Loving Whales to Death?

If you want to buy a sweatshirt with an orca whale on it, Friday Harbor, Washington is the place. Or an orca drink holder, wind chime, beer, hat, pair of socks, flag, blanket, wine glass, towel, pair of tennis shoes, or belly bag. Every summer the population of San Juan Island more than doubles with tourists coming with the hopes of glimpsing one of three resident families of orca whales. The orcas hunt for salmon up and down the Haro Straights, the deep passage alongside San Juan island.

Despite all of the attention, or perhaps because of it, the orcas are suffering. In the last six years the population has declined from one hundred to eighty, while the number of whale-watch companies that follow these whales has increased from twenty to eighty. A new study by Dr. David Bain asserts that the boats are so numerous and so loud in critical frequencies that 90-95% of the whales' echolocation is blocked.

A group called Orca Relief believes that this research provides the missing piece to the orcas' decline: boat noise makes it difficult for the orcas to find the fewer salmon available, forcing them to rely on their fat reserves, which are heavily contaminated with PCBs and other toxic chemicals.

Whale-watch operators are unhappy at being labeled villains. Many use their boats to promote the love of wildlife, offering what many groups such as ours have touted as one  income-generating alternative to whaling. They ask, what about the big tankers that make far more noise? What about lawns that dribble toxic herbicides every day into orca habitat? What about dams that block salmon runs and deforestation that silts them up?

AWI is working with those who have studied the whales the longest to outline a solution to the orca decline that the community can support. Besides pushing for a local ordinance banning the sale of the most harmful pesticides, we are asking that the whale-watch industry voluntarily limit their numbers, their reach and their hours, and to prohibit the especially noisy and polluting two stroke engines. Everyone agrees on just one thing-that there must be a way to save these magical whales so they can continue to exist in real life, not just as images of what once was.