- All right.
Good afternoon for everybody. Good evening on the East Coast
and whatever other time zones we might have.
I want to welcome all of you to our National Marine Sanctuary Webinar series.
This is a series that we've offered for the last four and a half years
and it's hosted by the NOAA Office of National Marine Sanctuaries.
And we have found over the years that it is a great way for us to connect with
formal and informal educators during these times of shelter at place.
We're connecting with middle and high school students, college students,
as well as even families and anyone that's interested in the topic that we're presenting.
So welcome to all of you.
We have over 900 registrants for today's webinar, which is really exciting.
We're inching up towards our capacity of I guess it's a thousand attendees.
So we can even have more than a thousand people register because not everyone can join us
during the live broadcast.
But we're so excited that you're all here.
I wanted to let everyone know that as an attendee you have joined today's webinar in listen only mode,
but there will be an opportunity for questions
and a little Q & A period at the end of our presentation, today.
So, let's see.
We're recording today's session, as we always do.
So for those of you that aren't-- that end up watching the recording,
it'll be made available on our archive page. You can share it broadly.
We have other resources that go on that webinar archive page, as well.
So with that, I wanted to welcome all of you and introduce you
to our National Marine Sanctuary system.
This webinar series is a great way for us to connect you to your underwater treasures,
your National Marine Sanctuaries and the Marine National Monuments that NOAA manages.
So this is a network of underwater parks that encompass more than 600,000 square miles
of ocean and Great Lakes treasures.
So from Lake Huron Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary, down the Atlantic coast
into the Gulf of Mexico, to the Pacific islands in the south Pacific in American Samoa,
working our way all the way up to the California coast and to where we're going to be focused, today,
the Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary.
So it's important to note that National Marine Sanctuaries and Marine National Monuments
protect the ocean and the Great Lakes for now and for future generations.
And so these special ocean areas are set aside for a wide variety of reasons,
In some cases, it's the biodiversity conservation value of a site,
it could be that we're protecting historic shipwrecks
and other cultural and maritime heritage elements of an underwater treasure.
These places provide shelter and safe haven for lots of endangered species,
like this Hawaiian green sea turtle and Hawaiian monk seal.
Through our mandate, we are required to do education, we do outreach,
we do research
and monitoring.
And all of this with the expectation to help protect the resource.
And so these are just special marine places. These are your treasures.
They're like underwater National Parks, but National Marine Sanctuaries.
And these are places that you can also enjoy, like you can the National Forest or National Park.
You can kayak or paddle there, in many cases, you can even fish there,
lots of opportunities to snorkel and scuba dive
and surf
and of course getting out on a boat and doing some wildlife viewing.
So lots of great ways to get involved
and you can even, if this excites you, you can become a volunteer for the National Marine Sanctuaries.
So I hope that gives you a nice visual tour of these special underwater treasures
that protect the ocean and Great Lakes.
Let's get into today's presentation.
So,
for some of you that are new you may not be familiar, but my name is Claire Fackler.
And I'm today's host for the National Marine Sanctuaries webinar series.
I'm sitting here in Santa Barbara, California.
I work for the NOAA Office of National Marine Sanctuaries.
My co-host today is Jacqueline Laverdure.
She's the education coordinator at the Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary
and she is in Port Angeles, Washington.
We are also joined by Chris Butler-Minor, also in Port Angeles,
who's the community engagement specialist.
And Chris is going to introduce our special guest speaker, today, to talk about orcas.
So Chris, take it away.
- Thank you, Claire.
So I'm very happy that all of you have taken the time to join us, today,
and I'm very pleased to be able to present on behalf of
not only the Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary, but Faro Marine Life Center
and the Peninsula College Associated Student Council.
Our special guest speaker Lynda Mapes.
She is an award-winning journalist with the Seattle Times.
She specializes in coverage of the environment, natural history,
Native American tribes. She's written several books.
I've read a couple of them and have enjoyed them tremendously, and would recommend them.
And today, she is going to talk to us about a study that she and others at the times
did over an 18-month period looking at orcas in the Puget Sound and on the coast.
And I could go on and on talking about how much i admire her, but instead,
I'm going to let her start talking to you about what orcas teach us. Thank you.
- All right, Lynda, we'll get you set up and off you'll go.
Let's see hold on let me work on your-- I'll unmute you, here.
All right, go ahead, Lynda.
- Hi everyone. i'm delighted to talk with you, today, albeit remotely.
I think one of the very first things Iwant to know is how many of you are from Washington state?
One of the things we're going to do in our talk, today, is I'm going to ask you a couple questions
and you're going to take a poll.
So go ahead and tell me; do you live in Washington state?
- Okay. we have launched the poll
and it looks like we have 63 percent of the participants have voted.
We'll give it another five seconds.
And we're going to go ahead and then close out the poll.
And sharing the results, right now.
We have 62 percent do not live in Washington state, but 38 do.
So if you do not live in Washington state and you want to write in the question box
where you do live, that would be great.
I'm going to go ahead and hide the poll and put it back to you, Lynda.
Okay so i'm a little surprised by that, actually.
I thought it would be the other way around. I thought we'd have a lot more people
from Washington state.
But all the better to share the news about orcas and what we can learn from orcas.
So, that leads me to my next poll question for you
and then we'll get into the substance of our presentation,
which is how many of you have seen this?
Which is the series called hostile waters, which ran as a five-part series in the Seattle Times.
How many of you read it or aware of it?
