Podcast Transcript: 1. Killer Whales & Culture, With Dr. John Ford
John Ford (00:01):
Blubber is where they have stored these PCBs. It's a fat-soluble compound that lodges in the blubber and may be very benign until the animal is nutritionally stressed, then it mobilizes these PCBs into the bloodstream that then affect the animal's ability to fight off disease.
Justin Cox (00:22):
Welcome to episode one of Pod of Orcas: Saving Southern Resident Killer Whales. I'm Justin Cox, and I'll be your host along with SeaDoc Society board member, Kevin Campion, who is here with me now. Kevin, how are you?
Kevin Campion:
I'm doing so good, Justin, how are you doing?
Justin Cox:
I'm doing great. I'm super excited to be kicking this thing off. I just feel really lucky to have talked to the people that you're going to hear in this series over the next six or seven weeks. I lead communications for the SeaDoc Society and killer whales come up almost every single day. And I learned a ton in these conversations that I didn't know before. And what's something I think people should know is that these episodes are going to be about 40 or so minutes and there will be six of them. And so these are all very, very strong scientists and conservationists talking on these topics. But if you know people who only slightly know about the situation with Southern Resident killer whales, or people who aren't necessarily deep in the weeds on this stuff every day, I think this is a good thing that you can share with other people who you want to be interested in this. It's a manageable amount to take in. Each episode is going to be on a topic, and so you're going to have episodes about salmon, noise. We have some more abstract ideas like how conservation of mountain gorillas can be applied to the work we're doing with Southern Resident killer whales. And looking back at the sort of history and culture and perception of killer whales in general over time. What I'm going to play for you right now is just a little introductory trailer for the series, which we're going to put out one per week over the next six weeks. So take a listen to this, to get a feel for what you're going to be experiencing.
Justin Cox: (1:59)
Imagine for a moment that you're walking down a city street, you've been walking for miles and you're hungry, but all the restaurants and grocery stores have seemingly vanished. You're also a little under the weather. Maybe you're sick, maybe you're not. Regardless, you're not your tip-top self. And the smoggy air - it's not helping. Oh, and your whole family's with you too. There has to be food around here somewhere! Maybe a block away, maybe clear on the other side of town. You'll just have to keep looking. And that noise - it's relentless. You can't even concentrate, let alone talk to your family. Actually, can we shut that off? Thank you. There are only 74 Southern Resident killer whales left in the wild, and they're looking directly at extinction if humans don't pay immediate attention to their plight. That scenario I just described where you're hungry and feeling achy as you seek nourishment in a food desert. Well, that's a simplified look at what's happening with the southern residents. They're facing three major challenges and they all compound one another. Their sole food source, salmon, has plummeted in the Salish Sea. There are fewer fish, and the fish that are around are far smaller than they used to be. Shipping traffic and boat noise have made the sea louder. That's a big deal considering orcas hunt and communicate through sound. Humans have released contaminants into the water and we're finding them in killer whales when we study them after their death. Those compromised their immune systems. Killer whales are emotionally intelligent and they have complex family dynamics. They also have a deep spiritual connection to the tribes and first nations who've been in the Salish Sea since time immemorial. The SeaDoc Society is a science-based organization on Orcas Island, and we're part of the UC Davis, Karen C Drayer Wildlife Health Center. As I mentioned earlier, my name is Justin Cox and I am the communications person for the SeaDoc Society. Kevin, who are you?
Kevin Campion (03:47):
I am Kevin Campion, a SeaDoc board member.
Justin Cox:
What do you do out on the water?
Kevin Campion:
So when I'm not doing things with SeaDoc, I run a program called Deep Green Wilderness, basically teaching whale conservation and research to teenagers on a sailboat on the Salish Sea. And I'm also now running a program called Save the North Pacific Right Whale.
Justin Cox (04:14):
Well, I am excited to spend the next six weeks with you. It's going to be cool. Our first episode today is going to be-, it's going to kind of bring us up to speed with where Southern Resident killer whales are now and their situation at large. And our guest is going to be John Ford, who up until semi-recently was a research scientist and head of Cetacean Research Program, Pacific Biological Station, Fisheries and Oceans Canada. Kevin, you've had some-, you've met John, right?
