A Whale of a Quandary Stirs Seattle

SEATTLE —  Commuters riding the ferry between Seattle and Vashon Island have been charmed by an orphaned killer whale plying the route for months, diving alongside the lumbering ferry and preening for onlookers.

The spectacle has been cause for alternate celebration and dread in this town, which prizes its orcas even more than its coffee. Celebration, because the spirited young whale is a symbol of everything that is still untamed about this city by the sea. Dread, because the orca is probably dying.

The whale, known as A73, is separated from her pod, which normally roams the coast of Canada, 400 miles to the north. She has an advancing skin disease and probable metabolic problems, making it unlikely she can survive for very long on her own alongside one of the largest cities on the West Coast, biologists say.

The orphan, whose antics have filled local news broadcasts since January and have spurred countless public debates and letters, appeared just as Seattle is facing a sharp decline in its local orca population. Only last week, there were signs that the region’s trademark killer whales are suffering heavier industrial pollution loads than ever imagined, including some of the highest levels of toxic PCBs ever measured in orcas.

“The orcas are a particularly effective indicator of the health of the ecosystem, as well as being probably our most beloved creature,” said Kathy Fletcher of People for Puget Sound, a citizens’ group working to restore the health of Seattle’s famous waterway.

“We’ve put toxins in the environment that are affecting the health of the orca whales, and we have managed to have such an impact on salmon that we are affecting their major food supply,” Fletcher said.

The black-and-white whales were shot at for years by fishermen through the early part of the century and rounded up for aquariums and sideshows in the 1960s and ‘70s (the most famous one being Namu, exhibited at the Seattle Aquarium, and the subject of a movie and a rock song before dying of an infection in his pen in 1966).

Their numbers in southern Puget Sound rebounded in the early 1990s, then took a nose dive, declining 20% since 1996. The three pods that are considered “resident” here, at least during the summer months, went from 98 whales in 1996 to about 80 today.

The Center for Biological Diversity and several other groups have petitioned to have the whales protected under the federal Endangered Species Act and recently notified the government of its intent to sue after the National Marine Fisheries Service this month missed a deadline for acting on the petition.

Meanwhile, the fisheries service said last week that it has test results from a 22-foot female found dead near Dungeness Bay this year--findings that show an astonishingly high level of industrial PCBs, which tend to accumulate in the blubber.

That whale was a transient, not one of Puget Sound’s residents. Unlike resident whales, which normally eat fish, transients tend to feed on seals and porpoises, which, being higher up in the food chain, tend to have bigger reserves of industrial pollutants in their body fat. Still, the levels found in the dead orca are 20 times the level that has been documented to cause reproductive problems and immune dysfunction in animals like seals.

“It was surprising,” in part because the whale appeared otherwise healthy and well fed, said John Stein, director of environmental conservation for the federal government’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center. It was not known how she died.

“You can find higher levels at times, but usually [among] whales in poor condition.... This has helped us understand what the far end of the spectrum can look like,” Stein said.

The findings also have scientists scratching their head because the higher levels showed up in a female still in her reproductive years. Normally, female whales pass on most of the toxins in their bodies to their offspring through lactation. They caution that the findings represent only one whale, and a dead one at that, and may not be representative of all whales in the region.

Still, Fletcher said, there has to be something wrong when so many of the region’s whales are disappearing without a trace, or washing up dead on a beach, as a young male orca did on the southern Washington coast in mid-April--or showing up alone and sick in urban Puget Sound.

Nor is A73 unique. Another orca, a member of one of southern Puget Sound’s resident pods, became separated from his pod and showed up in a remote inlet off Canada’s Vancouver Island last July.

Scientists say that whale appears much healthier than A73, whose precarious condition has left government officials in a quandary about whether to come to her aid--risking killing her from the stress or dooming her to permanent captivity--or leave her alone and hope for the best.

Two camps have emerged.

One side says A73 should be captured and moved in a net pen up to Canada, brought back to prime health and reunited with her pod when they show up there after their winter wanderings in late June. An advisory panel of scientists recently favored that view, arguing that, if the whale is going to be moved at all, it is important to do it before she becomes sicker and while there is still a chance to reunite with her own pod.

“The critical thing is, if we don’t do it in the next few weeks, the window of opportunity for releasing her [near her pod] is going to be closed,” said Michael Kandu of the whale conservation group SeaWolf. “She might be OK for the next one or two months, great. But what happens in 10 months [when her pod has again left the area]? They can’t put her back in the wild then. They’ve basically doomed her to life in captivity at that point.”

But the marine fisheries service, which has jurisdiction, has said it is inclined to wait and see. While the skin disease could be life-threatening, and the whale appears to have serious digestive problems, A73 is feeding and does not seem to be in distress, the agency said. A blood test was taken recently in the hope of gaining more clues.

The problem with the scientists’ recommendation, said NMFS spokesman Brian Gorman, is that it does not say how anyone will know when it is clearly time to give up on nature and move the whale.

“Our fear is we’d end up with a sick whale on our hands that we couldn’t reintroduce into the wild,” Gorman said. “That leaves us with two choices: We could euthanize the whale or we could send it on a one-way trip to a display facility. And those are both repugnant choices. The prospects for this whale are not good, no matter what happens.”