- All right, Lynda, we're launching that poll now
and just as we're getting in the answers there, I'll tell you where some of these folks are from
because they're from everywhere. We have Minnesota, Savannah, Florida,
Florida Keys, Alaska, Maine, California, Vancouver, Hawaii, Utah, California,
D.C., Massachusetts, San Antonio, Oregon, New Jersey, so everywhere. Portugal, Kauai,
someone in Sequim, Washington, which is just down the road from where I am.
Florida, San Diego, lots of places in Hawaii
So all over the place. North Carolina, Monterey, wow all over, Wyoming
- Great great great. So now that we've got that,
We're getting most of our answers in for this current poll.
And we have seven let's see 71 percent have voted. We'll give another five seconds.
And I'm going to go ahead and close this poll.
And i'll share the results.
It looks like 74 percent are going to be new to your materials!
So this is great 23 percent we're able to read them and four percent are not sure.
I'll hide this and i'll go back to your screen.
- Okay. Great.
So good to know.
Given that, let me just back up a step and and tell you who we are at the Seattle Times.
The Seattle times is a locally owned, a family-owned paper,
and it's been owned by the same family and published by the same family
for more than a hundred years. That's very unusual in the United States.
And I'm very proud as a reporter to work at the Seattle Times.
Everything I'm going to show you today these are all photographs and graphics
that exist online at seattletimes.com.
The entire series is online and free for you to browse and enjoy at seattletimes.com.
You will eventually hit a paywall but you can at least look through and see if you want to subscribe.
And I certainly urge you to do so.
Journalism is one of the corners of our democracy
and here at the Seattle Times, we have taken that very seriously.
When in our coverage of the environment,
we launched a very in-depth investigation about this top predator in every one of the world's oceans.
And no matter where you live, no matter where you're watching this from,
there are orcas in the ocean, somewhere near you.
And this is a magnificent predator, top predator, and yet
it's struggling to survive in our waters here in the Pacific Northwest, in the northeastern Pacific.
So at the Seattle Times, we decided to really dig into that and find out why.
What were the roots of this ecological crisis?
So what started it for us? Why did we decide to do that?
Well it all started with this one whale.
This beautiful mother whale, who has a nickname here locally, Tahlequah.
This beautiful mother whale gave birth in the summer of 2018
to the first calf, to the southern resident population of orcas in three years.
They hadn't had a baby in three years.
So there was great hope, enormous joy, at the birth of this calf, which was also a female.
But then there was a terrible tragic outcome. That little baby whale lived only for one half hour.
And you see ,right here on my screen, I'm circling a shape that you see at her head.
That is actually her calf.
Mother orca, Tahlequah, did something that biologists know
very high functioning intelligent social animals, such as elephants, do if they lose a baby:
they grieve. Just like you and me.
Mother orca, Tahlequah, carried that calf for 17 days, for 1 000 miles.
She swam in the waters of the Pacific Northwest just refusing to let her baby go.
Well at the Seattle Times, I became aware of that very on in her tour of grief
and we decided at the newspaper we were going to follow her. We were going to stick with her.
We were going to write about her every single day until she let go of that calf.
And do you know that, by the end of 17 days, millions of people were following that story
around the world.
I'll bet many of you listening right now followed the journey of grief of mother orca, Tahlequah.
She was a mother who just happened to be a whale, a boundary crashing species,
who suddenly connected everyone around the world with the plight of the orca whale.
Why was the Southern Resident population of orcas down to only, at that time, 74 animals?
And, today, I'm sorry to tell you, it's even fewer, only 72.
Well, that's what we're going to talk about, today, in this webinar.
What does the orca teach us about the state of our watersheds
and even the state of our world.
She's the whale who started it all. Mother orca, Tahlequah.
So what did we do at the paper? We decided to go everywhere the Southern Residents go.
Throughout their vast migratory range.
This whale swims and forages and eats and lives in family groups all the way from the northern waters
of B.C. to California.
That's why they're called the Southern Residents; they go very far south.
So what did we do first? We went up north where their relatives, the Northern Residents,
also a resident population of orcas, is doing very well!
These orcas are thriving up there. They're having babies every single year.
Playing and frolicking, their families are getting bigger and bigger.
And why is that? Well take a look at this picture. What do you see?
You see an intact coastline, you see a forest, you see clean quiet water.
We went to go see Paul Spong at Orcalab, a very remote outpost up in the waters of B.C.
and we talked to him about the Northern Resident whales.
From orca lab, looking out into the waters of the Johnstone Strait
and listening to the sounds of these whales that he records on speakers under water!
This is what the forest looks like out behind Orcalab. Look at that giant, giant tree.
So these waters of northern B.C. are very different than the waters that the Southern Residents live in.
The waters that the Northern Residents live in, such as Johnstone Strait,
here where you see these scientists working, are much cleaner,
the prey within those waters, including salmon, is much cleaner,
it has far fewer pollutants in the flesh of the salmon, such as PCBs.
Not only that, but there are many more salmon for these Northern Resident orcas to choose from.
More varieties of salmon and just plain more salmon.
In fact, some of the very same Chinook salmon that the Southern Resident orcas want to try to eat
down here in Washington water.
So those Northern Residents are getting up there before those salmon head south.
So they've got a real advantage over the Southern Residents.
What's the real difference between the Northern Residents and the Southerns?
It's us!
All of the millions of people living in Vancouver, B.C., in Seattle and the surrounding area
that are competing with the Southern Residents for the things they need to survive.
And so that was the launch of the series.
We looked north to where the Northern Residents are living and discovered
That you know these animals, these orca whales, when they have what they need to survive, they do great.
This isn't some crybaby species that just can't get it done.
No, it's a top predator, but they need the things they need.
They need clean water, they need adequate food and they also need quiet water,
so that they can actually hunt with success.