Kevin Campion (04:39):
Yeah, so I had the awesome opportunity of sitting down with John a couple of years ago up in Nanaimo where he works. I was a little starstruck, to be honest, you know, he’s been at the forefront of orca research and Southern Resident killer whale research since it began, really. And he published a book a few years ago called Marine Mammals of British Columbia, which is a resource that we use on the boat with our students that is just-, I can't say enough good things about. And then John Ford has the distinction of being one of maybe four Canadians who have ever seen a living North Pacific right whale, which is, you know, this is a-, aside from Southern Resident killer whales, but another highly endangered population of whales and John’s seen one! I think he's actually seen two. I just have so much respect for the work John's done over the last few decades. And yeah, just total, like, I mean, he's kind of a rock star in my little community of North Pacific right whale people.
Justin Cox (05:47):
Subscribe to the show, share the show, rate the show and review it, get the free SeaDoc Society monthly newsletter at seadocsociety.org/newsletter. And you can find us on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to follow along not only with the show, but everything else we're up to. This series is made possible by our amazing sponsors: Shearwater Kayak Tours, Rain Shadow Solar, Two Beers Brewing Company, Deer Harbor Charters and the Averna family, Betsy Wareham and West Sound Marina, the San Juan County Marine Resources Committee, and Apple State Vinegar. If you'd like to sponsor the show, you can reach us at seadoc@seadocsociety.org. Welcome to the show, John Ford. How are you doing?
John Ford:
Good. Thanks, Justin.
Justin Cox:
Awesome. Well, very excited to have you on. What I want to do right at the outset for people is sort of define the difference between the three types of killer whales that are in this area. What types of killer whales or populations of killer whales do we have in the Salish Sea?
John Ford (06:45):
Well, as you mentioned, there's three very distinct kinds that co-exist in our local waters along the West Coast here. And they're termed Residents, Bigg’s killer whales (otherwise known as Transients), and Offshore killer whales. So these are called ecotypes, three different ecotypes that live in isolation from one another. They never mix. They're all the same species, but…there are genetic differences, but more importantly, there are cultural differences between these three ecotypes. It all revolves around what they eat, what their diet is. So the Resident form, or the Resident ecotype, is a salmon specialist. They eat other kinds of fish, but they don't eat marine mammals. The Bigg’s killer whales, or Transients, they, to our knowledge, don't eat any fish. They only eat marine mammals and occasionally squid. And then the Offshore killer whales, we don't know a lot about. They live out on the outer coast just about all the time. They range widely from Southern California, right to the Aleutians. And they seem to be shark specialists. They go after large deep-water sharks, particularly to eat their very rich livers. So these three different forms, as I mentioned, co-exist on the coast, they lead separate lives, they don't mix. And thanks to photo identification and acoustics, underwater sound, we can distinguish them quite readily when we find them out on the water.
Justin Cox (08:08):
Amazing. So you've been doing this work since the late seventies, right?
John Ford:
That's right.
Justin Cox:
How did the killer whales, and then later specifically the Southern Residents, how did that sort of become your world? How did you get into that?
