A research team led by Brad Hanson of NOAA’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center has been tracking K and L pods off the coast of Oregon and California, most recently offshore of Washington’s Willapa Bay.
Map by Robin Baird with NOAA data
The team left Newport, Ore., on Friday aboard the 209-foot research vessel Bell M. Shimada. The crew caught up with K pod the following day with the help of a satellite transmitter attached to K-25, according to reports. Most if not all of L pod was seen swimming with the K pod whales near Cape Blanco, off the southern coast of Oregon.
The research team attached a new satellite tag to L-88, a 20-year-old male named Wave Walker. The new tag will provide another method of following the whales if the tag attached to K-25 should fall off, as expected sooner or later. It has already stayed attached for more than two months, about twice the average life of the satellite tags.
I have not yet connected with Brad Hanson, but I talked to Robin Baird of Cascadia Research, who has been getting reports from the crew. Robin told me that the researchers have been able to obtain multiple fecal and/or fish-scale samples on most of the days they have been at sea.
Those samples will aid in meeting the primary goal of the cruise, which is to figure out where the whales are going and what they are eating during the winter months while away from Puget Sound.
The satellite tags have allowed the research ship to stay with the whales even when the weather and their lack of vocalizations have made them hard to find, Robin said. As a result, this research cruise has been more efficient than past ones in terms of both time and fuel.
The research trip, which was scheduled for 21 days, will be cut in half because of the federal spending cuts related to the sequester, according to a statement issued by this afternoon by the Northwest Fisheries Science Center.
The travels of K-25 over the past two months are shown in an animation produced by staff at Northwest Fisheries Science Center. (In my browser, the north and sound portions of the map are cut off even in full-screen view, but the movements shown are still amazing.)
The latest report shows both tagged whales swimming offshore of Willapa Bay on the Washington Coast, having crossed the Columbia River mouth this morning. The full trip can be viewed on maps posted on the website called Southern Resident Killer Whale Satellite Tagging.
The general winter travel patterns has been known for over 20 years. The collections of fecal and fish samples have been done for over 10 years but no moratorium to protect the salmon. Scientist had said that it wasn’t their job to lobby so why continue to harass the orcas? Satellite tags are controversial. How would you like barbed hooks to penetrate your body?
At least the government sequester will give these orcas some deserved quiet times.