They need water, in other words, that looks like this. A lot more like the waters of Puget Sound
where I live, in Seattle, used to.
So one of the things we thought would be so important in this story,
especially for readers new to the subject, like a lot of you,
was some beautiful graphics. And we're very fortunate with Emily Eng, who was a member of our team,
who did these absolutely beautiful graphics, explaining a lot about the ecology
of the orca whale.
So i'll just quickly orient you to some of this. Again, it's all online and i encourage you to look at it.
Emily beautifully explained here that there are many different types of orca in the northeastern Pacific.
It's one species, orca, but different types.
You've got the Northern Residents, here, you've got the Southern Residents,
Both a resident species of whale which eats salmon.
They eat different kinds of salmon, but preferentially, Chinook, the very biggest salmon.
But salmon is the main thing they eat.
Then you have transient or Biggs killer whales.
Now this looks just or very similar to the Resident whale, but it has a very different diet.
That is the biggest difference. The transients eat marine mammals, seals, porpoises,
even, believe it or not, baby gray whale calves, minke whales, thousand pounds sea lions,
it's incredible what they can do.
So it's an orca, but it eats a very different diet.
Finally, the Offshores. These whales live out on the outer continental shore shelf
and we know the least about them just because they're so far out there. They're rarely seen.
We think they mainly eat sharks!
How do we know that? Because their teeth. They're quite sanded down.
And as you can see here in Emily's map, these animals share space. They overlap,
but they have different primary home ranges.
For the Southern Residents, they come all the way down here from B.C., as we discussed.
Here's Vancouver island, down to California. The Northern Residents they're mainly up here
And the Offshores are out here, whereas the Bigg's, they're just all over the place,
chasing those seals.
Just a little bit about some of the fun we had making this series.
Emily made that beautiful orca that you saw on the graphic out of clay
and baked it in our toaster oven in the newsroom.
And we even gave this sculpture a name. We called him Hank
and Hank had a big job to do, which was explained in these different graphics.
The very complicated biology and internal workings of an orca whale.
So orcas have a very, very special ability called echolocation.
It is how they actually see with sound.
You and I, we are completely sight oriented as mammals.
Orcas live in a very different world, below water, where mostly it's dark all the time.
So how do they hunt their prey, salmon?
Well they do it with sound.
And they have these very specialized structures, within their head, that enable them to do that.
This here is called a melon and it's actually filled with a kind of oil
and the orca sends out this beam of sound through the water
that strikes anything that has pointed that beam at. And it can flex its head and move that beam,
the way you or I would point a flashlight, to identify its prey.
It not only sees, as it were, through this sound echo that comes back to it,
the presence of a fish it sees inside it.
It can tell by the swim bladder in the fish what species it is.
Is it a Chinook, is it a Coho, is it a Pink or maybe something it doesn't even want to eat.
And so this miraculous ability enables the orca whale to actually see with sound.
Furthermore, the orca makes all kinds of sounds that are very important for communication
with its family and other whales.
These sounds come right out of its blowhole. They don't have vocal cords the way we do.
They don't speak through their mouth the way we do. No, they talk through their head!
Through nasal sacs and a phonic lip that push these sounds through the blowhole,
so that they can be heard even a mile away, in quiet water.
I'll come back to how important that is.
So let's talk about a little bit about this amazing ability to hunt underwater
What does a hunt really look like for an orca whale?
Well they start off at the surface, take a big breath and start a dive,
and then they start making a slow steady click click click click click as they're looking.
Scanning the water for the presence of prey down below,
then suddenly a different kind of sound. Really a rapid buzzing sound.
It almost sounds mechanical. That's coaxing this fish out of sight, out of hiding,
and then the chase is really on and an orca will chase that fish. It'll twist, it'll turn, it'll dive,
it'll pull through that fish, chase it out of a hole, whatever it has to do,
to finally get it up to the surface, where, very likely, it will share that fish with its family.
With a single shake of its head, it can shake that fish in half and into pieces
and feed the rest of the family.
And so the orca has used sound the entire time to find its prey.
So now, I am going to pause for a moment and we're going to have another poll question
for you to answer. And here's your question:
I want to find out if you know your ecological address.
Not your street address, your ecological address. What watershed do you live in?
And go ahead and type the name of that watershed in the chat box.
This is going to be really fun for people chiming in from foreign nations.
- So Lynda, I launched the poll. Do you know what watershed you live in?
And so the answers are yes, no, I'm not sure. And as we're doing that,
we're getting we're getting Rio Grande, gosh, He's going so fast.Western Colorado, St John's watershed,
Peabody Creek, Chesapeake Bay, Los Angeles Watershed, Elwha River,
Chesapeake Bay, Mississippi River,
Russian River, Wild Rivers, Puyallup River,
Elkhorn Slough, Everglades,
Strait of Georgia, Chesapeake Bay again,
Great Lakes, Potomac,
Frazier River, Cedar River, some I believe from Hawaii that I don't want to mispronounce (laughing).
So lots of different answers and we are getting most of the answers in here on the poll.
And i'm going to go ahead and close that in just a moment.
- [Claire] I jumped the gun. Sorry, Jacqueline, I closed it.
Yeah we have a pretty educated audience here.
72 percent of them know what watershed they live in their ecological address.
So well done, attendees.
There are 15 percent that said no and 14 percent that are not sure,
that maybe aren't entirely sure what a watershed is.
But yeah it was fun seeing where everyone's coming from and what your watershed's name is.
So, back to you guys.
-Well, just hit it and it's back to you.
So I'm super impressed. Big shout out to you all. That's a big that's a big percentage of people
who know their ecological address. And here's why that matters.