John Ford (08:19):
Well, in the early seventies, I heard about the work that the late colleague and mentor Michael Bigg, who's a research scientist at the Pacific Biological Station here in Nanaimo, British Columbia. He and his colleagues started a long-term study (well, what turned into a long-term study) in the early seventies of killer whales to try and understand how many there were, and what their basic population dynamics were. And this was to manage what at the time was a live capture fishery that was taking local killer whales from the wild and selling them to aquariums all over the world. And people were getting concerned that these killer whales were being depleted in local waters. So Mike Bigg was the inventor, essentially, of a photo identification technique. And that is using natural markings to identify individuals like a thumbprint or a mugshot. And this proved to be the key to learning about these animals. So I heard about the work that was going on in this area through a friend of mine, Graeme Ellis, who was a very close colleague of Mike’s at that time, working on the killer whales - this new killer whale program. And I had come from a background of acoustics. I had been interested in whale sounds through listening to them at the Vancouver Aquarium and then studying narwhals up in the high Arctic recording their underwater sounds. And I thought here's a perfect situation where we can go out and actually find a known group, a pod of whales, and follow them around and record their sounds while they're engaged in all these different routine activities that they might do from day to day or week to week. And by doing so come to understand how the underwater sounds function for these animals. So this was my intent to undertake this research as a graduate student. And I finally got underway in 1977 and, and seven years later, I finished my PhD on underwater sounds of killer whales. And over the course of that work, I sort of stumbled into the existence of these family-specific dialects in the resident ecotype, the resident population. And that became the focus of my work. And then since then, of course, it's branched out to all aspects of their natural history and population dynamics, and this work keeps going on today. So it's one of the longest running field study of any whale species in the world.
Justin Cox (10:53):
Amazing. And so is the ability to do this work, that's really parsing out the differences in dialects and sounds and communication and culture, is that built directly off of the ability to individually identify them - the work that Michael Bigg had done?
John Ford (11:07):
Yes. The tool, the key tool, is photo identification. That way we know exactly which group, well, first of all, which ecotype we're with, whether it's Resident or Transient or Bigg’s killer whales or Offshore. Now back in the seventies, when this work began, the Transients, the Biggs killer whales, were extremely rare and their numbers have increased dramatically over the last 45 years or so. And now we understand that's because their main food resource (that is seals and sea lions) were very depleted by years of harvesting and culling that went on for about a century and ended in the late sixties. And so their numbers have increased. So by going out, identifying the different group we're with, following them, seeing what eat, seeing what their whole lifestyle is like, this is how we've come to learn so much about these animals. And it's, it's involved many, many people over the years. My good friend and colleague Ken Balcomb has led the photo identification and life history work on Southern Resident killer whales. It's a smaller population. We have learned so much about these animals, and I think what, perhaps, is the most important aspect of their biology, that we now come to appreciate that we didn’t in the past, is just how much culture determines what they do and what they eat and how they exist. And this is what is one of the many fascinating features of this incredible species.
Justin Cox (12:37):
Yeah, I want to stick with that idea of culture before we-, I do want to ultimately move on to sort of how we got to this position where Southern Resident killer whales are so severely endangered and maybe where things might be headed, but this idea of culture. I mean, you're a scientist, you're a scientist who's been doing this work for almost 50 years. What does killer whale culture mean to you? What, I don't know what, yeah, what does killer whale culture mean to you?
John Ford (13:04):
Primarily, when I think of killer whale culture, I think of their underwater sounds because that, to me, is one of the clearest examples of social learning within these populations. So a whale that's born into a particular family group, or pod, of residents learns the sounds of primarily the mother, its mother, probably learns their sounds in utero before they're even born, because sound produced underwater would transmit right to the developing fetus in the mother, even before it's born. But these dialects at the family level are perpetuated by learning across generations and very closely related pods share very similar dialects, and we believe that they have descended from a common ancestral group. And that particular group split into two. The dialect slowly, over decades perhaps, drifted apart, so we now have this sort of mosaic of different dialects within the population. There's two populations of resident salmon-feeding killer whales on our coast. There's the Northern Residents with about 300 animals and the Southern Residents with about 75 or so. And within the Northern Residents, there's different clans, which are collections of pods that have a common dialect, or related dialects, yet there's no sharing of sounds whatsoever between these clans. So this is a very bizarre situation where these pods may travel together, but they use entirely different sounds. And there's no sort of diffusion of the dialects between these different groups, even though they spend so much time together. So the dialects are a great example of culture. The other prime example, I think, is their diet. We think that when a whale is born, it has no preconception of what food is. It learns what food is by being provisioned by its mother and close kin. There's a lot of food sharing that goes on within these groups. And it learns that the main food to eat is salmon if it's a Resident whale, or if it's a Bigg’s killer whale, it learns that harbor seal or porpoise or sea lion is the food that they're going to eat as part of their culture. And how to catch it is determined by foraging tactics that again are passed on across generations, by social learning. So there's many other examples of cultures. Northern residents, for example, off Northern Vancouver Island and the north coast all the way up to Alaska, Southeast Alaska. They have a very strong tradition of rubbing on pebble beaches routinely during the summer, they'll do this pretty much every day. They'll go to traditional beaches to rub their bodies. The Southern Residents - they don't have this culture at all. They just don't rub anywhere. So there's a whole range of different cultural attributes that define these different populations.
