Concern turns to mother orca Tahlequah as she carries dead calf

SEATTLE – As Tahlequah carries her dead calf, scientists studying the endangered southern residents are concerned for the mother orca.
On Christmas Eve it was confirmed she gave birth to a female calf, but a week later, researchers discovered the calf had died. Tahlequah, or J35, has been carrying the dead calf since, just as she did in 2018, when she carried a dead calf for 17 days and 1,000 miles.
In video recorded by scientists Wednesday, she is seen diving deeply over and over, the tiny fin of her calf poking up against the scenery of West Seattle as the sad tableau of Tahlequah and her family continues while humankind’s daily life goes on all around them.
Tahlequah endures this stress while already thin and taking care of two sons, all of which adds to her burden. She also had this calf unusually soon after the last one and may not have had time to physically recover.
“It is a concern that she was expending a lot of energy to try to take care of this calf that she has lost,” said Brad Hanson, biologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle during a news call Thursday, describing Tahlequah doing high arch dives and fighting the calf’s drag in the current. “And this is a time of year when fish availability is typically less than what it is other times a year. So we are concerned.”
Other members of J pod are sticking close by. How long Tahlequah will continue to do this is not known. The reason is presumed to be grief for a baby that did not survive.
“It’s fair to say she is grieving, or mourning,” said Joe Gaydos, science director of the SeaDoc Society.
“And I think over the last few years, we realized that we have the same neurotransmitters that they have. We have the same hormones that they have. Why shouldn’t we also have the same emotions that they have?“
Grieving is also seen in other long-lived, socially cohesive animals, including primates and other dolphins, Gaydos said.
He would not be surprised if other members of her family are helping to carry the calf, Gaydos said. “Similar participation in the process is seen in primates,” Gaydos said in an email. “Killer whales, like chimpanzees, like us, are social animals. Why wouldn’t the whole group participate in the grieving process? We don’t have the market cornered on helping others grieve.”
Other killer whales have been known to carry calves they have lost, but none for as long as Tahlequah.
Survival of newborn calves is always marginal, maybe around 50%, said Michael Weiss, research director for the Center for Whale Research.
The southern residents are battling extinction, facing multiple threats, from lack of chinook salmon, their preferred food, to vessel noise that makes it harder to hunt and pollution in their food.
All of those threats are made worse by climate change, which is upending ocean food webs, depleting summer stream flows and warming stream temperatures. All of that hammers salmon – and when salmon are scarce, the other threats the southern residents face are intensified.
“All these things … interact,” Weiss said. “There’s boat noise, there’s contaminants, there’s inbreeding, and all of those things that we can address we should be addressing. But the thing that really is universal across the analysis that has been run, is you can’t get recovery of the population without boosting the food available to them.”
The southern residents eat other fish, including chum, which provided a better-than-usual food source for them this year with an ample run. But chinook are the biggest and fattiest salmon in the sea and deliver the most calories for the hunting effort.
Chinook runs are in decline regionwide. The southern residents forage over a vast region, from Vancouver Island to the Golden Gate Bridge. They target fish from all along the West Coast, including rivers in Alaska, the Columbia, Fraser, Sacramento and Snake rivers, and Puget Sound.
Today the southern residents face serial failures of the rivers they depend on throughout their seasonal round, leaving them without regularly available, reliable food. The Columbia and Snake rivers were once the largest chinook producers in the world, but today, annual returns are down to a tenth of their historical abundance. Recovery of salmon runs in the Columbia will require dam removal on the Lower Snake River, in addition to many other actions, NOAA said in a comprehensive report in 2022.
Other efforts – including hatchery production intended specifically to feed the southern residents – are underway. Billions of dollars are being spent on culvert replacements to improve salmon returns to Puget Sound rivers. The state Legislature also has passed new restrictions that went into effect Wednesday requiring boaters to keep 1,000 yards away from the southern residents.
But more is needed.
“We are not doing enough on chinook recovery and salmon recovery right now,” Gaydos said. “We have culverts that need to come out, that are not coming down. We have a lot of momentum to move forward on helping the Columbia River with its chinook salmon, and those efforts are still stalled. So I think there’s a lot of things that can be happening but are not happening right now, unfortunately. We have to do more than we have been doing if we want to expect something better.”
The southern residents are uniquely fragile. They are one of NOAA’s 10 Species in the Spotlight, meaning they are among the most endangered animals that NOAA protects, with a population of only 73. Recovery has been stuck for years, with advances quickly erased by losses.
In one bright spot, a new calf was seen in J pod on Tuesday, and that calf, J62, looks healthy.