I'm showing you this slide now about Chinook abundance from Alaska all the way to California.
Remember we talked about the Resident orcas, both the Northerns and the Southerners,
they eat mainly salmon, but mostly what they really want is Chinook.
And the reason for that is these are the biggest, fattiest, oiliest salmon in the sea.
And if you're a big animal, like these orca whales are, you need to eat a big fish
that's going to give you the most calories for the hunting effort . Well that's Chinook.
but as you can see from this slide uh
Chinook are in trouble pretty much throughout the range of the orca whales.
Look, salmon. Look at the colors on this map. All of these gold colored rivers those are threatened.
All of these red color rivers like the Sacramento, down there in California,
this upper Columbia stretch in Washington state in danger.
They're very few where the salmon runs, particularly Chinook, are in good shape.
That's a real problem for orca whales.
So, you know, when we talk about what are the roots of this crisis,
why are the southern residents having so much trouble surviving,
it's because, for one thing, they're having trouble getting enough to eat, reliably, throughout their range.
So let's talk about that. Why is that? What does it take to have healthy salmon run,
so the entire food web, including an orca whale, can be thriving.
Well, it takes a little bit of everything, That's what makes this a tough problem.
It isn't enough to just address one issue, you've got to look at the whole situation.
Let's look at this beautiful picture this is taken on Hood canal, in Washington state,
during the herring spawn. That's what's creating that incredible, beautiful color in the water.
Spawning herring, right offshore. Notice the natural beach, Notice the lush forest.
Notice the clean clear water.
So these little fish are herring. They're also called forage fish. Forage f-o-r-a-g-e
and there are several species of forage fish. They're all very, very important not only to salmon,
which eat forage fish, but also sea birds and whales of all kinds. The point is it's a food chain.
The orcas eat salmon, the salmon eat forage fish, and these forage fish need natural beaches
on which to spawn. They lay their eggs on kelp beds. They also lay their eggs on sea grass.
These are herring eggs and, you know, these little protein packets are an incredible meal
for a whole suite of life.
Once that herring spawn is hits the water, then everything comes, like ringing a dinner bell.
You get sea lions and sea birds and salmon. It's a feast!
And this feeds that food chain all the way up to the orca whale.
So, you know, no little fish, no blackfish is a coast Salish native expression
and it's there for a reason because it's true, you don't get orcas without salmon,
you don't get salmon without forage fish, you don't get forage fish without natural beaches.
So it's all connected.
So, you know, I want to just take a step back and talk a little bit more about our team and our process
in creating this series of-- I was very fortunate to work with some incredible photographers.
Steven Ringman at the Seattle Times and Ramon Donpour was our videographer
and Lauren Froney was our producer back in the newsroom.
And we created some mini documentaries that are online with this series,
which I really hope you'll watch, and Steve and Ramon took incredible pictures.
You know, we-- I can't tell you how hard these were to get.
We were only able to do it because of the help of scientists at NOAA and elsewhere,
who allowed us to work with them, while they were out doing their research.
It was very important to us that readers everywhere could feel the majesty of these animals,
experience them as they swim and they breathe.
Remember they're mammals, like us, and to hear that deep lung, purging exhalation,
it connected me every time with the majesty of these animals
and the fact that we all share these waters.
As I said, this was only possible because of the help of the researchers who worked with us.
This included NGOs like the center for whale research, here in washington state.
Here you see us at work. That's Steve up there on the crow's nest, along with Ramon
working the video camera. We make it look easy in this picture,
but honestly, there are lots of bloopers, just like this, where you know you think you've got that shot,
but instead what you've got is splash.
So if this happens to you and your wildlife photography, rest assured it happens to us, too.
We used a drone a lot because it was really important to see the whole landscape
in a lot of the work that we were trying to get done,
to show people everything these animals cope with and their struggle to survive.
We wanted to show things such as these shipping containers stacked on these giant ships,
Plying the very same waters that these animals are trying to find a single salmon in.
Imagine the noise that industrial shipping lanes create for the Southern Resident orca whales.
It didn't always go well. This is how it looked for Steve after that drone came back
and chopped his finger. But he kept right on working.
Again, the drone enables us to show the urban environment and how much it's been altered.
This is right here in Seattle. This is the Green river which is a very important salmon river, still today,
for the Southern Residents. It's one of the top producers of Chinook.
But take a look. I mean this used to be some of the finest farm soil in the Green River Valley, in Seattle,
anywhere in the state.
But today, it's the second largest warehousing district anywhere on the West Coast.
This is because people love convenience. They want that you know package delivered in an hour.
Well how does that happen?
It happens because it comes on a ship from somewhere else in the world,
it gets offloaded to a truck into a warehouse like these and it goes on a highway
and it comes to your porch.
But along the way, what got lost? The transport for the salmon.
The river that they need to get in and out of the marine environment.
This river today, 80 percent of it is behind levee walls,
most of the vegetation has been cut, the water temperature is too hot,
and the salmon that those orcas need to survive are very much in decline.
Puget Sound Chinook are listed as a threatened species.
So you have the poignant situation
of the species, orcas, that are endangered relying on a threatened species for their survival.
We also went to see, for this story, we went we were fortunate enough to be invited aboard
the Bell Shimada, which is one of the nation's premier research ship.
It's one of the pride of NOAA, pride of NOAA''s fleet.
The Shimada was our ticket to a week at sea to understand the work that scientists were doing
to find out why was it that salmon are in decline.
Well let's take a look at what happens to the juveniles as soon as they head out to sea
in the Columbia River Plume.
The Columbia is the mightiest river of the lower 48,
once one of the mightiest salmon producers in the world.
