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The State of the Orca by Mark Anderson The Southern Resident Orca Population Crash of 2008 by Mark Anderson | |
The State of the OrcaBy Mark Anderson posted 01/24/04 San Juan County's self image is intimately tied to the well-being of this single population, and many of its tourist businesses directly promote orca, as though they will be here forever. Will they? We know that our whales went into a straight-line decline in 1996, and subsequently lost a fifth of their population, before a recent increase in births, which we hope (but which may not) will result in a slight population increase. Has the population "stabilized," or is this just a temporary aberration in their alarming decline? Orca Relief has been doing science on these questions, with the help of the University of Washington, since 1997; we were the first to predict the decline, and no organization has studied this issue more. In the first Orca Relief-funded study, the U.W's Dr. Glenn von Blaricom discovered that death rates correlated directly with a combination of declining salmon and increased boat traffic, concluding that boat traffic was a significant contributor to orca death. Using this model, we predicted three years ago that a temporary rise in the Chinook salmon count would result in a rise in the orca population; this has now happened. We also predicted that a return to historic Chinook declines would result in the renewed decline of the orca population. Given continued pressure from unlimited whale watching, this is our best guess for the future of this population. Since 1997, scientists in the U.S. and Canada have learned a great deal about the effects of boats on orcas, and ALL of it is negative. Among scientists who do not take money from the whale watching industry, this is now an essentially unanimous opinion. We know that orca swim further, faster, and with greater respiratory rates, when boats are around them, even at so-called "legal distances," and evidence indicates their sonar can be impaired by the noise from a single boat engine. They are relentlessly hounded during almost all daylight hours for every day they are in our waters, by a fleet of motorcraft who directly cause them distress, at a time when they can ill afford it. And that is the state of the orca. Mark Anderson |
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