From the Archipelago: Mysteries Below

October-November 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

The activity we see is only the 'surface' of whale behavior.

The early morning was serenely awash in damp shades of summer gray. My hydrophone dangled over the side of my boat out of sight in the cold dark water, ready to carry underwater sounds into my world. Dark roast coffee steamed from the mug held close to my chest for warmth.

This has not been a warm summer. The sun has made only rare and brief appearances, but I have grown to love the soft touch of fog droplets. Similarly, I have decided green tomatoes are delicious, no longer waiting for them to go red, because more often than not they simply mold before ripening.

Like last summer, this year has been good for toads, slugs and salmon, and as I waited for any hint of whales over the hydrophone, salmon were jumping everywhere around me-the spirited free-form leaps of the little pink salmon, the smooth arcs of coho, the bronzy explosions of chinook salmon, the sliding skips of chum and sockeye salmon.

This was supposed to be an "off" year for pink salmon. The big runs of pink salmon in the mainland between Kingcome and Knight Inlets are on the even years, but there was a surprise showing this year. "Must be from the Glendale River," remarked neighbour, DFO patrolman Glen Niedrauer. The pinks were fat and bright, indicating a good two years of feeding out in the open ocean. I canned up several loads of pink salmon, because they are the healthiest species of salmon to eat. Their short life span and habit of feeding low on the food chain, on larval organisms floating among the plankton, reduces the chance of bio-accumulation of the toxins so prevalent in farm salmon. The abundant pink salmon also benefit the fishing communities of this coast. In addition, they are simply delicious.

Lost in the spectacle of the returning salmon, I missed the first few "tink, tink, tink" of orca echolocation, but as they penetrated my reverie, my heart leapt. It took twenty minutes of dedicated scanning to spot the distinctive rise, pause and sink of the whales' fins. Three big males. I looked around, but no others appeared. "Must be the A36 brothers", I thought. This small pod of whales has only three males left and so is doomed to extinction. However, the three brothers seemed to be enjoying the summer. Most often seen in the company of large groups of As and Is, they were taking the day for themselves.

When they entered Fife Sound they split. Two went up along the Broughton Island shoreline and the third took the Eden Island side. Interspersed with the crisp sonar clicks came the lovely sweeping Weeoooup, so characteristic to the A36's and all their kin. For a long time I took this call to mean "I'm over here and doing fine," an acoustic reaching-out to each other, keeping the family together. But a paper I read recently by Dr. Peter Tyak of the highly respected Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, has given me a new perspective on this and other calls made by the orca.

Dr. Tyak hypothesizes that if whale "A" knows in intimate detail what whale "B" has said, whale "A" can examine the sound she receives and in doing so "see" schools of fish that might lie between the two whales. This set an enormous "Ah, hah" off in my brain. One of the mysteries about orca is why each family of fish-eaters (residents) bothers to use a unique dialect. Dr Tyak's hypothesis suggests an answer to this question. Orca and other dolphins are known to pay close attention to minute changes in both the frequency and timing of their calls. If a young whale has learned exactly how a sound should be broadcast, it can "read" the holes punched in it by objects and thus detect fish. A mother whale would be most interested in providing this swath of acoustic illumination to her offspring, not whales from another family. This would explain why each family uses its own dialect. However, this is still only a theory and there are likely many other factors are at work.

When the A36 brothers entered Tribune Channel they promptly fell asleep and swam close together, producing long rhythmic breaths. This was such normal behaviour it gave me hope that the persistent impact of the underwater acoustic harassment devices that had been used by the salmon farmers was drawing to an end.

When the whales came in a few days later they behaved in a similar manner, but at the east end of Fife they appeared to have a serious argument. One brother crossed to the Gilford Island shore and foraged intently, while a second brother made a wide arc out to the Burdwood Islands. The third brother, however, stopped at the end of Fife and slammed his tail repeatedly on the surface. Calls triangulated between the brothers and forward progress was halted. After an hour and a half, they decided to swim back the way they had come. I wondered why, until I spoke with a sportfisherman later who told me there had been a second family of whales that had not wanted to come into Fife and had turned and gone back out. This family may not have been convinced the pain-causing sound devices from the fish farms had been silenced. At least one of the brothers had apparently been intent on escorting that family and had convinced the other two that social needs should outweigh a long quiet nap down Tribune Channel.

