Orcasphere

The new Patagonia catalog (out yesterday) has a full page spread by Steven Hawley entitled “The Idaho Tide.”  It eloquently connects the wolves of Idaho’s Frank Church Wilderness with Snake River salmon and the southern residents, and it includes a great paragraph (below) with a quote-worthy line by Ken Balcomb:
“I think any reasonable biologist will [...]

The Sightline Institute has just released a new Cascadia Scorecard that attempts to track progress towards sustainability in Cascadia, the ecoregion encompassing much of western Washington and southern British Columbia. Southern resident killer whales and chinook salmon are featured within the scorecard’s wildlife indicator along with wolves, sage grouse, and caribou. While the [...]

Good national news is rolling in about 5 new southern resident whales and no deaths in 2009, plus one new baby thus far in 2010. Howard, Ken, and Brad allude to looking for correlations or explanations in chinook salmon abundance:
It sounds simplistic, Garrett said, but “the way that we can tag the population fluctuations [...]

Gregg Schorr for Brad, dive behavior

Is dive depth related to prey preference?
Do dive rates vary between pods, day/night, years?
Is frequency of max dive depth constant over time?

Prey field mapping in Sept, 2004 (after sockeye, during fall Chinook run): big targets are near middle of water column (>100m); prey assemblages different in Haro Strait?
Wild Salmon Center [...]

Pete for Steve Rafferty, epidemiological and pathologic findings
Only 10/81 confirmed SR deaths and 4/142 of NR were beach cast and available for post-mortem examination.  Infectious pneumonia is most common reported cause of mortality (60% of those necropsied).  We now have a standardized protocol for doing necropsies (available at http://seadocsociety.org)  Since 2002, Steve and Joe Gaydos [...]

Sandra O’Neill, Contaminants in salmon
We’ve heard that S and N residents are both eating mostly Chinook.  Why are the southern residents more contaminated than the northern residents?
Contaminants in fish are determined by:

where they live
what they eat
how long they are exposed
how fat they are

Chinook and Coho have elevated [PBDE] because they stay close to shore, while [...]

8:35 John Ford, resident KW foraging ecology

What may have caused the simultaneous declines in the N and S residents during the late 1990s?  Nutritional stress?
We compared expected and observed births and deaths, where expectations were based on period of unlimited growth (‘73-’90).  There were two phases of increased mortality in adult/juvenile fe/males: late 90s for [...]

14:55 Val Veirs giving Marla’s talk on “Vocal Compensation in SRKWs”

Background noise levels had mean of 110.1 DB +/- 4.1; range 98-123dB
Call source level: mean of 55.3dB +/-7.4 dB
Lombard effect in SRKWs is present; ~1dB increase in S1 call source level for every 1dB increase in ambient noise level
ambient noise increases with rising number of [...]

First there was Mike Bigg.  Early census effort started in 1976 and was motivated by concern about the captures for aquariums which took out about 50 animals.  1976-1984 habitat use was very similar to current critical habitat!  Most encounters May-October, with J pod present year-round.
Ken and Mike worried about how to ID babies.  They discovered [...]

10:00 Lynne Barre, NWFSC

Critical habitat can be modified.  A future step is designating habitat outside of the inland waters of WA.
Recovery plan implementation was started in 2003, well before the endangered listing in 2005.
Proposed regulations are under review… no date given for when rule-making will occur.
Consultations regarding potential impacts result in letters of concurrence or [...]