But today, many of the runs of salmon to the Columbia River are in decline.
So we went out on the Shimada to be with scientists and take a look at the marine food web.
Everything from the little tiny beasties on the kelp, to the various kinds of species coming up in a survey.
And you know as we did that,
what we understood was that climate change is affecting the food web out at sea
and that in turn is affecting the salmon and that too is affecting the whales.
So then we came back to Puget Sound when we went out again with researchers
and you know what we did then? We scooped up a lot of orca poo.
That's what this is. Orca poop.
I've smelled and seen more orca poop than you can imagine and i can tell you it smells like fish.
So why in the world would would scientists be so interested in orca scat?
Well because it's full of information.
When scientists can collect and analyze back in the lab these samples,
they can learn so much about the health of a whale.
They can find out if it's pregnant.
A researcher, like Brad Hansen here from the Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle,
can find out even which species of salmon that orca has eaten,
even by DNA testing, where that salmon came from.
That's incredibly valuable information to scientists trying to understand the diet of these animals,
what are they eating, where are the salmon coming from, and what in turn does that mean
for management actions.
Where do we need to really direct our efforts to bring back those salmon
because they're so important to the whales.
So this kind of front line basic field research is some of the most important information
that we can possibly have in this effort to save these whales.
And this kind of frontline field research is always always competing for funding
and multi-year funding and, you know, it's it's always a struggle to have enough.
And this is the kind of science that really needs to be supported
if we're going to save these animals.
We also went underwater to take a look at the success of restoration efforts.
You know, one of the things that we can feel good about is the incredible resilience of nature
and the ability of nature to respond when given the chance.
These are salmon in the Elwha river, out there on the Olympic peninsula.
And, you know, when we took down two dams on the Elwha river in the biggest restoration ever,
anywhere in the world, those salmons started coming back.
And it wasn't long, thereafter, that people from the center for whale research were seeing orca whales
feeding off the mouth of the Elwha river.
They were very quick to find those King salmon coming back,
just because those dams have come down and the river has begun a recovery.
We also looked at predators.
You know, what what is the impact of other salmon eaters out there in the environment,
including this sea lion having a nice big juicy Chum salmon in the Nisqually River.
You know, but ultimately it comes back to these animals the orca whales
and their ability in their family groups to get enough to eat and take care of one another.
I think that we in our coverage really wanted to keep our focus intimately on these animals.
It was always about the orcas, even though we talked about salmon
and we talked about forage fish and we talked about development.
We never wanted to lose sight through these incredible photographs of these intimate moments
that we were lucky enough to share with the whales. Like this moment,
when this whale is just breaking the surface tension of the water with its flipper.
That's not pollution, it's just the surface tension of the water breaking as this whale rolls.
And I'm so grateful to Steve and Ramon for their photography,
which really helps share the majesty of these animals with the whole world, including you, today.
We didn't sugarcoat it. We also wanted to show that these are indeed the most urban orcas in the world.
They deal with everything. Here, they are in the superfund site of Commencement Bay.
You know the pollutants that are still in these environments,
including in the fish that they're eating, are very important stressors for these animals,
especially, by the way, if they don't get enough to eat.
And that's one of the ways in which these threats combine.
If it's too noisy in the water to find enough fish, if the fish are scarce,
if these whales then don't get enough to eat and they're burning their fat,
that's where pollutants are lodged. In that fat.
And so the pollutants already in their bloodstream are increased in the amount of pollutants in their body
and sadly, it's worst of all for the little baby orcas, who get a big hit when they take their mother's milk
because that milk is very fatty and that's where the pollutants are.
I think that one of the big questions for scientists also has to do with this very low birth rate.
It's a small population, they don't give birth very often, there's even a little bit of inbreeding
and so there are multiple threats that scientists are looking at, with regard to these whales.
It isn't only food, it's also disease.
Is there some problem where they just don't really feel like eating?
Sometimes these whales are so skinny, scientists can't even believe it.
But they're not all starving to death. That's an oversimplification. There's more to the picture.
However, there's no doubt that all of the Southern Residents are food limited
and we can see that in some of these time series photographs that are taken by drone.
You know, in this situation, you have a little whale named J50, who just got skinnier
and skinnier and skinnier. There was something wrong with her.
So wrong with her, that NOAA launched a first ever international effort to try to intervene and save her life.
Even by trying to feed her medicated fish. this was a trial run, at that.
Even in injecting her with antibiotics, shot from a moving boat.
You know but very sadly she just kept wasting away.
Here you see this grotesque condition where you can actually see the bones of her cranium.
this is the skinniest whale any whale anyone had ever seen still alive and
just a few days after this picture was taken, she sank under the waves and never was seen again.
So why was she so thin? We don't know. We don't know why she was so terribly thin.
But we do know that all of the Southern Residents are struggling to get enough to eat.
They're not all starving but food is definitely an issue and a very key issue in their survival.
And that takes us back to sound.
Again, if you're making a racket, it's harder for these animals to find the food they need to find.
It creates almost a kind of fog of noise, if you will. They hunt with sound.
So if you make noise, it's harder for them to find what they need to eat.
And that puts them in direct conflict with us. One of their very prime habitats is right in the Harrow Strait
on the west side of San Juan Island,
which is a primary shipping lane to the Port of Vancouver,
the fastest growing port on the West Coast.
And so, you know, you really have this clash of maritime cultures
between these orcas, who have been in these waters since time immemorial, and us.
We utilize these waters for recreation and also for commerce.
We went out with some scientists just to put a hydrophone in the water an underwater microphone
and listen to what these orcas experienced. We couldn't honestly believe how loud it was.
Let's talk quickly about history because this is a piece of the problem, too.
