Podcast Transcript: 6. Toxic blubber, with Peter Ross

Justin Cox (00:01):

Welcome to Pod of Orcas. I'm Justin Cox, and I'm here with Kevin Campion, SeaDoc Society board member. What's up Kevin?

Kevin Campion (00:08):

What's up Justin? How are you doing?

Justin Cox (00:10):

Pretty well, nice to talk to over some coffee this morning. Today, our guest is Peter Ross and our subject matter we're going to talk about is contaminants. You've heard episodes about food, salmon, specifically for the Southern Residents, and noise. We're talking about pollution that remains in the water toxins that remain in the water over long periods of time and not only can they affect the Southern Resident Killer Whales, they can impact animals at the bottom of the food chain that then work their way up to the Southern Resident Killer Whales.

Kevin Campion (00:44):

I saw Peter Ross talk years ago at one of the Orca network things and I knew about his research and the issue with contaminants a little bit, but he like brought it to life in a way where I was like, I need to pay more attention to this and understand it better and so I have done some reading about it. I would say that like of the research that happens in Orcas for me, this is like some of the hardest to get my head around. And I think because of that, it's also like some of the most impressive research that is happening. They're not going out and he doesn't get to go sit in a boat and like watch whales, you know, like some of these other folks do, which are, they're also working super hard, but there's like this great reward. And there's like some intuitiveness to that researcher like, oh yeah, I see this whale let's buy a boat. I can imagine that that boat might have an effect on the whale. How do I measure that? Or like, I know the fish count is down because I can look at those numbers at the Fraser river. And, I know the whales around with that. Like how does, you know, when you start parsing that stuff out, but to like look at these whales and like a big picture health way, and then start imagining how these contaminants are like, it's just an amazing invisible story that Peter and I'm guessing with a team has dug into and brought to light. It's incredible how they've done that.

Justin Cox (02:14):

Yeah. I really agree. It is harder to put your head around and Peter does a good job of kind of laying that out. Like you have the idea that a lot of the contaminants we're talking about have been illegal for, years or decades now, but are still having their effect. And so there's sort of like a, well, what do we do and what future threats are still there and how is this still affecting them? And how has this go from effecting a mother to a baby immediately when it's born and starts nursing, we get into all of that and it's really good. So I think we're just going to jump over to Peter now, who is a scientist and ocean pollution expert who has worked for ocean wise and as an adjunct professor at the University of Victoria and the University of British Columbia, among many other things, really good speaker and communicator. I really enjoyed this conversation and I hope you do as well. Kevin, it's been real.

Kevin Campion (03:05):

Yeah, totally Justin. Thank you, man.

Justin Cox (03:10):

Take care.

Justin Cox (03:13):

This series is made possible by our amazing sponsors, Shearwater Kayak Tours, Rainshadow Solar, Two Beers Brewing Company, Deer Harbor Charters, and the Verna family, Betsy Wareham, and West Sound Marina, the San Juan County Marine Resources Committee, and Apple State Vinegar. Thank you also to an anonymous donor who sponsored in the memory of Nancy Albac. We are a science-based organization on Orcas Ssland and we are part of the Karen C Drayer Wildlife Health Center at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine.

Justin Cox (03:43):

Peter Ross, thank you for coming on the podcast.

Peter Ross (03:46):

You're welcome. Good to be here.

Justin Cox (03:47):

Awesome. So where do you contaminants fit in with like the three kind of main threats killer whales face and how do they play off of any of the other issues that Southern Residents face?

Peter Ross (03:57):

Well, the contaminant story for killer whales unfortunately is a tremendously complex one, with over 350,000 chemicals on the marketplace in Canada, in the United States, we're talking about a very, very complicated soup, with different emission histories, different categories of chemicals, some of them very persistent, some of them not very persistent, some of them water-soluble, some of them fat-soluble some of them endocrine disrupting some of them not. It makes for a very, very complicated story. To wrap that up into a singular threat is challenging, but I think is useful because when we look at the endangered Southern Resident Killer Whales that straddle the border between the United States and Canada and are at the top of the food chain, have long lives, large habitat needs. If we're going to preserve, protect and recover this population of, truly loved animals, we've got to understand complexity and we've got to put pollution or contamination into the spectrum of conservation. And that means comparing and contrasting with the two other major threats that is noise and disturbance and reduction of prey or food availability, namely Chinook salmon. And I think I can safely say that most of us scientists who've worked on a Southern Resident killer whales would agree that the three threats taken together that is contamination, noise and disturbance, and reduction of food availability represent a real and eminent danger to the recovery and the preservation of this species or this population for future generations.

