Orcas’ threatened designation has come too late, warn environmentalists
Broadcast News
PHOTO CREDIT: Global BC file
Resident orcas off southern Vancouver Island have been having trouble producing offspring.
December 17, 2004
VANCOUVER — The U.S. government is proposing to list killer whales in the waters off Washington State as a “threatened” species.
But one orca advocacy group says it may be too late.
The threatened status would help protect the habitat of the southern resident killer whales, who spend their summers in the waters off southern Vancouver Island.
But the head of the Orca Relief environmental group says Washington should have taken action 20 years ago.
Mark Anderson says some of the males and females in the pods can no longer reproduce.
Population of the three pods has declined by nearly 20 per cent in the last decade to fewer than 85 whales.
Two years ago, the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service decided the orcas didn’t need the protection provided by the threatened designation.
However, a federal court judge ordered the fisheries service to reconsider because of a lawsuit filed by environmentalists.
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Orcas May Make Protected List
Fri Dec 17, 7:55 AM ET / 2004
By Kenneth R. Weiss and Lynn Marshall Times Staff Writers
SEATTLE — The Bush administration on Thursday proposed placing killer whales in Washington’s Puget Sound on the list of endangered species, to keep the last 84 of these acrobatic and often photographed orcas from going extinct.
The administration, which ruled two years ago that endangered species protections were unwarranted, reversed itself after a federal judge ordered it to reconsider its legal justifications.
“It was never a question of whether we cared about the whales,” said Robert Lohn, northwest regional administrator of the National Marine Fisheries Service. “Everyone knows that we did. The question was, ‘Did they qualify for a listing under the narrow criteria of the [endangered species] law?’ ”
Another review, he said, determined that the orcas qualified to join the list as a species “threatened” with extinction. The proposal is expected to become final within a year, giving the public a chance to comment.
Invoking the Endangered Species Act to protect these whales is likely to lead to tougher rules to prevent and contain oil spills. It probably will tighten regulations on ship traffic and focus money and federal efforts to clean up old toxic waste in the Puget Sound and prevent new sources of man-made toxins that accumulate in the fat tissue of orcas.
It will also mean that the waters in the Puget Sound and other areas, including Chinook salmon streams on and around the Olympic Peninsula, may be declared “critical habitat” to halt the decline in fish the orcas need for food.
These added protections, said Earthjustice lawyer Patti Goldman, “give me hope that the orcas will continue to make Puget Sound their home and my grandchildren will be able to see them.”
Goldman was part of a coalition of conservation groups that sued to force the hand of the administration, which has placed fewer species on the endangered list than any other since the act was signed into law by President Nixon in 1973.
These resident orcas, which feed primarily on fish, have plummeted from about 200 in 1960 to fewer than 70 in 1973 when officials began annual counts of the whales.
Much of the decline was attributed to the capture of live whales for public display at aquariums and theme parks. In addition, dwindling salmon runs and a buildup of PCBs and other man-made toxins that weaken immune systems were also blamed for the orca population’s inability to recover.
A census last year tallied 84 of these southern resident orcas, which spend spring, summer and fall around the San Juan Islands. Scientists are unsure where the orcas spend the winter.
Biologists also spotted two calves, but won’t officially count them unless they survive long enough to be part of next year’s census. The survival rate of calves has been poor, which scientists suspect may be because of the heavy dose of toxins in their mothers’ milk.
Although the orcas spend much of their time in the Pacific Northwest, they have been spotted as far south as Monterey Bay in California.
Scientists also closely follow another population of more transient orcas that prowl the West Coast from Southern California to Alaska. These wanderers eat dolphins, seals, sea lions and whales, unlike the fish-eating Puget Sound orcas.
In 2001, the Center for Biological Diversity and other groups asked the fisheries service to place the Puget Sound orcas on the endangered list.
The next year, the fisheries service refused, saying that although this population faced a strong probability of extinction, it failed to meet the legal criteria of being a significant species distinct from orcas that live in British Columbia or Alaska.
A lawsuit followed and U.S. District Judge Robert S. Lasnik intervened, writing that the service had ignored its own experts. They had pointed out the three pods of southern residents are genetically different from transient killer whales, do not interbreed or associate with other orcas, and appear to have their own communication dialect of clicks, calls and whistles.
The judge wrote that the fisheries service was wrong to declare that the best available science on orcas dates to 1758, when Carl Linnaeus, the father of taxonomy, officially recognized all orcas as one global species. Taxonomists have never updated Linnaeus’ work.
The judge also dismissed as “speculation” that orcas from British Columbia or Alaska would repopulate Puget Sound once the resident population disappeared.
Lohn said the judge’s ruling, in effect, unshackled the fisheries service from the narrow confines of the law. He also noted that orcas already were protected from hunting or harassment under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, and that the fisheries service already had begun formulating a recovery plan under that law.
Endangered species protections, he said, “will take us to a higher level.” Most important, he said, any other government agency must get clearance from the fisheries service before it approved any activity that could harm the whales or their habitat, which he said was likely to include the entire Puget Sound.
These photogenic black-and-white mammals which delight whale watchers with surface gymnastics are a major tourist draw and play a significant role in the region’s tourist industry.
“Whale-watching is as important to the regional economy as the Seattle Seahawks or the SuperSonics,” said David Bain, an associate professor of psychology and an expert on orca behavior at the University of Washington.
