The plight of the declining orca population is more than just keeping boats away. Most experts agree it’s about the food supply. Chinook salmon are pretty tasty to a lot of animals; orcas, people, seals and another quietly increasing group – harbor porpoises. Those cute little guys that cruise around giving our kids something to spot while we’re sailing – They may be another factor in the challenges for orcas according to Christopher Dunagan..
Here’s the first few paragraphs of Dunagan’s piece in his Watching Our Waterways blog:
Most of us have heard that harbor seals eat Chinook salmon, which are the preferred food for our beloved Southern Resident killer whales, an endangered species whose long-term survival could hinge on getting enough Chinook.
The number of harbor seals in the inland waters of Washington state now totals somewhere around 10,000 or slightly higher, according to the latest estimates by Steve Jeffries, a marine mammal biologist with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.
Photo: ©Cindy R. Elliser, Pacific Mammal Research
But did you know that harbor porpoises, which eat many of the same things as harbor seals, now number around 11,000 in the same general area? That’s according to a recent study for the Navy led by research consultant Tom Jefferson.
I have to say that those numbers came as a major surprise to me, and I began to ask questions about what all these porpoises in Puget Sound might be doing to the food web, which involves complex interactions between salmon, seals, porpoises, orcas and many other species.
The result of my inquiry is a story published this week in the Encyclopedia of Puget Sound.
Kurt grew up racing and cruising in the Midwest, and has raced Lasers since the late 1970s. Currently he is a broker at Swiftsure Yachts. He has been Assistant Editor at Sailing Magazine and a short stint as Editor of Northwest Yachting. Through Meadow Point Publishing he handles various marketing duties for smaller local companies. He currently is partners on a C&C 36 which he cruises throughout the Northwest. He’s married to the amazing Abby and is father to Ian and Gabe.