Justin Cox (05:49):

Yeah. And when you say taken together, we're talking like not here are three individual threats it's taken together in like the real sense of like, they're playing off one another, right?

Peter Ross (06:01):

Yeah. I think if we look at the three threats, there's evidence to indicate fairly clearly that each threat in and of its own, can reduce the viability of the population and threaten the recovery and conservation of the Southern Resident Killer Whales. When you stack the three together, you end up with potentially synergistic situation where without real and practical solutions and practical recovery plans, this population is in imminent danger of extinction.

Justin Cox (06:40):

So when we're talking about contaminants, are we talking about things that entered the water a long time ago and are still having a negative effect, or are we talking about things that are still entering the water, or some combination of both?

Peter Ross (06:54):

The Chemical Era really began in world war II when DDT and PCBs to the very notorious categories of chemicals that I think most people would acknowledge. That's when they began to be commercially used on a widespread scale, and it was not recognized at the time that they would present potentially very dangerous implications for human health or the health of wildlife. They were widely perceived to be miracle chemicals because DDT would get rid of pests, some of them carrying malaria, while PCBs would allow us to basically transform and carry electricity safely without causing fire. So these two miracle chemicals were at the forefront of the chemical revolution. And since that time, we've seen exponential increase in the number of chemicals that are used in different environments. Some of them in homes, some of them in industry, some of them in medical and pharmaceutical sectors, some of them in transportation, and some of them in food and beverage safety. So we see a wide range of uses and applications. Some of these chemicals have been around for decades and have proven to be relatively inert and benign. Other chemicals were used for several decades and then discovered to be very harmful and then removed from the marketplace. So we see very complex overlay of different emissions histories or use histories. It makes it very, very difficult for us to sort of chart the threats to, for example, a long lived killer whale, where we might have today an elderly female killer whale, 80 or 90 years of age, who might've been born right around the time these chemicals were launched into commercial use and during her lifetime, she would have had several calves that would have been exposed to very, very high levels of some of these persistent chemicals through nursing. So at the end of the day, the onus is on us to do a few things. Number one, adopt a bit of a precautionary approach that allows us to take a weight of evidence without fully knowing the implications for killer whales. Number two, to rank and prioritize as best we can, the different types of chemicals that might harm a killer whale or threaten a killerwhale. Number three, to look at what types of chemicals might harm their food supply. For example, we shifted away from persistent bioaccumulative and toxic chemicals in the 1980s in the Western world in favor of chemicals, including pesticides that were not so persistent and bioaccumulative. And what this meant was hundreds and hundreds of new pesticides were developed over the last few decades that were water-soluble and not fat-soluble and broke down in the environment in some ways quickly, in some ways not so quickly. So there's been a big shift in the types of chemicals designed and allowed on the marketplace. And this is in some ways, meant a shift away from those persistent bioaccumulative and toxic chemicals that biomagnified up into killer whales towards a whole slew of different chemicals that are more water-soluble. And that we might not find a trace of in killer whales, but they may directly affect their food supply. They may affect the health of salmon, for example, so complicated scenario, but emissions history, very, very important overlay. When we look at the physical chemical properties of the chemical in question.

Justin Cox (10:53):

Southern Residents are at the top of the food chain. How do chemicals work if there's persistent toxins in the water? How does that work in terms of moving upward and ending up eventually at killer whales?

Peter Ross (11:06):

Biomagnification is a real threat, and a direct threat to the health of killer whales because simply put, killer whales are exposed to, and accumulate chemicals with those three properties persistence, bioaccumulative nature, and toxicity.

Peter Ross (11:25):

So sometimes we in the science sector refer to these as PBT chemicals and PCBs, DDT dioxins, many flame retardants are considered PBT chemicals. And what this means is these chemicals do not dissolve in water. They dissolve in fat. And so they will be attracted to organic material, detritus, the walls of algae and phytoplankton, and they will rapidly get soaked up, if you will, at the bottom of the food chain, grazed upon by little insects and invertebrates and zooplankton, and then subsequently be retained in those organisms as they're eaten by small fish, then big fish then, eagles and killer whales. So as you go up each step in the food chain, these chemicals are not disappearing, but the fats within which the chemicals are found are disappearing because they're being used for the currency of life, metabolism, growth, reproduction, et cetera. So PPD chemicals cause a real problem and have caused a real problem historically for the last 60 or 70 or 80 years for all wildlife at the top of the food chain.