There was a time in our state and in our region where anyone could go out
and actually catch themselves an orca whale and sell it for profit to an aquarium.
This is Ted Griffin and he was the very first to start this with a whale named Namu.
He captured Namu up in Northern B.C., big male orca, brought him down to the waterfront in Seattle
and opened the world's first ever, live performing orca exhibit.
Namu was an instant international hit
and that's partly because, you know, ted was was such a ham, he taught himself how to ride Namu and
and he was enthralled with Namu. He loved this animal. He was he was just fascinated with orcas.
He couldn't learn enough about Namu and orca whales.
And you know, I think he, even he, couldn't have known the power of what he unleashed
in bringing Namu to the waterfront, because suddenly killer whales were big business.
Everybody wanted to kill a whale.
And these are orca whales that are being kept in a tank as their as their shipping orders are being filled.
And if you were to walk down Western Avenue in Seattle, during the 1960s,
you might have seen this. A whale actually being loaded up in a crane to go off in a plane
and an iced down box and be sent across the world to an aquarium, someplace.
And you know, tragically, all of those animals today, a third of the pods, are dead, but one
from the Southern Resident population. And that's Lolita, also called Tokutai.
This is her on the day she was captured looking out of the net.
She's on a flat dead truck on her way to SeaTac airport to get a plane to Miami
to be shipped to the Miami Seaquarium where she still lives, today.
50 years later. All are dead, today, but one. Her.
This will be one other resident workout that's been in captivity longer, that's Hugo.
He's a Northern Resident and he's also still in captivity.
I want to wrap up by taking you to California. This is the southernmost part of the orcas range
and I it's still incredible to me that they go all the way down there to hunt, but they do.
They're off the coast of California and off the coast of the Columbia River, right now getting their fish.
Take a look at this.
We went to California to tell the story of the Southern Residents
because really, to us, California was a kind of time machine.
It was a wake-up call for the residents of the Pacific Northwest to say to them, look,
you know, keep it up. If you keep affecting the environment as much as we are,
if you keep converting it to housing and shopping and everything else, as much as you are,
we're going to look like california before long.
And California is a place that, you know, the Sacramento River was once one of the greatest
salmon producers in North America, second only to the Columbia.
And today, a lot of people in California don't even think of California as a salmon state.
And it's because of all this extensive development, including agriculture,
which you know, typically, you think well that's not housing. How bad can that be?
But there's been a conversion to very, very heavy water using crops that need year-round education
year-round irrigation, including almonds, which need more than a gallon of water for a single nut.
And so that you have a lot of pressure both of population and agricultural use
on water in the Sacramento water Sacramento River, which is home to these animals.
Winter Run Chinook. They're unique in the world and a very important food source for the Southern Residents.
But they are at the absolute brink of extinction because of Shasta Dam,
built with absolutely no fish passage, blocking all of their access to the cold mountain streams
on Mount Shasta, that you see there in the distance.
Well, today, they're kept alive with cold water releases from the Shasta Dam,
of which there's really not enough water to sustain them.
And so we now have what's called a captive brood and this is a very last-ditch survival step
that's being taken for these fish, to try to just at least keep a gene bank of them,
so they will not go extinct.
And this big wild salmon has been collected from the Sacramento River
and its eggs are going to be taken for the captive brood.
This is what the captive brood looks like underwater. Steve put a webcam in there
and you know, it's a sad sight. These fish are never going to live in the ocean,
they're never going to see the sea, they're just going to be kept as a gene bank, basically, for the future.
So then I've got my final poll question for you and here it is.
I want to know do you want to help. Do you want to get involved
in the battle to try to save salmon and orcas.
- Okay. Thanks, Lynda. so i just launched the poll.
And answers are starting to come in pretty quickly.
All right. we'll give it another couple of seconds, here.
So go ahead and you haven't already, put in your answer: yes, no, or not sure.
All right. I'm going to go ahead and close the poll
and share the results.
All right.
Looks like 90 percent say yes! That's great news!
- Yeah! - Back to you Lynda. I'm going to hide those results.
- Yeah. That's great news i'm not really surprised.
But I wanted to know because let's just take a look at another one of Emily's great maps.
This is my watershed not far from where i'm sitting, talking to you. This is a Green-Duwamish Watershed
And I want you to realize that, wherever you're sitting, your watershed might not look like this,
but it's got some of these very same elements that Emily has called out.
Do the rivers have a natural shoreline or are they armored?
Is it a healthy riparian zone or an unhealthy one?
What do I mean by that? Are there forests along the banks of the rivers?
If there is a levee, is it set back so that the river can have access to at least some of the floodplain?
Or is it just walled right in with a levee that takes away access of the river to its floodplain,
which, furthermore, denies the river the ability to recharge the aquifer with fresh cold water.
It means the salmon don't have anywhere to lay their eggs.
It just greatly degrades the quality of the water. It's too hot and there's very little for the salmon to eat' because they don't have trees raining in this nutritious leaf litter
They don't have insects dropping in to feed the fish. So these elements of a healthy forest,
a natural shoreline, native plants along the shoreline that feed the insects,
of river's ability to move around in its floodplain.
No matter where you live, these are some of the very same elements that you need to get educated about
in your watershed. So find out who is your local watershed group.
Get to know those people, go to their meetings, start volunteering.
In-- I guarantee you in your watershed, you're going to have issues just like in mine
and I might start up in the very top of the watershed, like here in the Green River,
where fully half of the watershed, all the good stuff up here, is walled off by the Howard Hanson Dam.
It's a flood control structure, but it was built without any fish passage.