The abundance of pink salmon this year was matched by other fish species as well. Thousands of rhinoceros auklets dotted Fife Sound all summer. This species of bird is a surface marker of big masses of small fish. Usually they congregate out in Queen Charlotte Strait, feeding on the herring that are swept against the Archipelago with every flood tide. Whenever I saw a flock actively feeding, surrounded by screaming gulls, I snuck in to take a peek. I could always find a tight little ball of fish in the center of the activity being eaten from below by the diving auklets and snatched from above by the swarming gulls. The fish were about 5cm long and made very snakey movements. There were none of the scales twinkling in the dark water that I find whenever herring are being eaten by birds. As I approached the school, I took a dip with my net and found so many fish in it I couldn't lift it up. I quickly backed it down until I had only a few, then I slipped them into a bucket. The little fish were slim and slivery, their dorsal fins ran down the entire length of their backs-they were sand lance.

I have never seen sand lance in the Archipelago before this spring. That doesn't mean they were never here, because fish are so hard to see, but they certainly have not been here in the past decade in such high numbers for so long. I make it a habit of checking whatever dolphins and birds bring to the surface and have never seen these fish before.

With arrival of so many sand lance I expected a humpback whale to come in and feed on them, but none materialized. I wondered why until I spoke with a commercial troller who had been fishing at the west end of Queen Charlotte Strait. There, fishing for salmon he had hooked many oil-rich pilchard or sardines. I know from previous experience that humpback whales love pilchard. The oil in those fish help sustain the essential warm blanket of fatty blubber on the
whales. Clearly the table was well set to the west.

In mid August a mysterious phenomena reappeared. Beginning in 1986 I have occasionally heard a very distinctive sound from the hydrophone, which operates 24 hours a day in my house. When I first heard it I thought it was a humpback whale leaping. Then when I couldn't see anything on the surface, I began to wonder if it was something dragging along the seafloor. It sounds a little like Darth Vader breathing in the Star Wars movies. After 1986 the "sea monster" was silent for almost a decade, but when I heard it again I recognized it immediately. Now over the years I hear it periodically. It is often heard in the fall, particularly as the sun begins to set. I have come across it here and there through the Archipelago. Once it must have been directly beneath the boat and very loud. I now believe this sound is a call of some type because it has a distinctive repetitive rhythm. It sounds like a very large animal, whatever it is, because it is so low frequency. There are likely many life forms in the ocean that we have never seen, or have seen but never heard. Some day I hope to borrow a remote-controlled submersible to try and have a look at this caller from the deep.

The sealice infection I identified this spring has shown up in many other species of salmonids including searun cutthroat trout, young chinook salmon, young coho and chums. Several people have brought me young salmon they have found lying in the bottoms of their boats in the morning. No one has seen this before and some believe the excessive jumping is due to the fish trying to rid themselves of the sealice. The Department of Fisheries and Oceans refuses to take this event seriously and have even placed me under investigation for taking the lice-infested pink smolts two weeks prior to receiving my scientific permit. The international community of scientists, however, has a completely different take on these sealice. They tell me they felt certain this would happen here, as it has everywhere else there are salmon farms. They say most of the fish I caught had so many lice they were not going to survive and that unless the salmon farmers are forced to reduce their sealice before the wild salmon juveniles come out of the rivers each year, we will lose our wild stocks just as they have in Norway, Scotland and Ireland. They have been very helpful in guiding me through proper testing protocol.

I have seen many kayakers enjoying the beauty of this Archipelago. Small pods of you appear through wisps of fog, among the diamond-capped waves of the afternoon westerlies, and your brilliant little vessels line some white beaches like butterflies at rest. To you I would like to say that if you hope to enjoy the wilderness of this coast in the future, you are going to have to fight for her. Oil wells are on the way and the fish farmers want to expand throughout the entire coast in ever increasing densities. The governments of Canada, British Columbia and many municipalities have failed to recognize that wilderness will become the most precious and valuable commodity on earth in the near future. In my years of talking with bureaucrats and politicians I have learned one thing-it is up to us, the citizens, to keep life on earth.


© Alexandra Morton is a marine mammal scientist and writer in the Broughton Archipelago.
e-mail: wildorca@island.net