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SAVING THE KILLERS: AN INTERVIEW WITH MARK ANDERSON By Mark Anderson with Janet Thomas
FiRe is back! Future in Review returns, live, at the beautiful Terranea Resort in Palos Verdes, CA, November 6-9. Join old friends and new at this life-changing event. Register now! Earlybird tickets are just $3900 until May 31 - that's a savings of $2000. See more in "Upcoming Events." _____ Why Read: It isn't often these days that we get to celebrate a major triumph in nature conservation; even less when involving apex mammal predators; and less again when this movement was initiated and paid for by technology executives. This week's issue describes the early returns of how SNS members have done just that with the Southern Resident Killer Whales of the Salish Sea.
Author's Note: This is a continuing story about the efforts of SNS members and friends to save the only resident orcas in the world, the southern resident killer whales (SRKW). [Earlier descriptions of this effort have been chronicled in "SNS: Your Orca Dollars At Work" (5/29/02), "SNS: The Orca Crash of 2008-9" (2/23/09), and "SNS Special Alert: IMPORTANT re Saving the Resident Orca of Puget Sound" (12/8/18).] _____ This week's issue is composed of selections from an interview of me by Janet Thomas, Executive Director of Orca Relief Citizens Alliance, conducted on February 28, 2023. Janet is completing a book on saving the resident killer whales of Puget Sound, and if anyone deserves credit for the successes we'll be describing here, Janet is that person. We'll start by stating the problem and the solutions we're celebrating today, note those inside the SNS membership who helped get all of us to this point, and then conclude with portions of the interview.
Many of you are aware of the problem, noted in these pages as early as 1997: killer whales, or orca - the pelagic apex predator on three-quarters of the planet, and with brains four times larger than ours - were doing fine in all of the oceans of the world. But the only resident orcas, later determined to be a separate (sub) species worthy of protection, were dying at a precipitous rate. These residents of the Salish Sea were just recovering from years of predation by Sea World when, for numerous reasons, we predicted their future population crash. In preparation for dealing with this problem, members of SNS got together and formed Orca Relief Citizens' Alliance (ORCA) in 1997 - a puckish way, by name, of showing that we had seen the upcoming population crash ahead of time. And indeed, for the next five years, the J, K, and L pods comprising this group lost 17% of their members, a catastrophe in the making. The first board of directors consisted of myself and Northwest technology industry accountant Roger Clark; the first check was written by well-known technology entrepreneur Mike Slade. Since that time, top officers and mainstream employees at Microsoft, Intel, and other tech companies have provided annual support, together with local citizens, the Patagonia company, and many other concerned individuals to keep the Orca Relief effort alive. Our charter was simple: to identify, and reverse, the cause of the increased mortality of resident orcas. We raised funds from the SNS membership, and our first research was conducted through the University of Washington's Friday Harbor Laboratories, the result of which was a summary understanding that remains unchanged to this day: "In times of reduced Chinook salmon count, the presence of motorized boats increases orcas' need for food, while simultaneously reducing their ability to hunt, and they starve, while consuming their toxin-laden blubber." It is worth underlining that our whales have been dying of starvation, and not pollution - something virtually all marine mammologists (those who are not being paid by whale watchers) agree on today. Our next move was to commission a study by the Northwest branch of NOAA Fisheries' Marine Mammal Laboratory (then under the auspices of the National Marine Fisheries Service) to understand if there was a correlation between the number of motorized whale-watch boats and whale deaths. This led to the early discovery that, as the daily whale-watch boat count passed about 26, the two chart lines (number of boats and whale mortality rate) converged, and they stayed that way as they climbed. The correlation was tight, undeniable. Motorized boats kill orcas. Janet Thomas joined ORCA after proving her mettle by winning a battle to remove jet skis from local waters, because of their negative effects on local whales (protected by the Marine Mammal Protection Act). The courage she demonstrated in fighting the operators, the county, and the state - and winning at the Supreme Court level - made it obvious that she would be perfect for the job.
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