Justin Cox (16:02):
Yeah, these are traditions built up over time, completely separate from one another. Yeah.
John Ford (16:07):
They are. And you can imagine that if a young whale learns the dialect of its group, of its mother, when it's born, if it's a female, they can live 70, 80, perhaps even 90 years or so. And over that almost a century, they'll retain that particular dialect. And so going across generations, if there's even minor differences or changes in the dialect, you can imagine that these dialects may persist for centuries. And in the case of J pod, a very well-known Southern Resident pod, we have recordings going back to the 1950s that sound very much like that pod does today. These very stereotyped calls that make up the dialect - there's about a dozen calls on average for a pod. These calls probably last for centuries before they eventually may be phased out in favor of new calls as the population evolves.
Justin Cox (17:05):
Yeah. I was having a conversation with our science director, Joe Gaydos, about Southern Resident killer whale greeting ceremonies, where all these whales come together, various pods. And there's a whole lot of the sound happening almost to the point a human could perceive it as singing together. I don't want to project my own human feelings onto it, but what's happening there? And then as follow up to that, are other populations of killer whales, not only here, but around the world, also doing something similar?
John Ford (17:35):
These greeting ceremonies are another example of cultural differences within populations. It seems to be a behavior tradition of the Southern residents when they've been apart, pods have been apart or parts of pods have been apart for some days. For example, when they get together, when they run into each other, again, they do this ceremony, if you like. It's kind of a ritualized-, a behavior where the two groups line up and face each other at the surface, and then they'll dive synchronously and there's a great deal of social excitement, lots of underwater vocalization. Clearly it's an exciting time for them. The Northern Residents - they don't seem to do this nearly as much as the Southern Residents, the Northerns, when they get together, they just kind of merge. And there's no elaborate performance, if you like. Yet, the Northerns, as I mentioned, they have a tradition of rubbing on beaches that the Southern Residents don’t. So there are these cultural differences, even within the resident ecotype of the population levels.
Bob Friel (18:42):
Hi, this is Bob Friel, producer of the SeaDoc Society’s video series, Salish Sea Wild. Follow SeaDoc’s Joe Gatos, as he explores the wonders of the Salish Sea. Watch Joe shake hands with the world's biggest octopus, get nibbled on by huge Steller sea lions, and witness our wildest wildlife events. To see the show, just go to YouTube and search for Salish Sea Wild. Don't miss the episode where Dr. Joe makes a house call to check on the health of our beloved Southern Resident killer whales.
John Ford (19:20):
Some reason that we don't really fully understand the Southern and Northern Residents, even though their ranges overlap, especially on the west coast of Vancouver Island there's substantial overlap, they never mix. They're xenophobic, if you like. The Southern Residents will avoid meeting a Northern Resident group, even if they're in earshot of one another, which happens quite regularly out of the mouth of the Strait of Juan de Fuca. But they don't mix. And this is just another quirk of these animals.
Justin Cox (19:50):
Prior to the photo identification and everything like that, did people just think they were all the same? Like, there's a killer whale (and I primarily mean white people, honestly).
John Ford (20:02):
Yes, it is interesting in that when the study began, there was no notion that there were these different ecotypes of killer whales feeding on different prey and leading separate lives. There was just no indication. There was no precedent for that kind of situation in any social mammal. And so it actually was a slow evolution of understanding that took almost a decade to complete before we really recognized these, what were called transients, now we’re calling them Bigg’s killer whales in honor of Michael Bigg, the founding father of the modern science of killer whale studies on the coast here. Now we recognize that they're not just social outcasts of the resident groups. That was kind of the initial thought about what these animals were, but they're actually a fully legitimate population that just leads a totally different existence. And so when the study began, it was known that killer whales ate salmon and seals and various other things. Being the top predator in the ocean that would be expected. But what was so surprising, and still is today to many of us who still have a hard time believing it, that they can be so set in their ways that they will only eat certain prey. And even if that prey abundance becomes less than sufficient to meet the needs of the population, they will still keep looking for it. And they won't switch to alternative prey that might be more abundant. For example, a resident killer whale faced with a shortage of Chinook salmon, which is their preferred species that-
Justin Cox (21:41):
That shortage exists very much right now.
John Ford (21:43):
It does certainly, but they still continue focusing on Chinook even at their peril, in a way, that they're running an energetic deficit, it seems, because there's not enough Chinook for them to thrive. And they may switch to alternative fish, like halibut, and of course, other salmon species, but that seems to be insufficient to meet their needs. So why are these different populations so specialized on particular kinds of prey? And this was something that we've pondered for years. And I think it all boils down to the old adage, that “Jack of all trades, master of none”, that means that a generalist can do fairly well in the long-term, but specialists can out-compete them because they become really good at a particular thing that you do. In the case of killer whales, specialists that go after salmon, especially Chinook salmon, which are present year-round in our waters, unlike some of the migratory species, or the more migratory species like Sockeye and Pink, which are only present for a few months in the summer. Chinook salmon, historically, there was huge numbers of Chinook salmon on this coast enough to support a big population of Chinook specialists, but that's changed in recent years. And it seems that they are slow to adapt to the changing ecosystem and switch prey types, which is to their detriment, I think. Which is kind of hard to imagine because they're an intelligent, innovative animal that has globally evolved all sorts of elaborate tactics to catch their preferred prey, like washing seals off ice pans in the Antarctic, or coming up on beaches in Patagonia to take sea lion pups off the beach. You know, they're a very skillful, versatile predator, but they are behaviorally and culturally constrained to just a small portion of what they, in theory, could eat. This can be a successful strategy because again, specialists can out compete generalists, but it does make them more vulnerable to population level problems if their prey resource fails for whatever reason.
Justin Cox (24:06):
And in this case, that prey resources is failing. To that end, we're down to the low seventies, with total Southern resident killer whales remaining, all of them can be individually identified. There's this kind of counter-intuitive thing for people, especially people who are semi-new to the area, or-. They're called Southern Resident killer whales. The idea of resident implies that this is their home. This is where they are. You will see them here. And then you have these transients, the Bigg’s killer whales, on the other side. The residents are becoming less residential, right? They're traveling further to look for food. And then we're seeing the transients more often. Is that the case?
John Ford (24:45):
We don't know much about this sort of historical distribution of these populations. Around 2000 or so, right at the turn of the century, Southern Residents were seen down in Monterey Bay for the first time, and it was a big surprise to us. We had no idea in the winter that they went that far South. We knew that they vacated in-shore waters of Puget Sound and the San Juan's and Southern Vancouver Island, these waters that they spend most of their time in the summer and fall. We knew that they left, but we thought that they just went out to local waters on the outside of Vancouver Island or Washington state. But their first appearance down there coincided with, at the time, very strong runs of Chinook salmon into the Sacramento River. What we now recognize 20 years later is that the Southern Residents historically probably were very dependent on Chinook stocks that went into the Fraser, Columbia and the Sacramento River to spawn. And these were huge resources back in the 1800’s before Europeans arrived and started fisheries and depleted these populations. So what we're seeing in the Southern Residents is a population that is basically failing because of the lack of food that traditionally supported the population, probably a much larger population that existed, you know, before we started harassing, shooting killer whales in the early 1900’s because they were viewed with fear and they were competition for salmon. And then live captures took almost 50 Southern Residents during the late sixties and early seventies. And today what we have now is almost a remnant population. So can they survive into the future? We hope so, but it's going to require some very strong actions in terms of providing enough Chinook salmon for them to meet their needs. Not just at their current population size, but to allow them to grow to hopefully, you know, over, you know, hundreds of animals like the Northern Residents, which seem to be doing okay. Their numbers have been increasing, around 300 or so, but the Southerns have not been increasing.
