Cascadia at work

(photo C.Tucker)

Studies of the diet of fish-eating killer whales in the near shore waters of British Columbia and Washington… Click to read the full report

Hello all,
We’ve finished up our field work in the San Juan Islands for this year – our two and a half weeks in September produced 32 samples from southern residents, including 1 regurgitation sample, 12 prey samples (including our first record of southern residents feeding on herring), and 19 fecal samples. Many of the fecal samples were collected just after Ls and Ks came in from the west, so they should give us a good idea of what the whales were feeding on when outside of the core area in the San Juan Islands. We also had one deployment of a suction-cup attached time-depth recorder on a transient, and obtained 18 hours of dive data, including only our second deployment through the night and into the next day. The samples/data will be analyzed over the next few months. We’ve made up a web page on the diet study – with photographs if anyone is interested -we’d like to use this web page to help get information out to naturalists and drivers, so if anyone has suggestions for information to add, please let us know.
Thanks,
Robin Baird & Brad Hanson