From the Archipelago: Blackfish Sound

February-March 2001

This is an article from WaveLength Magazine, available in print in North America and globally on the web.
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by Alexandra Morton

As the words “Blackfish Sound... Naiad Explorer” crackled over the radio, I left the steaming canner of tightly sealed jars of pink salmon and hurried to answer.

Orcas (once known as ‘blackfish’) are very social beings. Photos by Alexandra Morton ©

The first name in a radio call is the vessel being called, and mine is Blackfish Sound. The second name is the vessel calling. “You’d better get out here,” came Bud Butler’s voice, first mate on the Naiad, “you are not going to want to miss this”, and he gave me his position out in Queen Charlotte Strait. As I made sure the canner wasn’t going to explode in my absence I could hear him chastising me for taking so long to answer the radio. “Everyone’s been calling you.” The rhythmic pulse of the steam escaping from the canner must have masked the previous calls.

There is nothing quite so nice as letting go the boat lines and heading out for a whale sighting, especially in the conditions of that afternoon—glassy calm with wisps of cloud nestled into every cleft in the hills. At the end of Fife Sound I spotted the Naiad Explorer, the new whale watching boat out of Port McNeill, owned by Donna and Bill MacKay. She looks like a fifty foot Zodiac—an unmistakable profile on the coast. As I approached, I saw a sea of Orca dorsal fins.

Orca research of this coast is one of the greatest and most cooperative scientific pursuits in Canada. Underway for three decades and passed like a torch from one researcher to the next, it has probed the secrets of one of the most difficult mammals to study. A few researchers have been involved from the project’s inception—Graeme Ellis, John Ford and Paul Spong—but hundreds have participated.

It was Dr. Michael Bigg who discovered that a good picture of an Orca’s dorsal fin can be used to distinguish that whale from all other Orca for its entire life. Some whales are easy to identify, others nearly impossible, but it can be done. While the concept is elegantly simply, the pictures are difficult to get because Orca think nothing of traveling one hundred miles a day. That is why the contributions of so many people have been essential. Gradually the pictures are allowing us to piece together the fascinatingly complex and unusual social life of the Orca.

The most important thing to the Orca (after food and air) is family. Among some groups of Orca, no one leaves their mother! This is similar to elephant societies, but among elephants the males do leave their natal groups, unlike male Orca. The first researchers to look at Orca “saw” a harem society, but the photo-identification work taught us these weren’t harems, but rather matriarchal groups—mothers and their children. As the photographs kept coming we learned that whales grow up slowly—about the same rate as us—not reaching full maturity until their early twenties. We learned that the whales of this coast are reluctant to mix and have developed distinct societies with their own culture of unique behaviours, territory and sound.

As I approached the waves of fins falling and rising from the water’s surface I struggled with an internal dilemma—to record sounds, which is my work, or take pictures and contribute to the collective database on the social life of the eastern Pacific Orca. This was an unusually large gathering of whales.

Lowering my hydrophone I entered another world. Queen Charlotte Strait is a broad expanse of water, but the voices of 100 Orca easily filled it. The unique calls of each lineage rippled out from their family epicenters and surged into and around the calls of other ancestry. This constellation of sound washed up against the land which contained it and poured back into the Strait, weaving against the outgoing threads of sound—it was a whale’s universe down there.

Lost in the three dimensions of this symphony, the whales became distant and the fog slumped down the hillsides and pooled along the water’s surface. There was no time to reflect. I left the marine world and puttered after the Naiad and the whales, not wanting to get lost in the fog.

I sidled up to one family after another and snapped a visual record of who was there. Many were the northern resident whales from up around Prince Rupert. There were A’s, C’s, G’s, H’s and I’s, almost all the pods in the northern resident orca community.

While a group of whales this big is exciting to us humans, it is clearly even more exciting to the whales. They were moving fast, breaching, roaring around in tide lines—presumably after salmon. Spectacular all-male groups coalesced, exploding to the surface to gulp air and vanish. Whales blazed beneath the boat, chasing one another, finding a new partner or rejoining their families. They were spread far and wide.

Where Queen Charlotte Strait narrows into Blackfish Sound, the groups of whales slid in one behind the other and became waves of mammalian warmth and sound in a salmon-filled sea. I stopped and let these waves wash beneath and around me. It is hard not to contrast my humanity against the backdrop of whales at moments like this, as they appear to have a greater capacity to enjoy the company of their own kind.

I left the gathering as it flooded into Johnstone Strait and on down into Discovery Passage. For days afterwards the morning whale reports—usually restricted to a local VHF radio channel— became mainstream news as this enormous congregation of whales pushed further and further south, into the territory of the southern resident whales. These whales reminded the coastal communities of Powell River, Campbell River and elsewhere that they have whales for neighbours.

Some Orca came back right away, but the others remained in the south, in the territory of the southern resident Orcas. The southerns, however, were away at the time on the west coast of Vancouver Island and the northerns remained until the day before the southern whales returned to the Strait of Georgia.

Whale choreography on this coast is always a little mystifying. They come and go in interesting ways. Althoughtthey enter each other’s territory periodically, we have never seen southerns and northerns mix and we didn’t see it this year either. Did the southerns get a taste of the northerns on a current traveling west from the Strait of Georgia and decide to come home? Were they on their way home anyway? Did they announce their return with calls so loud it cleared the northerns ahead of them, or did the northerns taste the southerns on a northbound current and skedaddle? Was the precise coming and going a coincidence? I don’t think so.

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I spent most of the summer learning about another sea creature which was rising with increasing regularity to the surface—Atlantic salmon in the nets of commercial fishermen. After I counted over 1,000 escaped farmed Atlantic salmon caught in Johnstone Strait in 24 hours (see my column in the last issue), I began questioning fishermen at every fishing opening and going boat to boat to collect samples and take pictures. The fishermen were wonderfully tolerant of my constant questioning at the busiest time of their year.

An opening near my home in Tribune Channel produced over 3,000 Atlantic salmon in one day. Many of these fish had fresh pellets in them and so we knew these fish had escaped within hours. When the nearest fish farm at Sargeaunt Pass was queried, they initially denied losing any fish. But later they had to announce they had found a hole through which an unknown number of salmon had been escaping for an unknown period of time. If there hadn’t been a commercial opening they likely wouldn’t have become aware of the hole until harvest time. How many times a year does this happen?

It was frightening to watch these big ten pound fish hit the gillnets one after another in broad daylight—there were so many. Over 400 seals assembled in the area and I began wondering if the vast number of escaped farm fish were fueling an explosion in the seal population. Clearly commercial fisherman can catch escaped farm fish and so Calvin Siider, a Sointula gillnetter, hounded government at all levels to reopen Tribune to try and catch more of the estimated 30,000 escapees in order to get them out of the water. He was successful and this fishery provided a second look at the Atlantic salmon which had now been free for at least six days.

While none of the fish had food in their stomachs in the first Tribune opening, by the second opening a small percentage had eaten sticklebacks, which were abundant in the area, along with herring and small wild salmon. It appeared they were quickly figuring out how to survive outside a pen—something government has assured us they could not do. I also found larger, much more mature Atlantic salmon clustered around the outside of the pens. These fish appeared to have been feeding on pellets escaping through the nets. They were maturing, an easy swim away from the best rivers in the area. Indeed, observers spotted three Atlantics in a half hour in the neighbouring Kaweikan River.

A few weeks later, a fishery a short distance away in Knight Inlet revealed an even broader diet including shrimp and crab. In all, I examined the stomachs of almost 800 Atlantic salmon and found the industry and government statement that escaped Atlantics don’t feed on wild food to be wrong. I also found a disturbing number of different types of Atlantic salmon. Some were covered in spots, some had no spots. Some looked like coho, others like sockeye. Some had no teeth, some long jagged straight teeth, others fine inward pointing teeth. Some had been treated for sea lice, others were crawling in lice. These fish were not from one or two breakouts: the range of conditions and types suggested these fish were from many farms over the years. By the end of August I had counted over 10,000 Atlantic salmon caught from Campbell River to Alaska although I had talked to less than one third of the BC fishing fleet and only one Alaskan boat.

What do Atlantic salmon in the Pacific mean? Well, they eat and attack Pacific salmon, as well as carry exotic diseases and enhance local pathogens, parasites and predators. I don’t think we need to know any more before we take some action. Calvin Siider is fighting hard to get a winter fishery opened on Atlantic salmon. In winter, very few Pacific salmon are around that can be caught, and there are measures which would make by-catch negligible.

The greater problem is that no one knows who these Atlantic salmon belong to. They are not a wild Pacific fish, so perhaps the Department of Fisheries and Oceans has no jurisdiction over them. The fish farmers, on the other hand, have refused for the past decade to tag their livestock so as to avoid being held accountable for escapes—so perhaps they have forfeited their ownership of these fish as well. But the fish shouldn’t be sold because they could have recently eaten medicated pellets.

Alex’s family in a wooden boat built by husband, Eric

This is a new problem for this coast, requiring new and creative solutions. But while the politics are muddy, the biological perspective is clear—get Atlantic salmon out of the Pacific before this experiment runs its destructive course. Please contact the provincial Ministry of Environment and bolster their courage to tackle this.

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The tiny Echo Bay School opened its doors again this fall and, like children across the country, pupils piled maple leaves high and jumped into them.

The tourists fled south, the sandhill cranes close behind them. The dolphins have been scarce because the ocean has set its table far to the west, past Pine Island. There the Naiad recently passed through an aggregation of dolphins a mile wide and four miles long.

The diminutive pink salmon came home in such abundance this year that the bears feasted heartily. The growth rings of trees far up the slope will be marked well this year with the special nitrogen these fish impart to the earth.

The rainfall this fall is befitting of a raincoast and even the beleaguered chum salmon have made a brave showing. Something is going right in the ocean and wild salmon are benefiting.

The pulse of this coast may have skipped a few beats, been squeezed and trampled, but it is still thumping with magnificent force.

Oh yes, reading WaveLength every couple of months has induced me to borrow a kayak to ferry my daughter to school— and to find the peace you know.

Good winter to you.