Justin Cox (27:12):
Yeah. And something we talk about in a future episode is, I mean, we just had this super interesting conversation about sound and communication and culture. And in addition to the increased fishing presence and everything, the general noisiness of the Salish Sea has also increased, and it's impossible to ignore that.
John Ford (27:33):
There's a number of different threats like that, and pressures on the Southern Residents in particular. Noise is certainly one of them. We don't really understand to what extent noise affects their ability to locate fish with their echolocation, which is their primary sense of navigation and orientation underwater. They emit streams of clicks that they receive echoes from, and interpret those echoes to determine where they are, and presumably where a Chinook salmon is ahead of them. Noise might mask those very faint echoes that they need to find food and to be able to catch it. But there are other stressors facing the population. Another one is the accumulation of contaminants in their bodies, including especially PCBs, which have been outlawed for decades on our coast, but are still persistent in the marine environment. Now these PCB levels are very high in Southern Residents, and less so in Northern Residents, because they typically forage in a less polluted environment off northern Vancouver Island and northern British Columbia and Southeast Alaska. So what we surmise is that when the Southern Residents have become nutritionally stressed, particularly in winter, when there may be fewer Chinook available out there to meet their energetic needs, that they start metabolizing blubber. And blubber is where they have stored the, these PCBs. It's a fat-soluble compound that lodges in the blubber, and maybe very benign until the animal is nutritionally stressed. Then it mobilizes these PCBs into the bloodstream that then affect the animal's ability to fight off disease. PCBs can cause reproductive problems and so on. So this may be what's causing the problems for Southern Residents. They may not be literally starving just because of a lack of food, but the lack of food is causing these PCBs to act to the detriment of their health. And it may just tip the balance, whether they get over a particular disease or parasite load or something like that, when in the past they might have with sufficient food.
Justin Cox (29:49):
Yeah and anybody listening to this first episode should know that in the coming weeks, we have some really, really cool and interesting conversations about those specific issues related to sound and noise and chemicals and toxins and contaminants. So tune into those. Cause we go deep on both of them. So John, you've been doing this work for coming on 50 years. A lot of people have dedicated a lot of time to studying specifically Southern Resident killer whales. I believe I've read that they are essentially the most studied cetacean in the world, right. If we know this much information about them, if we've learned so much about how they communicate and sound and everything, why has the situation remained so dire? Why hasn't the ability to save them paced with the amount that we've learned about them?
John Ford (30:44):
Yeah, that's a good point. You know, we do realize that sound is so important to the animals to keep the groups in touch with each other when they're spread out foraging for salmon, to find salmon, and so on. But we really, you know, we know that, but we don't know what sort of threshold that might exist in the noise level that causes them problems. In the meantime, noise continues to increase on our coast because of, you know, new increased levels of shipping activity, big, new container ports being built off the Port of Vancouver, for example, with steadily increasing levels of shipping. And not just ships, but recreational boating is increasing it as well. So these stressors are increasing, even though as we learn more about them, the habitat is getting further degraded through noise. The contaminants are more under control in that they are diminishing in their environment, or at least the sort of legacy contaminants like PCBs are, but there's new contaminants coming into the system like PBDEs, which are fire retardants that are now presenting more of a problem. And of course the ultimate problem is food availability. So we now understand after years of work, just how important Chinook salmon is. While we've been learning just how important that is, Chinook salmon stocks have continued to decline. And so this is a widespread problem related to habitat issues on the spawning habitat, lack of water in certain river systems, dams on the Columbia, and mismanagement, if you like, of Chinook salmon resources. There's just more human fisheries. They're taking more Chinook than are out there to provide enough reserve, if you like, for the Southern Residents. So what we need to do going into the future is, I think, really focus more on what the whales needs are at different times of the year and in different areas. And ensure that we have provided proper habitat for them in terms of noise and lack of physical disturbance through, you know, flocks of fishing boats around them and with their downriggers and so on, you know, to allow them not just to have enough fish, but to be able to catch them in their traditional foraging hotspots. Which we're now starting to better understand, you know, we've known where they spend much of their time in the San Juan's, for example, because there's been work going on since the mid seventies in that area, but it's just in the recent years that we've started to learn more about where they forage in Juan de Fuca, Swiftsure Bank off the mouth of the Juan de Fuca, and the outer coast of Washington, Oregon, and down even into California. These areas are really, really important to the whales and we need to protect their habitat and their food resource in those areas if we're going to hope to have Southern Residents turning the corner and starting to increase again.
