Mystery Killer Whales & The Pursuit

Two stories by Nancy Black.

Southern resident killer whales

Pt 1: Nancy, with the California Killer Whale Project, thought she’d seen it all, having spent 13 years on the Bay at that point. Transient killer whales and offshore orcas were the regulars who passed through. But on this day, she did not recognize any of the individuals. Another mystery was finally unraveled when she discovered these were residents from the Salish Sea who’d never before been seen south of southern Oregon. They came down on the hunt for salmon.

Pt. 2: Orcas, or killer whales as they are called in Monterey Bay, are known as the top predators of the sea (except for humans), having been observed feeding on dolphins, whales and sharks.  So Nancy, marine biologist and owner of Monterey Bay Whale Watch, was stunned to see Risso’s dolphins in hot pursuit of the killer whales, a first for her. Who knows what that was all about!

NANCY BLACK is a marine biologist and killer whale researcher with the California Killer Whale Project. She’s also owner of Monterey Bay Whale Watch, which runs multiple whale watching trips daily out of the Monterey Harbor.

Nancy was born in San Carlos, California, and grew up there. She attended University of California at Davis (UCD) as an undergraduate and came to Monterey Bay to attend graduate school at Moss Landing Marine Labs. There she studied Marine Mammalogy in the Marine Sciences program in the Birds and Mammal Lab. She received a Masters Degree in Marine Science from Moss Landing.

While at the lab, Nancy had different part-time jobs to help pay the bills. She got her start working as a naturalist during the gray whale season on boats out of San Francisco and Half Moon Bay, and at Randy’s in Monterey.

During that time, Nancy started running her own whale watching trips for school children to earn additional income. She chartered the boats and worked as the guide. The program was so successful that some schools are still bringing students out 25 years later.

During her time as a grad student, Nancy also worked in the Bahamas over four seasons, summer and fall, with the Oceanic Society, helping on wild Atlantic spotted dolphin trips. They took groups out at sea on a sailboat for a week at a time to swim with the dolphins and assist with research. Nancy was a biologist/naturalist for that program.

This gave her the idea to do something similar in Monterey Bay.  Overlapping with her time working on the Bahama’s project in the early 90s, Nancy collaborated with Cascadia Research Collective out of Washington State on a program in Monterey Bay. The program was similar to the Oceanic Society’s and to Earthwatch projects. Nancy took 10-15 people out on the Bay on the Pt. Sur Clipper where the participants helped with data collection and photo ID. They mostly focused on humpback and blue whales, but they gathered data on killer whales, too, if the whales showed up.

Nancy still captains the Pt. Sur Clipper, taking out passengers on All-Day trips searching for killer whales.

You can watch Nancy’s story on Youtube here: https://youtu.be/d1l5lHwmvF8

MYSTERY KILLER WHALES

One of my most interesting wildlife encounters was back during the winter 2000, when we came across a group of killer whales, and they were pretty spread out. There were quite a few of them, at least more than twenty when we first got there, it looked like. And they were spread out, maybe a half-mile to a mile in small sub-groups of five here, then two there. So I first thought they were offshore type of killer whales, not the transients we usually see. It seemed to be too many to be transients and just the behavior and how many there were and how they were spread out was different.

I was very excited because they were offshores, because we don’t see them very often – maybe once a winter, maybe once or twice, or some years we don’t even see offshores. Anyway, we were getting the cameras ready, cause I want to identify as many as we could, because we want to learn as much as we can about the offshore type. They’re the ones we see that range all the way from Southern California up into the Bering Sea. There’s just one population. The same group of animals is down in southern California, and the same animals can be seen all the way up to Alaska.

It’s not separate groups like transients. There’s one type of transient that is down here, and there’s a different transient population that’s up in British Columbia. Then you get different transients in Alaska. Same with the residents.  So anyway, the offshores are really exciting to see, and we really want to identify all of them. There are over 300 of them.

As I started taking pictures, I was looking at my photos, and some of the whales had open saddles. So where the white goes into the black there on the back just behind the dorsal fin, there was some black going into the white, and that’s called an open saddle.

So then I’m thinking, “Wow, that’s kind of weird for offshores to have that”, ‘cause very few really have tha,t and in offshores, if they do, it’s very minor. So then I’m thinking, “This is something really different. Like what is going on? This is like, they look like residents!” I had been working in Alaska for the previous five or six years at the time, and we see residents up there quite a bit, and they were starting to remind me of resident killer whales, where I thought, “No, no this can’t be possible they would be down here,” because we’ve never seen any resident types in Monterey Bay.

There’s three types of killer whales: The transients, which are the mammal-hunters, residents which feed only on fish, primarily on king salmon or Chinook, and the offshore type, which I mentioned. They feed on sharks, and squid and maybe offshore oceanic fish I don’t know much about.

