Saving Seafood

Endangered Orcas Are Starving. Should We Start Feeding Them?

January 25, 2018 — Washington state officials have proposed a new tack to save the Pacific Northwest’s critically endangered orca population. Their idea is to boost salmon hatchery production by 10 to 20 million more fish per year to provide more food for the iconic killer whales.

No one wants to see orcas starve, but reliance on fish hatcheries leaves some whale advocacy groups uneasy.

There are just 76 orcas left in the pods that call the inland waters of the Northwest home. That’s the lowest number in more than three decades. Numerous factors take the blame for the dwindling population, but one of the biggest according to biologists is lack of prey. Chinook salmon are the preferred food for these orcas.

Sport fisherman Greg King can relate.

“The science is there. They’re dying,” he said. “We’re on a world stage here right now. The whole world is watching us. Are we going to let these orca whales die and have that blood on our hands? I don’t think we want that.”

King trooped to the Washington Legislature this month to support spending tax dollars to increase hatchery production of Chinook—also known as king—salmon. The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife first proposed this idea and the governor is running with it.

State Rep. Brian Blake, D-Aberdeen, independently put forward the concept and is getting traction with both parties in the legislature.

On one level, the idea is pretty simple: rear more salmon at maybe half a dozen or more existing hatcheries throughout the state with spare capacity and release them.

Some of that could happen at the Hoodsport salmon hatchery on Hood Canal.

“We want to see if we can add to that prey base here from Hoodsport,” State Fish and Wildlife Regional Hatchery Manager Rob Allan said.

Asked whether he thinks this will work, that enough of the fish will survive to grow big enough to interest the killer whales, Allan said he hopes so.

“All we know is that we release fish, they go out to the salt (water) and then they come back,” Allan said. “So then it’s up to the whales to go ahead and eat ’em. We think it’s going to help.”

But potential complications abound. The federal government will need to give the OK because both the Puget Sound orcas and many wild salmon runs they used to feed on are listed as endangered.

“Hatchery fish has been identified as a bit detrimental to recovery of wild stocks,” Allan explained. “They want us to put the reins on it a bit.”

That’s because hatchery fish could compete for resources with wild stocks and they might interbreed. So it’ll be a challenge to identify the right salmon stocks, hatchery locations and run timing.

Read the full story at KUOW

 

Government Scientists Say A Controversial Pesticide Is Killing Endangered Salmon

January 12, 2018 — The federal government’s top fisheries experts say that three widely used pesticides — including the controversial insecticide chlorpyrifos — are jeopardizing the survival of many species of salmon, as well as orcas that feed on those salmon.

It’s a fresh attack on a chemical that the Environmental Protection Agency was ready to take off the market a year ago — until the Trump administration changed course.

Chlorpyrifos is widely used by farmers to protect crops like strawberries, broccoli and citrus fruit from insect pests. In recent years, though, scientists have found evidence that exposure to chlorpyrifos residues can harm the developing brains of small children, even in the womb.

Two years ago, the Environmental Protection Agency issued a proposal that would have stopped farmers from using chlorpyrifos. The final decision, however, fell to the Trump administration, and EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt decided to keep the chemical on the market while the agency continues to study its risks.

This new report, however, examines another danger entirely — the risk that chlorpyrifos and two other pesticides, diazinon and malathion, are washing into streams and rivers and harming wildlife.

The National Marine Fisheries Service concluded that continued use of the chemicals is likely to jeopardize the survival of endangered species of salmon, as well as orcas that eat the salmon. According to the report, use of chlorpyrifos is affecting 38 species of endangered fish, and it’s having negative effects on 37 areas that have been designated as “critical habitat” for endangered species.

Read the full story at New England Public Radio

 

Conservation groups petition President Obama to create ‘safe zone’ for orcas

November 7, 2016 — SEATTLE — Conservative groups from the Pacific Northwest petitioned President Obama on Friday in an effort to protect the Puget Sound orcas.

The Orca Relief Citizen’s Alliance and Project Seawolf want the Obama administration to create a ten square mile “whale protection zone” near San Juan Island.

The groups claim the noise and pollution from boats and other human disturbances interfere with the orcas’ feeding.

Read the full story at KATU

Orca Killed by Satellite Tag Leads to Criticism of Science Practices

October 7, 2016 — They bounced around the coast in a 22-foot Zodiac, a team of federal scientists with a dart rifle trying to nail the dorsal fin on a killer whale. The seas had been calm when they came across the pod of orcas along the Pacific Ocean near the U.S. border with Canada. But then the winds exploded and the waters turned rough, and the satellite tag and dart they fired missed the mark and smacked the water.

It was February 2016, and the scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had been trying to attach tiny satellite transmitters to the endangered cetaceans to track where they go in winter, to help see why their populations are so depressed. So the researchers retrieved the dart, reloaded the rifle, and took another shot, this time hitting the animal, a healthy-looking 20-year-old male known as L95.

The darting seemed “routine in all regards,” a report would later state, until the orca wound up dead and that dart became the prime suspect. On Wednesday, an expert panel of scientists agreed that efforts to attach the satellite tag to L95 likely paved the way for a rare fungal infection that killed the endangered mammal, leaving only 82 orcas left in that population.

The accident and findings left whale scientists reeling. NOAA is “deeply dismayed that one of their tags may have had something to do with the death of this whale,” said Richard Merrick, the agency’s chief scientist, himself a former whale researcher.

Read the full story at National Geographic

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