Justin Cox (12:39):

So you mentioned something in passing before that we have there, they're set somewhere between 70 and 75 Southern Resident killer whales at any given time over the last couple of years and any time there's a death, it's very sad. And anytime there's a baby, it's exciting. This idea that Southern Resident killer whales will take on these toxins and contaminants over time, and then when they have their baby and feed the baby, can you explain a little bit about what happens there? Because the idea that you're celebrating the birth of a baby, but then also the potential to pass along the accumulated toxins is a real bummer.

Peter Ross (13:17):

Yeah. The Southern Residents are really an interesting example of a marine mammal for us humans because they really represent the most studied and perhaps the best understood cetacean or whale, dolphin, and porpoise population anywhere in the world. We know every single individual by name, what they look like. We know who they're related to, we know what they eat. So this gives us a tremendous backdrop to study the animals and understand more about their ecology, their feeding ecology, their habitat use and the way in which contaminants get into their bodies. For example, we know that the Bigg's killer whales that eat only marine mammals and also ply these regional waters are more contaminated than the Resident killer whales that eat salmon. And that's because they're higher in the food chain, without knowing something about their feeding ecology, we would've never understood that. We can also, we have also demonstrated that males are more contaminated than females, and that's simply because the males have no way to get rid of these fat-soluble chemicals, these persistent chemicals like PCBs, whereas females have this wonderful mechanism to have calves, have babies, and then nurse them for a period of a year, a year and a half, possibly even two years. And if we look at killer whale milk, we acknowledged that it has about 35% fat content. So that's a very high fat content, and that's a very good mechanism for the female to get rid of fat-soluble chemicals because they're in that fat component. The unfortunate part of this is that the calf is at the receiving end of a wonderfully nutritious fat-rich milk that helps them to grow. But it's chock full of endocrine-disrupting chemicals that present a problem when it comes to controlling a lot of their endocrine mediated physiological processes, growth, the health of their reproductive system, their immune system, the development of their brain, which is super important as a culturally rich species. So these chemicals are transferred to a calf. And that calf, if we look at the concentrations is actually one position higher in the food chain than his or her own mother.

Justin Cox (15:48):

Is that common across all species, all the way up to humans and everything, are we passing off, are our mom's passing off contaminants to their children if they've been exposed to things? Or is it not as fat rich, or is this- I'm not a scientist. So this is a little bit of just a personal curiosity, but that's just such a fascinating and sad thing.

Peter Ross (16:12):

I think we can safely say that during the nursing of any mammal, there is a transfer of contaminants. I think what's exceptional though with killer whales is that they're very high on the food chain. They eat a fair bit. They eat somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 to 5% of their body weight a day as adults. And then when they're nursing, the calf is relying on a very, very, lipid-rich or fat, rich diet. So, killer whales in some ways, a little bit exceptional in their ability, if you can put it this way, to transfer some of these notorious chemicals to their calves. But we do see it in basically any mammal. It's just the degree tends to vary.

Justin Cox (16:58):

Joe shared with me a paper you were a part of in around the year 2000 that kind of demonstrated how contaminated these whales were. What have the last 20 years looked like in terms of improvement or things getting worse or things staying the same, where are we headed with this? How are things looking?

Peter Ross (17:15):

With such a complex soup out there we can probably expect that this story for contaminants and killer whales is a good news, bad news story. There is good news in so far as the levels of DDT have declined probably tenfold in the Northeastern Pacific over the last 50 years. The concentrations of PCBs, we were able to demonstrate, have declined in the neighborhood of 3 to 5 times in Southern Resident killer whales since their peak in the 1970s. So with these two notorious classes of chemicals regulations in the 1970s and source control were very, very effective and very, very, important on the flip side, in the 1990s and early 2000s, we saw the rapid emergence of a new concern and that was that related to PBDEs, this is a flame retardant that was widespread in upholstery and furnishings and transport, and a number of other sectors and these PBDEs were doubling in harbor seals from Puget Sound every three and a half years.

Justin Cox (18:24):

When we say flame retardant, we're not talking about, like, we're talking about something that is used in the materials to make these things it's in there to make them less flammable.

Peter Ross (18:45):

That's correct. PBDEs were doubling every 3.2 years in Harbor seals and Puget Sound, indicating a rapid escalation of this chemical into the food web. And this represented a significant and emerging conservation concern because PBDEs are very, very similar to PCBs they're, polybrominated rather than polychlorinated and they're very persistent and they're endocrine-disrupting. So when North America moved to eliminate these from the market between 2004 and 2007, we subsequently saw that the concentrations peaked and then began to drop again. So that was bad news that turned into a better news or a good news story. Unfortunately we have a number of other pollutants out there, lurking in the shadows and require us to be vigilant, require us to do research, and require us to be ready to make difficult decisions about best practices or sometimes regulations.