So there’s three types, eco-types of killer whales off the Pacific Coast, and maybe another type that we don’t know that much about, but much further offshore. I was the naturalist on a gray whale trip as I looked at these killer whales. And so the people were getting really excited, too, because there were so many killer whales, and, besides there being so many, they started to get really active. They were breaching, there was some spy-hopping. We saw a newborn calf with little orange marks on it. When they’re first born they’re really orangey, so this killer whale calf couldn’t have been more than, you know, maybe a month or two old. So it was really excited, popping its little head up. It was really cute.

 So with all this activity, this breaching and bubbly behavior, this really reminded me more and more of residents. “God this is crazy.  I mean can these really be residents?” And I had not been familiar with the residents that are seen in Washington State at the time, cause I hadn’t worked with those. I had only been studying the residents in Alaska, and they didn’t look like those. So I’m thinking, “Oh my God, when I get home, I’m gonna look, look in the book and see. Maybe they’re some weird type of offshore, because I still thought residents have never been down here. What’s going on? Maybe there’s some other type of killer whale from offshore or something, who knows?”

So, it was a huge surprise, ‘cause you know by that time, by that year I had been out on the water for the last maybe thirteen previous years pretty much constantly. I was working a lot pretty much year round for the last thirteen years, and nothing! I’d seen no killer whales that looked like that at all. So this was really a huge discovery of something.

Anyway, we got a lot of pictures. You know, we tried to drive around most of the group. Then I got home that night, and I looked at the pictures right away. I looked in the book for the southern residents, the ones in Washington State. They’re currently endangered. And I looked. And it’s like, “Oh my God! One of them matched!” Then I looked at another one, and another match. I’m like, “ This is like amazing!” I could not believe it.

So then I called my friend Dave Ellifret, who works with Ken Balcomb up in Washington State. “I’m sending you these pictures now” to confirm it, because he knows all of them by heart. He’s got them all identified in his head. And I sent him these pictures, and he said, “Yes, it’s part of the K and L pods.” I mean, are you kidding?

And he was going crazy, too, because they had never been seen this far south before. I don’t even think they’d been seen, you know, south of northern Oregon before or Washington in previous years.

As soon as he saw them and the word spread, you know, up in Washington State, it was immediately on all the news up there and even down here. And everybody up there was worried, like ”Oh my God, our killer whales have left!”

They thought they’d left the area, and maybe they’ve gone for good, because the salmon population is very low, even back then and that was sixteen years ago. Now it’s really low, the salmon, those whales are starving to death right now, sadly. That was the beginning of it. So we think they were traveling further to look for food, because their salmon was depleted, still is. And since then, we have seen them almost every winter or every two or three winters. If they haven’t made it to Monterey Bay, they’ve been seen in northern California.

So that was a huge discovery, and that was like the biggest surprise of my career out on the ocean seeing the southern residents in Monterey Bay.

THE PURSUIT 

Back about 2003 or 2002, early 2000s, we were out on one of our whale watching trips. I think it was in the fall, and we were watching a small group of transient-type killer whales, the ones that eat marine mammals.  We’d been following them for maybe about twenty minutes or so. They were just slowly traveling, and then we came upon a group of Risso’s dolphins, like a scattered group of Risso’s. They’re a larger dolphin, about twelve feet long, which feeds only on squid.

And killer whales don’t really prey on Risso’s dolphins very much. There’s been one time in my time out on Monterey Bay in thirty years that we’ve seen killer whales attack and kill a Risso’s dolphin. But beyond that they really don’t – it’s not one of their main prey.

So in this case the Risso’s were scattered out, and all of a sudden the killer whales took off porpoising. But in this case it was the Risso’s that were chasing the killer whales! It was really unusual. Very strange! The killer whales were being pursued by the Risso’s, ‘cause Risso’s are known to be kind of a bully, aggressive dolphin.

And it’s like, “What’s going on here?” We realized it was the killer whales that were being pursued, not the other way around. So the Risso’s were flanking them on the side and on the back, behind. And the killer whales were grouped together, tight. And they were going fast, away. We were trying to keep up.

The Risso’s chased after them for, I don’t know, maybe it was like five, ten plus minutes or so. And they caught up to the killer whales, and then some more Risso’s ahead of them blocked them to the point where the killer whales stopped. They were surrounded by the Risso’s, and it was like they were trapped in a fence almost and bunched up. Somehow the Risso’s were keeping them trapped. It was the strangest thing ever.

I’ve never seen anything like that since, and I haven’t seen the Risso’s do that with other dolphins before. So they had these killer whales trapped for maybe, it could have been up to five, eight minutes or so. And the killer whales were stopped like they were trapped in a net or something. It was so similar to that.

And then all of a sudden the killer whales broke free, and they just fled out of there as fast as they could. The Risso’s did pursue them for a little bit, and then just gave up and that was it. But it was the strangest thing. What was going on? It was really a mystery. Very unusual.