Justin Cox (33:54):
Yeah, a really clarifying way I've found to think about that is SeaDoc Society does a good amount of work with Tufted Puffins, and Tufted Puffins would come spend a certain part of the year out here in the Salish Sea and near the outer coast, but then they spend the rest of the year out on the water. And we're not exactly sure where, we're not exactly sure the conditions, and there's a whole lot we don't know. And the way Joe puts it is like, if you study or try to come up with a solution for something that you only have data on for three months out of the year, you're missing nine months, you don't have the whole picture. And so it's makes sense that you need to take a wide angle look at where they're going and really understand everything that they're up against.
John Ford (34:39):
You know, that is so true. And one of the biggest gaps in our year-round understanding of Southern Residents in particular is, and Northern residents, but- is where they go in the winter, what they feed on in the winter. We now realize that from the work that has been possible… It's tough in the winter: the days are short, the weather's really bad, our typical way of studying the animals in little boats that are, you know, 20 feet or less in size, you just can't work out on the outer exposed coast in winter with that kind of approach. So it's taken awhile for us to learn as much as we have. There's still much more to learn. We're using new techniques to get a better sense of their habitat, use patterns through remote autonomous recording devices that are being deployed at strategic sites out on the west coast to detect the whale’s dialects. We can tell which pods are where, what time, and so on and get a better sense of where they're spending their time looking for food. One result of that work off the mouth of Juan de Fuca Strait, an area called Swiftsure Bank, which we now recognize as being really important to the animals during winter and spring, especially, but actually throughout the year, one great surprise to us was how much Northern Resident pods are present in the same area as the Southern Residents on Swiftsure Bank, especially in the fall, winter and spring. And they're out there almost as much as the Southern Residents, which we had no idea of up until recently.
Justin Cox (36:15):
Something I think you alluded to there a little bit that we haven't touched on, is there's a lot of work policy-wise, lot a real tough conversations and stuff happening in the state of Washington on this side of the border. You're sitting in Nanaimo in Canada right now, and that's a lot of where you've done your work over the years. What does the kind of transboundary nature, the border that cuts this ecosystem right in half, what kind of challenges does that pose and what’s happening in Canada?
John Ford (36:45):
It certainly is a transboundary population, spends much of its time in both sides of the border. And there is a lot of ongoing collaboration between the U.S. and Canadian government. In Canada, there's been some very strong steps taken, I think, to reduce competition from human sports fishing in particular, but also commercial fishing for Chinook salmon in key foraging areas that the whales need to catch their food basically. And I think that kind of approach is starting to take place in the U.S. waters as well. But there's much more that needs to be done on both sides of the borders to explicitly allow the animals to function in the hotspots that they traditionally use. And to make sure that you know, that they are getting enough food and that's ultimately what the biggest concern, in my opinion, is for these animals.
Justin Cox (37:47):
You've been at this work for quite a while. What are you up to these days?
