? Scientists seek clues to decline

By Craig Welch
Seattle Times staff reporter

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Puget Sound's orcas have names such as Sparky and Blossom. And each can be identified by its distinctive black and white markings. But scientists still don't even know where they go when they leave the Sound.

"We don't know if they turn left, if they turn right, or if they go straight out ... 400 miles," said Linda Jones, a government whale expert.

The lack of basic knowledge about the Northwest's signature marine mammal highlights the challenges ahead as scientists search for clues to their decline.

This much is clear: The government may turn to the Endangered Species Act (ESA) to try to save them, but applying it to a migrating mammal at the top of the food chain could touch everything from construction along major rivers to cruise-ship operations.

U.S. District Judge Robert Lasnik ruled Wednesday that the National Marine Fisheries Service ignored available science in 2002 when it decided against listing the region's killer whales as threatened or endangered.

While he stopped short of ordering the agency to do so, most observers expect NMFS will do precisely that sometime next year.

"Anybody involved in environmentalism knows: You can't save a species without saving its ecosystem," said Michael Harris, with the Orca Conservancy. "And the ESA looks straight to the ecosystem."

To date, scientists can't pinpoint why the southern resident orcas, which summer near the San Juans, have dropped from nearly 100 in the mid-1990s to 84 today, but they recognize several factors may be influential. Many have toxins such as DDT and PCBs in their blubber, some may not get enough food and others may have run-ins with boats or parasite infestations.

And the single greatest threat to the population, according to the National Marine Fisheries Service, is a catastrophic oil spill.

While orcas currently are protected by the Marine Mammal Protection Act and with a "conservation plan," the ESA requires that all federal agencies "act affirmatively" to save species, and allows citizen lawsuits if the agencies don't.

"For starters, and very practically, an ESA listing would mean we would immediately get real, solid oil-spill-prevention measures," Harris said.

Meanwhile, since toxins from food sources accumulate in orcas, poisons in barely measurable amounts in their food — herring, salmon or rockfish — may still be too much for the whales.

"We may have to reduce the use of pesticides and other chemicals that run into the Sound, and eventually run into whales," said David Bain, a University of Washington professor and whale expert. "Cruise-ship dumping, that sort of thing."

When killer whales are food-stressed, they draw on their fat reserves, which releases those toxins into their systems, so scientists maintain one of the best things to do for orcas may be simply to keep them well-fed.

Bain and others said a listing could put more pressure on the government to breach dams bottling up what was once among the region's largest salmon runs — two Elwha dams that have been approved for removal, but still await the necessary money — tens of millions of dollars.

"The Elwha is a candy store for orcas," Harris said. "Remove the cork, and the fish will flow out."

A listing could also offer a boost to environmentalists who have pushed for years to rebuild depleted herring stocks eaten by orcas near the Cherry Point refineries, where analysis has found oil in herring and eggs (though at levels lower than stocks elsewhere in the Sound).

NMFS could be forced to respond as they did in Alaska, where a crash in Steller's sea lions led to cutbacks in commercial fishing for pollock, a prime food, in a few important areas.

"And we'd have to do more to protect estuaries used by salmon — even where they're not in trouble," said Patti Goldman, an attorney with Earthjustice, a group that frequently takes on environmental battles.

Jones, with NMFS' Northwest Fisheries Science Center, said researchers are still struggling with basic questions.

It's not clear, for example, whether whales are bothered by the high-pitch of fast-approaching boats, which some scientists believe can mask their ability to track prey with sonar. Or are they bothered simply by the human attention?

"Is it the vessel interactions or the noise, the disturbance of having something following you around all the time, or the sound?" Jones asked.

Meanwhile, the region's three pods of orcas, J, K and L, have different travel patterns. And L-pod, which spends more time outside Puget Sound, has a greater death rate than the J-pod.

"That immediately starts shifting a lot of the focus of the problem to activities outside Puget Sound," said Jones. "But we don't even know where they go. They've shown up in San Francisco Bay and Newport, Oregon, and off the coast of Vancouver Island."

Perhaps most dramatic, any federal agency would have to consult with the fisheries services before doing any work in or around Puget Sound that could even potentially harm orcas.

"The point of an ESA listing is that the conservation of the species is no longer resting on NMFS," said Brent Plater, one of the attorneys who filed suit against the government, leading to Wednesday's ruling. "The burden shifts to anyone or anything that might pose a threat to prove that it doesn't."

Craig Welch: 206-464-2093 or cwelch@seattletimes.com

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