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Justin Cox (20:13):

If you don't keep an eye on these kinds of things, people will put bad things into the environment.

Peter Ross (20:17):

Yeah, well, unfortunately, us humans tend to look at the ocean as a vast abyss that is poorly understood, that is tremendously capable of processing large quantities of waste and nobody is ultimately taking responsibility for the commons or the high seas it takes a remarkable global surveillance and collaboration to get the community of nations together, to agree that we should maybe not be using a certain chemical or selling it or disposing of it and that we need to work together to reduce the threat facing creatures at the top of the food chain that are long lived because these chemicals move around the world with impunity. We know that it takes somewhere in the neighborhood of 7 to 10 days for dust and metals and hydrocarbons and pesticides to move from Asia across the Pacific to the west coast of North America. We know that it takes 8 to 10 days for industrial chemicals emitted in the Heartland of industrial USA to reach the high Arctic where it falls out and gets into the food web of Inuit peoples that rely on the Marine food web for a great deal of their food supply. So when we talk about pollution, it means to me that we have to balance the onus of responsibility imparted by you and me and our neighbors in our communities and obviously in our countries with the collective responsibility of the community of nations that has to work together because not only is planet Earth small, but Southern Resident Killer Whales are really a barometer of what's happening on a planetary scale. And without collaboration, without multilateral protection and without adequate surveillance, we're never going to be able to understand, let alone protect Southern Resident Killer Whales from the threat of pollution.

Justin Cox (22:25):

And then there's this other side, which is the stuff that already is in the water. Is there a way to remove that from the water in places where you identify that it's bad? Like if stuff is already there, is the damage done, or can you, can things be done to alleviate that?

Peter Ross (22:40):

The best, the most effective? And the cheapest solution is to turn the tap off at source. Once we've released it, released any kind of contaminant out into the environment, it tends to become costly and grossly ineffective at actually dealing with the problem and protecting killer whale habitat. There are examples of remediation. There are examples of cleanup where hotspots in the U.S. We have Superfund sites in other parts of the world, we have contaminated sites, and most nations have a regulatory regime and a remediation strategy that allows or enables or forces companies and governments to clean up very contaminated hotspots.

Peter Ross (23:23):

That instrument is important because if we can deal with the hotspots, we can eliminate some of the lingering and persistent and ongoing sources of contamination for the wider habitat of killer whales. But it is by no means easy, cheap, or ultimately terribly effective. It's simply what we must do.

Justin Cox (23:44):

How do you collect the samples and how do you basically determine the level of contaminants in the Southern Resident Killer Whale as a scientist in the field and in the lab? What's the approach to that?

Peter Ross (23:55):

The challenge in working with marine mammals and notably killer whales is that they're large, they're fast, you can't catch them, you shouldn't catch them, there are legal and ethical constraints to working with them and studying them, but we have in the past developed what we call minimally invasive techniques that allows us to take a very small biopsy of skin, a little bit underlying blubber. This gives us a little sample that we can look at contaminants in and we can also look at their health using some cutting edge molecular techniques. So much of the work that we've done in the past has really cemented our understanding of what killer whales have accumulated during their lifetimes, what this means for their health, and what is happening over time. But at the same time, we look for additional means to study killer whale habitat because we feel as I think it's fair to say that we in the scientific community feel as though we have a responsibility to make sure that we don't become a conservation threat to add to the burden already faced by killer whales. So we've studied proxy species or other species to get an indication of what chemicals we're finding in the food web. For example, harbor seals in Puget Sound and in British Columbia sit at about the same position in the food chain as Southern Resident killer whales and we can track contaminants in harbor seals over time and space and get a very good understanding of what's going on in killer whale habitat and Harbor seals are abundant, they're relatively easy to handle, to capture safely and ethically, and we can take samples from them and then release them very quickly. So that's been a really effective proxy tool to study killer whale habitat. Another way would be to study sediments because sediments often retain a track record or history of the types of pollutants that killer whales have been exposed to over their lifetime. We can actually look at the layers of sediments that are laid down and, and track back in time and look at the history of emissions for lead, for mercury, for hydrocarbons, for PCBs, you name it. And we can basically look at how the trends are looking in terms of either the good news or the bad news as an emerges in Killer Whale habitat. Another way would be to study their primary food about 85% of what Southern Resident Killer Whales consume is Chinook salmon. So if we can capture and sample Chinook salmon we get a good idea of what the killer whales are ingesting and what they're being to and this gives us another way to basically monitor pollution in killer whale habitat as time goes on. There's widespread acceptance that the three dominant threats, individually or collectively present a real, an imminent threat to the recovery and prospects for Southern Resident killer whales. But we also know that Chinook salmon has been on the decline, a dramatic decline over the last couple of decades probably due to a variety of factors, including climate change, and habitat destruction, as well as fishing. And if we have killer whales looking, hunting further a field for fewer salmon that may be smaller then it means the killer whales are likely to be facing nutritional stresses. And in fact, we've seen this in some difficult years, we see a killer whales being thinner, having higher mortality rates, having reduced reproduction rates and we know that food supply is a real problem whether this makes any of the other problems worse. For example, contaminant related threats is difficult to say but the clarity comes in the form of these killer whales need to eat, and they depend on long lived, trophic, high trophic level fish Chinook salmon notably that are very nutritious and very high in fat. You take that away from them and you're going to have a significant problem no matter which way you look at it.

