From the Archipelago: Whale Culture

February-March 2004

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

A group of transients in Queen Charlotte Strait.

It was December 1984. My late husband Robin Morton and I were in an 18 ft. Zodiac, with every piece of warm clothing we owned on our bodies. It was one of those cold, clear, calm spells that we get in the Broughton Archipelago in mid-winter. All the water lines in Echo Bay freeze in this weather, but no one cares because it is just so good to see the sun for awhile.

As our little boat turned the corner, we looked up the frozen expanse of Kingcome Inlet to see the sight of four simultaneous thin jets of steam rising from the water— whales!

Robin and I used to head out daily, making random choices as to which way we should go to try to find whales. Some days the wind set our course, making us veer away from the frothing Tribune Channel and Knight Inlet, sending us down Fife Sound. But on a day like this, well, we could have gone to Cape Caution, but for our growing love of the Broughton.

While Robin expertly guided the boat closer, I kept the binoculars pressed to my face, trying to figure out which orca these were. We assumed they were mammal-eating transients at this time of year, but as we swung wide and parallel with them, there was no mistaking it, this was Eve’s family, the A5s. This was the first time we’d found the whales in winter and here they were in the Broughton!

I always thought whale blows would form dense white clouds, like ours in winter, but they don’t. Whale blows are harder to spot in winter and the snowy hillsides can camouflage what blows they do create. I suspect orca have a way of keeping their breath cool. They are a warm mammal in a cold sea and so have many superb design features to allow them this lifestyle.

Every year for the next 10 years I found orca hunting and fishing the Broughton in winter. Many days I would encounter the wide-roaming, nomadic mammal-eaters, but I also encountered Eve and her kin enough times to begin thinking Kingcome and Knight Inlet belonged to her line. While many different pods and several clans of fish-eaters fished the Broughton in summer, they were almost always escorted by the As and, I never saw any but the A5s in winter.

In April, when oolichans and herring flood into the inlets to spawn, great chinook salmon follow. A chinook feeding on oolichans is the best salmon there is. Their flesh is rich and flavorful, brimming with essential energy for a warm mammal in a cold sea.

After Robin’s death, I often went fishing with neighbors until I learned how to solo, and quickly learned the ‘hotspots’. The best fishermen drop their gear only at precise locations and at exact phases of the tide. If they don’t get a bite, they pull up the gear and try another spot. When I followed the whales, I quickly noticed they fished exactly the same locations as the humans. They too zig-zagged up Kingcome Inlet, not bothering with the vast swaths of coastline in between. I suspect the knowledge held by the human fishermen came from seeing Eve’s ancestors tearing up the water, a huge silver fish glinting in the lead. Eve had learned the spots from her mother, and her mother had learned from her mother, and so on back thousands of years.

When a young English woman named Jane Goodall first went into the jungle to study chimpanzees, she was discouraged from naming them. In her doctoral thesis she was told she could not even identify them as ‘he’ or ‘she’—she had to write ‘it’. But she refused. Today the concept of culture among animals is gaining credibility. We have taken a big step in 30 years.

One of humanity’s most successful strategies is that we share realities with each other. Our children do it naturally in their play: “You be the king. I’ll be the princess”. This ability to agree on who is what, and what belongs where, has given rise to our diverse cultures. We learn to handle our environment, build cities, create art, practice traditions and design governments, until each erodes and we start over again, carrying always a few strands from the culture before, to become our myths.

Now many people think something like this may occur among some animal groups. Some groups of primates use sticks to dig for termites, wash sand from rice or medicate themselves with plants. The orca is also a candidate for culture. When a whale is born into a pod, he or she learns a dialect. If she is a northern resident member she will learn where the rubbing beaches are. If she was Eve’s daughter she would have learned where the oolichan-fed chinook rests between tides in Kingcome Inlet.

Each group of Orca studied world-wide has habits peculiar to it alone. We think a great deal of this specialization stems from what food resources are available to them. One of the most remarkable glimpses into orca society is the existence of two groups of orca, side-by-side in BC waters, with two distinct cultures.

The ‘transient’ mammal-eaters are quiet. Their dialect is very different from the ‘resident’ fish-eaters. Transients have small families that must splinter when they reach the number five. They are nomadic and highly adaptable . If one route becomes blocked, they just figure out another course.

The fish-eaters, however, have big noisy families. They have a gradient of dialects that link close lineages with many shared sounds, and mark distant lineages with lack of shared calls. They are very set on routing, insisting on either following the path of the salmon or abandoning the entire area. They have no interest in the back door and if they are displaced from their traditional winter grounds I don’t know where they go.

These differences can be traced to food. If the transients were chatty, their clever seal and porpoise prey would quietly sneak out of the way when they heard them coming. Recent research demonstrated that BC seals know the difference between the calls of the fish-eaters and the mammal-eaters. Just for insurance, these seals also clump all unknown orca calls, such as Alaskan calls, into the ‘dangerous’ category. A seal, while fat and juicy, is small compared to a school of salmon and so one seal will only feed one or two whales. I have seen it many times: the big males will often wait patiently, eating nothing while mom and the youngest kid feed on one seal. If there were twenty in the family, it would be a very long time between turns.

One of the greatest rewards to the whale for living in the sea, is brain growth, unfettered by gravity and problematic pelvic bones.The intriguing case of a large brain in a cold ocean is a wonderful mystery. Brains are oxygen hungry; no animal which makes a living holding its breath would have a large brain as a luxury feature. Brains are for storage of experiences, storage of thoughts, and maybe storage of culture? Every now and then some of the southern resident whales make a trip up Burrard Inlet. Undoubtedly, that body of water was the winter haven for some lineage of orca. Are the whales checking to see if Vancouver is still there? Do they have memory of ‘before’.

In 1993, underwater acoustic harassment devices were turned on by fish farms in the Broughton and the A clan whales left. Acoustic harassment was an experiment to keep seals away from farmed salmon, but it didn’t work. The seals are so keen on the fat farm salmon, they would even risk their hearing. Since that time three of the oldest matriarchs of the A clan have died—Nicola, Eve, Stripe—and with them passed the knowledge of how to fish the oolichan-fed chinook of Kingcome.

We fought successfully to have the acoustic harassment devices turned off, and in November, Nicola’s daughter Tsitika, came through the Broughton. This is the first time I have heard her voice here in nine years. She came back a week later and then close relatives came the week after that. Had she told them the coast is clear, no painful sounds anymore? Does she remember the course her mother traveled through here? Does she know they always came for the ebb, that April is when the feast is spread in Kingcome, that the chum used to end the season in October? Now I am on the edge of my seat hoping I will get the opportunity to see what kind of new orca traditions are forged here, and which ones are remembered, in the inlets that once belonged to Eve.

© Alexandra Morton (R.P.Bio) is a marine mammal scientist and author in BC’s Broughton Archipelago. www.raincoastresearch.org.