Scientists hunt Puget Sound orca bone site

WHIDBEY ISLAND, Wash. – It took bombs, planes and speedboats to corral the orcas at Whidbey Island’s Penn Cove, where the youngsters were separated from their pods and shipped off to aquariums around the country.

Now, researchers are trying to locate the bones of a handful of orcas killed during those roundups in the 1960s and ‘70s, hoping that analyzing the remains will help them better understand the endangered animals.

Four or five of the killer whales are believed to have been buried on the central part of Whidbey Island, near Coupeville.

Susan Berta, program director of the Orca Network, a Whidbey Island group that tracks the whales, identified three possible burial spots using the accounts of witnesses.

One spot is paved over and inaccessible. At another site, the owner allowed a dig as long as the location was not publicized, and on Feb. 21, the orca experts went to work.

“We were really confident that we were in the right spot. We talked with the guy who operated the backhoe back in 1970,” said Mike Etnier, a Bellingham-based zooarchaeologist involved in the search.

“He said, ‘Yeah, it was right here.’ “

But a day of searching failed to turn up even a sliver of bone.

“Either we dug in the wrong spot, or we dug in the right spot and the bones are so porous or so decayed that we didn’t see them,” said Etnier, who hopes finding such bones would provide information about the historical eating patterns of Puget Sound’s orcas.

The search now depends on photos that the backhoe operator took all those years ago.

The hope is that they will show a landmark that pinpoints the burial site.

“Other than that, it’s the needle in the haystack,” Etnier said.

The orca searchers plan to look for bones at another nearby site in the water, but they fear the bones may have dissolved.

Puget Sound’s three southern resident orca pods, known as J, K and L, were granted protection under the Endangered Species Act in 2005.

DNA samples and eating histories of the long-dead killer whales could help prove that the Puget Sound killer whales are different enough from other orcas to further validate their listing as endangered, Berta said.

Brad Hanson, a wildlife biologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center, said obtaining more samples of bone would create a better historical record of the conditions orca have lived in over time.