Justin Cox (24:18):

Is data collection around contaminants, part of the like protocol for when, a Southern Resident or just a killer whale in general dies and is stranded and available for testing?

Peter Ross (24:18):

There a really few instances where a killer whale washes a shore or is spotted after death but when there is a killer whale that's washed ashore that has died then scientists from multiple agencies and organizations spring to the fore, and secure samples to do a comprehensive investigation. The key here is to acknowledge that this animal is not necessarily a normal representation of what's going on in the real population. The animal might be old, it might've been ill, it might've been hit by a boat. So this is not what we like to see, but, it's partly a reflection of mother nature and the natural goings on of the population. So when a killer whale washes ashore, scientists can investigate, look at pathogens, look at lesions, look at pathologies, look at contaminants to paint a picture of what happened to this individual and use that as a tool to inform as to what might be happening to the population at large.

Justin Cox (27:25):

What do things look like looking ahead? It sounds like there are people continuously at work on trying to make sure that we keep unhealthy things out of the water, but there's also this other force of there will always be other threats on the horizon. And we live in a place where, I don't know about post coronavirus, but Seattle and Vancouver and the surrounding cities, these are just growing populations, these are bustling places. I don't know where scientifically and personally, where you see things going, or how do you feel about it?

Peter Ross (30:30):

Well, I'm an optimist because I acknowledged that with bad news, we can create good news and so when I look at bad news, I appreciate that there is power. There is strength in that understanding is in that illumination. And so that gives me hope because by understanding more about the threat posed by PCBs and PBDEs, we saw government agencies in both the United States and Canada step up and adopt a number of measures to reduce the levels of PCBs or to deal with contaminated sites. We saw more enforcement with noise and disturbance ditto, we see more enforcement and more stringent rules around whale-watching and other vessel practices and behaviors around Southern Resident killer whales with prey we've seen governments step up to allow more escapement to basically reduce the sport, recreational, and commercial pressures on Chinook salmon. So with all of the bad news in this, I do see hope because I see the strength and power that can be imparted upon a population that is endangered and that reflects a very widespread concern on the part of the public that really wants to know that governments and industry and other sectors are willing to spend money and energy to conserve this population for future generations. It's remarkable if we really think about this, that there are 100,000 people for every Southern Resident killer whale in the Salish Sea watershed, that's 100,000 people per whale. So that means if we want this population to survive, we have to remember that every time we flush our toilet, every time we wash our car, every time we put fertilizer or pesticides in our lawns, every time we're washing the dishes that the fingerprint or the footprint coming from our home and our activities is going to trickle down into killer whale habitat. And I think the key there is for us to collectively work together to acknowledge this and that will have tremendous potential to develop best practices for all of us, and better waste management practices in ways that I think have real chance of contributing to the recovery of this population.

Justin Cox (33:03):

Well Peter, I really like that as a place to end. Thank you so much for joining today.

Peter Ross (33:08):

You're welcome, Justin. Delighted.

Justin Cox (33:10):

Thank you. Bye bye.

Peter Ross (33:13):

We will see you next week when we have a very special guest on for the finale episode in this series. Please take this moment to rate and review the show, tell some friends about it. Basically we're a small science-based nonprofit, but outreach is a huge part of our mission and your support in any way that you give it means a ton to us. If you enjoy this kind of science-based storytelling, you should go to our website and click the newsletter tab and get our free monthly newsletter. I think you'll like it. You can reach me at justin@seadocsociety.org, and our logo was created by float.org.