Saving Seafood

Coast Guard on the Hook in Killer Whale Lawsuit

January 19, 2018 — SEATTLE — The Coast Guard must face claims by two Northwest tribes that a plan for oil tanker traffic threatens the habitat of southern resident killer whales, a federal judge ruled this week.

The Tulalip and Suquamish Tribes sued the Coast Guard last year over its adoption of a traffic-separation plan off the coast of Washington state.

The tribes say the Coast Guard did not consult with the National Marine Fisheries Service before adopting the plan. The “seven-fold increase” in oil tanker traffic en route to Canada threatens the southern resident killer whales, according to the lawsuit.

That particular group of killer whales, also called orcas, is the only population of killer whales protected under the Endangered Species Act.

There are fewer than 80 orcas in the population, and they spend a large part of each year in the waters of Puget Sound, the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the Georgia Strait.

The tribes sought a court order requiring the Coast Guard to consult with the Fisheries Service on a new shipping traffic plan, with permanent measures to “ensure against jeopardy, prevent adverse modification of critical habitat, and minimize incidental take.”

“Killer whales are revered by our people. They are part of our ancestral marine ecology and continue to be very important to our culture. They now face their biggest threat to date: the expansion of the Trans Mountain pipeline,” Marie Zackuse, Tulalip Tribes chairwoman, said last year.

Read the full story at the Courthouse News Service

 

ALASKA: In a Bering Sea battle of killer whales vs. fishermen, the whales are winning

June 20, 2017 — In the Bering Sea, near the edge the continental shelf, fishermen are trying to escape a predator that seems to outwit them at every turn, stripping their fishing lines and lurking behind their vessels.

The predators are pods of killer whales chasing down the halibut and black cod caught by longline fishermen. Fishermen say the whales are becoming a common sight — and problem — in recent years, as they’ve gone from an occasional pest to apparently targeting the fishermen’s lines.

Fishermen say they can harvest 20,000 to 30,000 pounds of halibut in a single day, only to harvest next to nothing the next when a pod of killer whales recognizes their boat. The hooks will be stripped clean, longtime Bering Sea longliner Jay Hebert said in a phone interview this week. Sometimes there will be just halibut “lips” still attached to hooks — if anything at all.

“It’s kind of like a primordial struggle,” fisherman Buck Laukitis said about the orcas last week. “It comes at a real cost.”

The whales seem to be targeting specific boats, fisherman Jeff Kauffman said in a phone interview. FV Oracle Captain Robert Hanson said juvenile whales are starting to show up, and he thinks the mothers are teaching the young to go for the halibut and black cod the fishermen are trying to catch.

Hanson, a fisherman who’s worked in the Bering Sea since 1992, said the orca problem has become “systemic” in recent years. There are more pods present, he said, and the animals are getting more aggressive.

In a letter he sent to the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council last month, Hanson described a series of challenges he faced in recent years. On a trip to the continental shelf in April he said his crew was “harassed nonstop.” He wrote that they lost approximately 12,000 pounds of sellable halibut to the whales and wasted 4,000 gallons of fuel trying to outrun them.

Read the full story at Alaska Dispatch News

What Antarctic Killer Whales Can Teach Humans About Climate Change

April 11, 2017 — They stood on the top bridge of the cruise ship National Geographic Explorer, peering through binoculars at the vast icy Weddell Sea. It was a summer afternoon in February in Antarctica, the air a balmy 32-or-so degrees Fahrenheit, and John Durban and Holly Fearnbach, biologists with the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service, had spotted killer whales in the distance.

The only question was, were these the Type B2’s, with their gorgeous gray-and-white coloring and their culinary fondness for Gentoo penguins—one of only three kinds of killer whales found in the Antarctic Peninsula? Or another type of killer whale unique to these cold deep waters? From miles away it was hard to tell. The rest of us spectators on the ship, far from our native habitats of Texas, England, and Kenya, gazed out at the ice floes and the foggy horizon splashed with blue, wondering too.

The scientists were on board thanks to a grant from the Lindblad Expeditions-National Geographic (LEX-NG) Fund. The fund aspires to protect the ocean’s last pristine areas through research, conservation, education, and community-development projects in the company’s far-flung destinations.

For Durban and Fearnbach, who are based in sunny La Jolla, California, the fund has buoyed their research in Antarctica. While they also study orca and humpback whale populations in the Pacific Northwest, the North Atlantic and Alaska, on these trips they’ve been able to observe killer whales in perhaps the most inaccessible place on the planet. Since 2011, the scientists have made several voyages a year to the frozen continent on the Explorer, using the ice-cutting, refurbished Norwegian ferry to follow the whales.

Read the full story at The Atlantic

Endangered Puget Sound orcas to get personal health records

April 1, 2016 — SEATTLE — The killer whales that spend time in the inland waters of Washington state already are tagged and tracked, photographed and measured.

Researchers follow them by drone and by sea, analyzing their waste and their exhaled breath.

Now, experts want to add another layer to the exhaustive studies: individual health records for each endangered whale.

The records would take existing research on the creatures and combine it in one place. The idea is to use them to monitor the orcas’ health trends individually and as a population. It’s similar to people having one medical record as they move from one doctor to the next or between specialists.

Eighty-four orcas typically appear in Puget Sound from spring to fall.

Read the full story at KRON 4