So far, despite spending more than a hundred million dollars on this,
this is as far as we've gotten with providing fish passage at the Howard Hanson Dam.
So you know, while it's critical Chinook and Steelhead habits, they can't get there.
Here's the lower river. You saw this picture, before.
Very, very heavily built lower river for the Green River Valley.
There's a real question before the local officials in King County.
This is the King County council and the King County Flood District.
What's going to happen to the rest of this river, the 20 percent of it that is still natural on its banks?
Are we going to build more walls? If we build walls will they be set back
so that the river has more room to move? Those are the kinds of local questions.
Local land use questions that you can get involved in in your community.
We all need a place to live, too.
And as populations grow, how can we do that?
Can we do that in a way that makes room also for the animals that were here first?
Such as the orca and the salmon and,
by the way, the treaty tribes that have a treaty right to harvest those fish.
We're all here together.
Can we make space for these animals-- the orcas and the salmon-- as well as for one another.
We need industry. Everybody needs industry jobs.
We're seeing this more than ever right now during the shutdown.
We're really feeling what happens to all of us if we don't have thriving industry.
But how do we do that? Does it have to look like this?
We did this starting a hundred years ago.
That's this is the 100th anniversary, this year, of the complete conversion
of the lower Duwamish River to an industrial shipping channel,
leaving no habitat at all for salmon.
This is another shot of the lower Duwamish River where we're using its banks for piling up scrap.
So here's my question for you, and it's the question we asked in the Seattle Times in our series.
What about the future? What about the orcas?
As our population grows, what can we do so that we can all continue to live here in this beautiful landscape
and these waters that we share.
And no matter where you live, no matter where you're watching this,
the animals that you share this planet with, you know, they're depending on your care.
And these waters that that we all rely on and that we love, they, too, are depending on your care.
Thank you very much.
- Oh, Lynda, that was such an engaging presentation. The photos were fantastic.
So, thanks to your Seattle Times photographers and the researchers and nonprofits that helped you.
So Jacqueline and I are going to go through a Q&A.
We have about seven or eight minutes
and we have lots of great questions, so Jacqueline, I'll let you kick it off and we'll just bat back and forth.
Let's see. Let's get you unmuted here.
Hold on, Jacqueline.
- I got it, sorry for that, thank you. - No problem
- Somebody pointed out that June is orca acknowledge-- recognition month,
So that's good to know, there for everybody who wants to celebrate.
And then we have Craig Wilson asked will there be a book or pamphlet on the work that you've done?
Thank you for that question. I swear I didn't plant that.
Yes, (laughing) I've just finished the edit and will next week do the copy edit on a book that's being published.
It will be out in the spring of 2021 from mountaineers books.
And it was it's been co-published with the Seattle Times
and it will include the beautiful photographs you've seen today.
These fabulous graphics and an even longer deeper telling of this very same story.
So yes, it's coming out soon.
It's called Work Up: Shared Waters, Shared Home from the mountaineers books
in spring of 2021.
- Great. Wonderful.
So this kind of ties into that.
So some of those infographics that you shared from the graphic designer at the Seattle Times,
are those-- I imagine they're in the Hostile Waters publication and the online platform for that.
They were just saying are they accessible to be used for educational purposes?
- Yes is the answer to your question.
So take a look at seattletimes.com
Everything you've seen in this presentation and a whole lot more,
including Ramon's and Lauren's incredible videos, are there for you to see and enjoy.
And you know, just get in touch with us at the Seattle Times.
We're we love working with educators in schools and you know how to reach me.
It's Lmapes@seattletimes.com and could field those requests and we would love to help.
We built this material for you. It's for the public to use and learn about these incredible animals.
So we'd love to hear from you. If you find this useful, please be in touch.
- Okay, I have a question here, as well. This is from Cindy.
And i'm not sure if you're gonna answer this,
but due to corona virus, Haro Straight and Puget Sound cargo ship traffic has decreased.
Has this helped the orcas as a result?
- Right. It's true, the water is a lot quieter out there.
Not only that, but the whale watch fleet is still tied up at the docks.
So it's quiet in a way it hasn't been, you know, probably in 50 years.
and it can only help. I mean this is this is good for marine life.
You know, there's just no question and it's good for the orcas.
Now as it happens, right now the orcas aren't really here much.
They're they're sort of visiting at this time of year,
but it's pretty soon that the Southern Residents returned to their primary summer range
in San Juan Islands.
It used to be that they returned pretty much by the end of May
and stayed all the way through summer. That's really been shifting
because their their food source, the Chinook salmon, have been declining.
But you know, once they come back to their summer home-- if this continues--
that is the shutdown of shipping and recreational boat traffic,
they're going to find a very different environment than they've encountered in the past.
And you know, the various scientists who've looked at this including the orca task force,
they even called for a moratorium on a recreational whale watching of the Southern Residents.
In the end, that isn't what the government decided to do,
but right now, new regulations are being discussed to regulate whale watching for the first time
in terms of number of boats that could be watching the whales at any time.
And some additional restrictions have already been placed by the legislature.
But you know, right now, it's quieter than it has ever been or probably ever will be, again.
- All right. We have a question from Amanda. How often are offshore orcas sited in the Salish Sea?
- Oh golly. In the Salish Sea, never, because the Salish Sea, right, that's Puget Sound
and the Strait of Juan de Fuca in the waters around B.C. and the offshores are on the outer continental shelves.
So they're in a different place. They're way out there in the ocean and rarely seen, actually,
because of where they are.
- Great, thank you.
- So I've seen a lot of questions about the names of the orcas.
So a lot of them asked how to spell them and we could probably put that out in a follow-up email,
but can you speak to if the names are of any significance? Are they native origin?