“We spend millions of dollars on stadiums to keep those guys in town. It seems only fair to do the same for whales.”
riday, December 17, 2004, 12:00 A.M. Pacific
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Federal agency proposes threatened status for orcas
By Warren Cornwall
Seattle Times staff reporter
A whale once shot at as a menace to fishermen but now viewed as synonymous with Northwest waters may get the full protection of the federal government with yesterday’s announcement that the orcas plying Puget Sound should be listed as threatened.
The decision by the National Marine Fisheries Service to propose the threatened status reverses a two-year-old ruling by the agency that a group of orcas, known as the Southern Residents, aren’t different enough from orcas worldwide to be considered for protection under the Endangered Species Act.
It represents a victory for environmental and whale-protection groups that have taken up the distinctive black-and-white mammal as a charismatic mascot with Hollywood appeal, and a key indicator of problems in the region’s waters.
They hope invoking the federal Endangered Species Act will result in closer scrutiny of human activities that might harm the orcas, including boat traffic, use of toxic chemicals, oil shipping and refining, piping of wastewater into Puget Sound and construction near the shoreline.
“I think this should give the orcas hope and the people of Puget Sound hope,” said Patti Goldman, an attorney for the environmental group Earthjustice, one of the groups that sued the fisheries service over its earlier decision not to list the whales.
But government officials said the listing is largely symbolic because orcas already enjoy protections under state, federal and Canadian law, and existing protections for threatened salmon will overlap with the whales’ needs. Unlike the Endangered Species Act listing of local salmon runs, this decision appears to have produced little anxiety among industries that could be affected.
“For the average Joe there won’t be much change,” said Bob Lohn, head of the fisheries service’s Northwest office.
The service will take public comment on the proposal for 90 days, and it plans to hold two public hearings about the proposed listing, Feb. 17 in Seattle and Feb. 28 in Friday Harbor, San Juan County. It has up to a year to reach a final decision about declaring the whales threatened.
The Southern Resident orcas, which summer in Puget Sound, the Strait of Juan de Fuca and around Vancouver Island, had declined from 99 whales in 1995 to a low of 79 in 2001, according to the Center for Whale Research. However, they rebounded to 85 this year.
The precipitous decline in the late 1990s alarmed orca advocates and scientists, who fear the animals — which breed slowly and live up to 80 years — could be devastated by further losses. Scientists suspect toxic chemicals that concentrate in the creature’s blubber, as well as boat noise and a decline in salmon runs that are a staple of the orca’s diet, may be to blame for the recent losses.
Often the focus of media coverage, orcas — commonly known as killer whales — were once reviled as man-killers and a plague to fishermen, who would at times shoot at them. Then in the 1960s and early 1970s, the population was decimated when large numbers were captured for display at amusement parks.
The local orcas are some of the most closely scrutinized marine animals in the world. Each individual mammal has a scientific name and a nickname, such as Luna. Their personalities have been detailed, their ages recorded and their genetic makeup analyzed.
But much about the whales remains a mystery. It’s unknown where many of the Southern Residents spend the winter, for example. Even the question of whether the Southern Residents constitute a unique group separate from other killer whales has been disputed.
The fisheries service in 2002 said the Southern Residents didn’t qualify for the Endangered Species Act because the whales were simply part of the worldwide species of orcas. Environmental groups and whale advocates successfully challenged that decision in federal court, forcing the government to reconsider and leading to yesterday’s announcement that the Southern Residents are a distinct subspecies.
The Southern Residents already are classified as an endangered species by Washington state and as “depleted” under the federal Marine Mammal Protection Act, and are covered by the Canadian equivalent of the Endangered Species Act, or ESA. State, federal and Canadian officials have been crafting plans to help the orcas under those laws.
“Our recovery efforts are already under way for these killer whales,” Lohn said in a statement. “We’ve had workshops and consulted with experts on development of a conservation plan, essentially identical to the recovery plan that an ESA listing would require.”
Under current regulations, orca whales can’t be killed or captured. The Navy in Puget Sound has agreed not to use sonar while killer whales are nearby, in response to fears the sonar disturbs them, Lohn said.
There will be some differences if the ESA listing happens, Lohn said. Federal agencies would have to consult with the fisheries service before taking any action that could affect the whales, such as issuing a federal permit for a pier being built in the Sound, or allowing cleanup of contaminated sediment. Many of those activities already undergo scrutiny because of salmon, Lohn said. But underwater noise could be a new issue with the whales, he said.
Bill Kidd, a spokesman for BP, a petroleum company that ships oil from Alaska through orca waters to its Cherry Point refinery near Bellingham, said the orca listing isn’t on his radar.
“If there is going to be an impact on our operations, we certainly haven’t identified it,” he said.
Tom McMillen, who owns a commercial whale-watching business in the San Juan Islands, said he would welcome restrictions on whale-watching to limit growth of the industry. But he acknowledged not all companies would agree.
Environmentalists tick off a list of activities that should get a closer look to protect orcas, including oil tankers and boating. A major oil spill is considered one of the biggest potential threats to survival of these orcas.
Toxic chemicals are another top issue. Scientists say these orcas are among the most contaminated whales on Earth, riddled with long-lived toxins that travel up the food chain.
Municipal sewer systems, pulp mills and other operations that pipe wastewater into the orcas’ habitat may need closer scrutiny for whales than for salmon, said Brent Plater, an attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group. Cleanup of toxic underwater sites also may need to meet stricter thresholds for orcas, he said.
Warren Cornwall: 206-464-2311 or wcornwall@seattletimes.com
“The service will take public comment on the proposal for 90 days, and it plans to hold two public hearings about the proposed listing, Feb. 17 in Seattle and Feb. 28 in Friday Harbor, San Juan County.”
i will make an effort to go to this!