For creatures that eat 400 pounds of salmon a day, killer whales are startlingly human. They live as long as you do. They never escape the controlling influence of their moms. They love to show off.
Consider J-22, also known as Oreo. She is a 21-year-old killer whale – or orca – with serious family obligations. She has three offspring to watch over and rarely ventures far from J-pod, her extended family, which is led by a vigorous 92-year-old matriarch named Granny. On a recent day, Oreo slipped briefly away from Granny and approached a whale-watching boat. As cameras clicked, Oreo launched herself high out of the water, jumping for the sheer, show-offy heck of it.
She is about 25 feet long and weighs more than 8,000 pounds, so it was an energy-expensive heave. Resident killer whales in Puget Sound routinely do this sort of thing, to the delight of human beings.
In return, over recent decades, humans have destroyed about 90 percent of their salmon supply, contaminated the sound with toxic chemicals and, in the 1960s and ’70s, kidnapped scores of young killer whales to perform in aquatic shows.
Now, federal amends are being made. Southern resident killer whales of Puget Sound were listed late last year as endangered species. There are just 89 of them in three pods, all numbered and named, with birth dates and family trees posted on the Internet.
In June, the National Marine Fisheries Service proposed protecting most of Puget Sound as critical habitat for the whales, which are actually the world’s largest dolphins. The proposal, encompassing 2,564 square miles at the heart of one of the nation’s busiest commercial waterways, has alarmed local industry.
Building and farm groups have sued to stop the proposal, which is due to become law by November. They argue that it would require complicated and costly reviews of future industrial development, home construction, sewer treatment, road construction and water use around the sound, an inland waterway surrounded by nearly 4 million people.
Russell Brooks, managing attorney for the Pacific Legal Foundation, which is leading the challenge, warns that the listing of killer whales as endangered could create unforeseen economic fallout in the Pacific Northwest comparable to what followed the listing of northern spotted owls in the early 1990s.
Then, 80 percent of federal forests from Washington to northern California were closed to logging, and an estimated 30,000 timber industry jobs disappeared. The spotted owl, by the way, is still in severe decline, and scientists do not know how to save it.
“This is not really about killer whales at all,” said Brooks, whose group specializes in trying to rein in the economic impact of the Endangered Species Act. “This is a tool used by those who wish to impose their own version of non-land-use on Puget Sound.”
But for champions of the orcas, federal protection has been welcomed as an overdue gift.
And their numbers are growing, with an estimated 150,000 people each year paying about $70 each to go watch and wonder at the animals in Puget Sound.
“We are very, very happy about this,” said Ralph Munro, a former Washington secretary of state and a longtime activist who, like many ardent orca admirers, says he’s had “mystical” encounters with the creatures.
“I know it sounds kooky,” Munro, 63, said during a break at a recent public hearing on the plan to make Puget Sound a protected zone, “but I can show you 10 people in this room who have had mystical experiences with orcas.”
(It is a linguistic tic of the debate over these marine mammals that supporters of the endangered species listing tend to call them orcas, while opponents of the listing tend to call them killer whales.) Munro’s special encounter, he said, occurred seven years ago after the death of Ralph, an orca that was named for Munro to honor his efforts to halt the live capture of the animals from Puget Sound for aquatic shows.
According to several eyewitness accounts, just as Munro began to deliver a eulogy for his deceased namesake, a large group of orcas – from all three pods based in Puget Sound – converged in the waters beside the park, where they jumped and frolicked for hours.
The emotional appeal of killer whales in the green-leaning Puget Sound region is difficult to overstate. Local news coverage borders on the obsessive. Ralph’s 1999 funeral was covered by three local television stations, Munro said. The accidental death this year of Luna, a 6-year-old orphan orca killed by a tugboat propeller, occasioned widespread news coverage.
Aboard the Island Adventure II, a whale-watching boat based in Anacortes, the pilot tried during a recent five-hour cruise to stay at least 100 yards from J-pod.
He succeeded for the most part, except when Oreo and some of her gregarious kin swam toward the boat to wow tourists by breaching, slapping their flippers on the water and spy-hopping (a head-out-of-water feat similar to a human treading water).
“They are just so social,” said Ellen Newberry, who works on the boat as a naturalist and has a degree in marine biology from the University of Maine. “I have seen mothers toss their babies out of the water with their snouts. Young males show us the salmon they just caught. I get they feeling they are all just trying to show off.”
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