- Oh right. So these are the nicknames and they are done by the Orca Whale Museum at Friday Harbor.
And it's a fundraiser that they do. You can adopt a whale. You can
You know, you can go to their website and you'll see all the different names
and you know, they range, right, some of them are just kind of whimsical and silly like Oreo
and stuff like that.
This one, mother orca Tahlequah,
her name, Telequah, is a Native American name, but that's an exception.
A lot of them are not like that at all. they're Ripples and Rainbow and Double Stuff
and they've got all kinds of Daves.
And I think they just come from, you know, people who have watched the whales on the water
and know them and there's some significant thing about the way they look that charms them
and they get that nickname.
So it's a mix.
- Great. Thank you.
There's a question here. Do Southern orca go to the Hawaiian Islands?
We have quite a few people joining us from Hawaii.
- That's a fun question. No. Their range is from basically around Victoria, B.C.
and the outer western end of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, to the San Juan Islands and Puget Sound
and then all the way down the outer coast of Washington, Oregon and California.
There are orcas, though, in every ocean of the world,
just different types of orcas. And they all have a specialized diet.
They eat what they eat.
I mean it's very interesting to see how these orcas manage to maintain a peaceful coexistence
with one another. They eat different things.
So they're not in competition with one another, overtly, over food.
- Yeah, great. I know there was a sighting of orcas just a couple of weeks ago off the Big Island of Hawaii
and Kona. So i can see why there's a lot of interest.
- Just a different population. - Just yep different population.
So it looks like, Jacqueline, we can probably ask one more question
and then we'll move on to the closing slides.
And for all those questions, there's so many questions that have come in,
we really appreciate the high interest in this topic and Lynda's great presentation.
So, Lynda, if it's okay with you, we're hoping to send you many of these unanswered questions
and give you a few days or a week to respond back.
And we'll make sure to blast it out to all the attendees and registrants of today's webinar, if that works?
- I'd love to. That'd be fun. Great.
- Okay, well with the last question, just to reach other audiences around,
Some folks were asking if there's any of this research being done in the Atlantic?
- Ah. On Orca whales.
You know, if I said no, I'd probably be wrong, because there's a scientist, somewhere,
doing something on everything, right?
But most of the research on-- I'm aware of-- is about the Southern Resident orcas
because they are the endangered population and that's all going on, right here.
Remember, the other populations are healthy. They're doing fine.
Which really points it back to what is that's going on, here, that needs to be fixed.
- Thank you. Great. - Excellent. Okay, well with that,
I will go ahead and work my way back to being the presenter.
and we can wrap things up. We do appreciate that
we have lots of great questions and look forward to getting the responses from them.
So with that, let me get back into my presentation, here.
We do have a webinar archive.
And here we go.
Typical government URL super long and cumbersome. Don't worry, you will get a follow-up email, immediately,
that has a link to the webinar archive.
And you'll get also a certificate of a attendance, excuse me.
So this is just an example of one that we've given in January.
So all of you that attended today's webinar will receive one of these
in an email just shortly after we conclude.
And for those of you that end up watching the recording if you get to this point
and you would like a certificate of attendance, please go ahead and email sanctuary.education.noaa.gov
I'll put it back. It's on that slide, right there.
And we're doing a lot of cross promotion because there's so many great distance learning programs
and live interactions happening all over the country with NOAA and partners.
My co-worker, Hannah MacDonald, hosts these live interactions with Exploring by the Seat of Your Pants.
They're two or three a week until early June. The next one is on May 20th at 4 pm Eastern.
You would have an opportunity to explore the deep sea communities in an underwater volcano
in our National Marine Sanctuary of American Samoa.
And note, I've already pre-loaded into your question box the links to these upcoming presentations.
They will also be in the follow-up email,
but if you want to click on them, now, and bookmark those pages, you can.
In our very own webinar series, we have two this week, which is exciting for us,
On May 21st, we have award-winning marine life photographer, Doug Perrine joining us.
He's going to deconstruct the media bias concerning sharks
to showcase how different holly how sharks are like hollywood sharks versus real sharks.
So that should be an exciting one.
And then our partners at Woods Hole Cceanographic Institution and the Sea Grant, there,
they're hosting a NOAA live series that's typically targeting grades second through sixth
or second through eighth. And they have hands-on activities.
The one later this week is about nature's warning signs for tsunamis. How minutes matter.
So lots of great opportunities. Again, those links are already in your question box
in the go to webinar control panel.
My last little plug here is we greatly appreciate evaluation of our program,
so when you leave today's webinar, there are four short questions that we ask you to complete.
It will take you less than a minute. It pops up instantly as you leave the webinar
or as we end today's presentation.
Please do that.
For those of you that are formal and informal educators, there's an additional link
in a fifth comment question, which takes you to a more robust, multimedia and distance learning survey.
So NOAA has OMB clearance to do this broader survey,
but we want to hear from you. Like what length videos do you want?
what types of distance learning programs work for you, your future classrooms, your students, etc.
So please take, in that case, probably five to eight minutes to complete the survey.
And we greatly appreciate getting that feedback from those of you that want these resources from NOAA.
So with that, we will conclude today's presentation.
It was so wonderful to hear from award-winning journalist Lynda Mapes
from the Seattle Times. Thank you so much for your just visually stimulating presentation and storytelling.
And we hope that a lot of those people that want suggested that
they were interested in being volunteers, will find a way to get involved.
So thanks, Jacqueline and Chris, for also co-hosting with me.
And we appreciate everyone's participation today.
With that, it concludes today's webinar. Thank you
- Thank you.
- [Chris] Thanks, Lynda.