John Ford (37:51):
Well, I'm actually spending a lot of time analyzing the recordings made on these autonomous recorders to look at what groups of killer whales are in what area at what time of year. Of course, these are highly mobile whales and they have lots of options of where they go. It doesn't take much for them to travel, you know, up to a hundred miles in a 24 hour period. So they get around a lot. And by deciphering these sounds throughout the year from a number of different locations, we can get a much better sense of how they move around. The dialects are a little tricky to interpret, and there's not too many of us that actually have learned the different dialects of the Bigg’s killer whales, the Southern Residents, Northern Residents. And even these sharks specialists, Offshore whales, use completely different sounds. So I'm finding that my early learning of these languages, if you like, back in the late seventies and early eighties, when I was doing my graduate work, I still can recognize all these different dialects. So I'm spending a lot of time interpreting who's out there to better understand the movement of these whales.
Justin Cox (39:02):
Where can people find you and some of this work?
John Ford (39:06):
I'm now affiliated mostly with the University of British Columbia, and recently I ran the Cetacean Research Program for the Canadian Fisheries and Oceans Department at the Pacific Biological Station here in Nanaimo. And so working mostly from home these days, thanks to the pandemic but, you know, collaborating with lots of people in Canada and in the U.S. to, you know, focus on what we can do about improving the future for these whales.
Justin Cox (39:42):
Anything that you think someone I'm entering into a podcast series about Southern Resident killer whales should know in episode one that maybe I haven't asked you about.
John Ford (39:49):
If we provide enough food for these different ecotypes, they can do just fine, even in a pretty noisy environment, like the Strait of Georgia, Juan de Fuca, Puget Sound. There's a lot of vessels making a lot of noise, but the Bigg’s killer whales are doing fine. So I think that, again, emphasizes the importance of food. If there's enough food available for the animals, they can probably exist in fairly urbanized environments. And so that's why we need to really focus on that aspect of the conservation of Southern Resident killer whales.
Justin Cox (40:25):
Before I say goodbye, my co-host, Kevin, who I record the introductions for each of these podcasts with, said that you're one of the handful of people who've seen a North Pacific right whale. The rarest whale in the world, if I'm right. Is that true?
John Ford (40:40):
You know, it's true. And it was just more by luck than anything that after an absence of about 60 years of North Pacific right whales off the coast of British Columbia, there was two different individuals that appeared in the same summer. And I happened to be in the right place to see both of those animals, which was tremendously exciting. I never thought in my career that I would ever see one of these animals. The best estimates are less than 50 in the Eastern North Pacific, North Pacific right whales, so they're critically endangered. We don't know how they're doing with what their prospects are for recovering their numbers, but seeing these two individuals gave us some hope. These ones had not been seen before. You know, there's a handful of animals photo identified, mostly in the Bering Sea, and around Kodiak. But these animals weren't in the little catalog of individual photo I.D.s for North Pacific right whale. So, you know, we're hopeful that they can make the turnaround in their population and start coming back. But no, it was real privileged to be able to see these two animals a few years ago.
Justin Cox (41:45):
Amazing. Well, it sounds like you put in your time and you earned that special moment so glad you had it.
John Ford:
Thanks, Justin.
Justing Cox:
Awesome. Well, John really enjoyed talking to you. Thank you so much for coming on episode one of this podcast.
John Ford (41:58):
You’re very welcome. It was great. Thanks Justin.
Justin Cox (42:01):
Next week's conversation is all about salmon and it's one that I will not soon forget. Here's a little clip. Make sure to subscribe, spread the word, review the podcast, and we'll see you next week. If the status quo were maintained, could you see a future without salmon?
Cecilia Gobin (42:18):
I think to date, we, this region, has effectively done all of the easy things when it comes to salmon recovery. That's not to say that that's bad or good. It's just how we decided to start trying to recover salmon. You know, you have to start somewhere. On the flip side of that, what that means then is that all of those hard decisions, all of those big action items, you know, those big ticket items are what's left.
Justin Cox (42:55):
Our logo was produced by float.org and all music was produced by Podington Bear. The killer whale sounds you heard in this episode are courtesy of the Whale Museum.