Skip to footer

Hope, in the form of a baby killer whale

An endangered pod of killer whales off the coast of Washington has a new member, the first newborn in more than two years.

|
Ken Balcomb/Center for Whale Research
The new baby orca swims alongside its presumed mother.

A pod of endangered killer whales that swims off the coast of Washington state welcomed its first newborn in more than two years.

On Dec. 30, Ken Balcomb, a scientist at the Center for Whale Research, noticed the newborn orca while monitoring a pod, dubbed J-pod, which hangs around Puget Sound, a large Pacific Ocean inlet. The baby killer whale is likely about seven or eight days old now.

The whale's birth is encouraging news for the pod, which lost a pregnant female earlier in December. The 19-year-old female whale named J-32 died somewhere in the Strait of Georgia before scientists hauled her ashore to perform a necropsy. Balcomb and others determined that the whale's fetus had died and a resulting bacterial infection killed the mother. [Drone Captures Aerial Photos of Killer Whales]

"The loss of J-32 was a disturbing setback," Brad Hanson, a wildlife biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), told Live Science. "We lost a lot of reproductive potential."

But the new baby whale, named J-50, is a good sign, Hanson added.

Balcomb is still unsure who the mother of the new whale is. It might be a younger female named J-36 or themore seasoned 43-year-old whale named J-16 who has had three other surviving calves. However, J-16's last calf died within a month in December 2011, according to Balcomb. The death was not unusual, since about 35 to 45 percent of newborn orcas don't make it past their first year, according to NOAA. If J-50 survives, it will be the first successful newborn in the Puget Sound population in about two and a half years.

Since the birth of the new whale, the pod has stayed in the Strait of Georgia, an area closer to Vancouver that is notorious for bad weather and difficult for scientists to reach, Hanson said. One of the whales in J-pod has a satellite transmitter attached to it, so once the pod moves on to friendlier waters, scientists will check on the new whale and determine who its mother is.

The birth of J-50 makes it the 78th orca in the population off the coast of Washington state and Canada. Killer whales are widely distributed around the world, but this particular group of killer whales is considered an endangered species in the United States and Canada.

Part of the problem is that this group was targeted for captive display, Hanson said. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, at least 40 of the whales (over half of the population) were taken for captive display. The population rebounded to almost 100 whales in the 1990s, but by the early 2000s, it saw a 20 percent decline. In 2005, the United States listed the group as endangered.

The exact cause of the decline is still unknown, Hanson said. However, one likely factor is the dwindling supply of Chinook salmon, the largest type of Pacific salmon and one of the orcas' primary food sources.

"I think we must restore abundant healthy prey resources ASAP if these whales are to have any chance of avoiding extinction," Balcomb wrote in his necropsy report of J-32. "The critical point for their recovery may already have passed."

Follow Kelly Dickerson on Twitter. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

Copyright 2015 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Hope, in the form of a baby killer whale
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2015/0107/Hope-in-the-form-of-a-baby-killer-whale
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe