Latest / NaturallyScott / E72 John Ford – The Secret Cultures of Killer Whales 🐋

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E72 John Ford – The Secret Cultures of Killer Whales 🐋 · NaturallyScott

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_02: Hello, my name is Scott Harris.
• 0:01
  SPEAKER_02: I'm the host of Naturally Scott.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you so much for joining us today.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_02: Um, we've got another uh terrific podcast set up, and you might get tired of hearing that, but I honestly don't.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_02: I feel blessed with the guests that we have and the conversations we get to have, and this one's of a particular interest to me, which I'll share with you as we go along.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_02: But our guest today is a gentleman named John Ford.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_02: John, welcome.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_02: Hi, Scott.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_02: Now, John, you are, well, let's let me back up for just a second.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_02: There are certain animals in the world, um, we'll focus on North America, that just kind of seem to grab us down deep if we even just catch a glimpse of them, right?
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_02: Uh a grizzly bear or an alligator are a couple of those, but one of those is certainly an orca.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I've been on enough whale watching cruises.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_02: I study marine biology for a couple of years as a young man and just regular cruises.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_02: And anytime somebody shouts killer whale, everybody floods to that side of the boat.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_02: Gray whales, I've seen a couple.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_02: Humpback whales, we'll get another one.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_02: I've just never seen anybody that doesn't get excited about orcas.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and so what a what a neat thing that you have going on, that that's, you know, the, I believe, the primary focus of your work.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, I've been incredibly fortunate to spend my whole career studying orcas, killer whales in different parts of the world, mostly here on the coast of British Columbia and Canada.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_01: And my work started, or my experience with uh with orcas started when I was a little kid, maybe eight or nine years old, fishing off Victoria, the south end of Vancouver Island.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_01: And uh I have vivid memories of of groups of killer whales swimming by our little fishing boat and being quite panicked about it because uh this is in the early 60s.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_01: Uh people were convinced that these were really dangerous animals, and uh so it it left a big impression on me.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_01: In 1964, the first killer whale ever held in captivity was captured and taken into Vancouver Harbor, and my uh it was held in a dry dock there, and my my dad took me down there to see this thing on the one day it was open to the public, and I thought, this animal's not that scary, and this poor little whale swimming around in a big dry dock.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway, and that it sort of got me going from a very early age, being intrigued with with um with killer whales.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_01: And I ended up actually working as a as a as a killer whale trainer in my late teens at the Vancouver Aquarium, and and then decided uh from my experience there I wanted to learn more about them in the wild.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_01: And so uh I've been doing it ever since.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_02: Well, that's fine.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_02: I have to ask, since you brought it up, what are your thoughts about killer whales in captivity?
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_01: Well, back in those days, we didn't know any better.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_01: We didn't realize, nobody realized that these were such intelligent animals, so highly social, that lived in essentially permanent family groups.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_01: And I think if we knew that back then, uh there wouldn't have been so much acceptance of having them in captivity.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_01: And also, as I mentioned, you know, the prevailing thought back in those days that these were incredibly dangerous animals.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_01: And so uh that first one that was captured um by the Vancouver Aquarium in 1964 that I mentioned, it actually wasn't intended to be a live capture.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_01: It was harpooned from uh a harpooned gun shot uh mounted on shore and with the intent to make a life-size model, a very accurate model of a killer whale, because they nobody really knew what they looked like other than black and white and so on.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_01: And so perceptions were very different back in the 60s and early 70s when these live captures went on.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_01: Today I think there's the there's no reason to have killer whales in captivity.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_01: It's a complicated question what we do with the ones that are there now.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_01: It's uh most of them have been born in captivity.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_01: This is the only world they know in in captivity.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm I I feel that it's uh it's not appropriate to let them go to the wild because they would have a really tough time surviving, in my opinion.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_01: Because so much of their so much of their world, their life is is is learned by social uh mimicry, by by social learning.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_01: Uh their lives are driven by culture.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_01: And the more we learn about killer whales, the more we understand that there are very many different cultures of this species in the ocean.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_01: And on our coast here, uh over the last 45 years that I've been working with an incredible team of colleagues to learn about the details of these cultures, we now recognize that there's there's what we call resident killer whales, there's big killer whales, and there's offshore killer whales, three different types of the same, essentially the same species that lead completely different lives.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_01: They don't mix, they they eat completely different prey, and they're highly specialized, and these specializations are learned by individuals, young whales growing up in the group, and um, it sticks with them for life.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_01: So resident killer whales, for example, are specialists on salmon and some other fish species.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_01: Big killer whales, also known as transients, uh, they don't eat fish, they eat mammals primarily, uh, seals, sea lions, porpoises, uh, and they don't touch fish.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_01: Offshore killer whales, we just recently discovered after collecting data for 20 years, these things are sometimes slow to gather enough data to really be able to be be confident in what we're seeing.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_01: They're sh they're shark specialists, so they feed on sleeper sharks, blue sharks, dogfish, um, even a torpedo or electric ray.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_01: Recently we got a sort of prey fragment from them, which is pretty interesting because those are very spicy fish for them, no doubt.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_01: So, anyway, these different cultures coexist with without mixing, without associating, and they lead completely separate lives in the same waters.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, so now that leads to more questions that we're gonna have time to answer.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so I can throw out the ones I had previously.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I was on a on a NAT geo expedition last summer up in Alaska, and that's where I was first introduced to the concept of the resident, the transient, and the open water.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and I was I was just fascinated by that and how the different pods eat different things.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_02: And and uh uh the naturalist or one of the naturalists on that trip was explaining that when the resident orcas are there, the mammals are fine.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_02: They don't make an effort to get out of their way, they know they're not going to be hunted, they recognize a non-threat, I guess.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but then when the transients come through, they scatter.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_02: Um, they get up on the ice, they try to get away, and they move on.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_02: And and I love that interaction and how they kind of seem to understand uh who's a threat and who's food and who's not.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_02: Um and and in doing some more research, I understand that the pods around the world of orcas have different ways of hunting, whether they're chasing their prey up on shore or washing it off of icebergs or whatever it is, and that and that they're not, that they might not necessarily be able to transfer that if they were magically moved from the Australian coast um up into the Arctic areas.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_02: Is that true that they would struggle in the way that it would if we took coastal brown bears and switched them with grizzly bears, that both would suffer from really not knowing what to do?
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_01: I I really believe that's true.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_01: Uh these whales become highly specialized by learning uh what is food, number one.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_01: If you're transient, you re you're you learn that warm-blooded prey is food.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_01: If you're a resident, you learn that salmon is food.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_01: And the the hunting tactics and strategies are are highly evolved and highly specific to a particular prey type.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_01: So as a young whale grows up in the pod, it learns these techniques for capturing different kinds of food, whatever that that culture specialty is.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_01: And I think uh they're they're smart animals and they're to some extent adaptable, but they are also very much set in their ways.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_01: Once they once they have learned how to make a living in the traditional way that has been passed on across generations, this is what they do.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_01: And with the resident populations on our coast, we noticed in the late or mid to late 1990s, there was a big drop in the abundance of their key food, which was chinook or king salmon.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_01: And uh we also noted that in over a period of years, with this significant decline in in the availability of their prey, that their mortality rates shot right up, two to three times what would be expected.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_01: And so we uh when the chinook or king salmon abundance improved, the mortality rates went back down to normal.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_01: So we said, could it be that they are so specialized that if the food the food that they're focused on becomes less available, that they'll actually suffer mortality as a result?
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_01: This is the top predator in the ocean.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_01: Nothing eats it.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_01: It can, in theory, eat pretty much whatever it wants.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_01: But again, they're so set in their ways that they don't seem to be able to just turn on a dime and go after different prey.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_01: So we think, in the case of the decline of residents during that period of very poor prey availability, that they didn't uh starve to death directly, but they probably became nutritionally stressed, and that leads to um mobilization of the toxins, PCBs and so on that are unfortunately stored in their blubber at high levels, which led to uh uh them using their blubber, releasing these PCBs, and and their immune response was affected by that.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_01: So they would succumb to disease and and parasites and and so on.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_01: So they are highly specialized, and I don't think it that it's it's really very easy for them to switch to alternative prey.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_02: That is just wild to me learning about that.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_02: And I I'm just I'm just fascinated by that.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, one of the things I wonder, so you have these pods, let's say we've got a resident pod, the inside passage in Alaska.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_02: How does that not become so inbred?
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_02: Because as I understand it, they're not welcoming transient males or open ocean males.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_02: How does it not become inbred to the point of self-destructive?
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that is a concern.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um, the resident killer population on the coast of Alaska and British Columbia and Washington State primarily, there's there's three different populations or subpopulations of this resident ecotype, as we call it.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_01: There's southern Alaskan residents that you probably saw up there in southeast Alaska.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_01: They sometimes make a visit to northern British Columbia, but normally in British Columbia we have northern residents, which is a different population, um, from sort of Vancouver Island, Central Vancouver Island, north up to Alaska, and then off Southern Vancouver Island in Washington, extending sometimes all the way down to California, are Southern residents.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_01: So these populations or subpopulations, they don't mix at all, even though they're all feeding on the same prey and acoustically they're they're quite different from one another because there are these different dialects, but nonetheless, they're all basically the same kind of whale, but they don't mix.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_01: And our main concern with this is that the some of these populations, especially what the the southern residents that are very well, very well known in Washington State and and around southern uh British Columbia, there's only 74 or or so of those in the population, and they are inbred, and it it may be a great detriment to their potential survival in the future.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_01: Other populations like the northern residents, there's about 350 of those, and southern Alaskan residents, there's probably up to a thousand of those.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so those populations are still very small, but they're not small enough for inbreeding to be a real problem.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_01: But for the southern residents in particular, they will only breed within their population.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_01: They don't mix with other resident types or the transients or the offshore type.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_01: So it, yeah, it's a big problem for these very small populations.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, I just as a sidebar I need to ask, because you've referred to them as both orcas or killer whales?
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_01: Well, they answered anything, really.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_01: You know, they're called blackfish in the old days.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_01: And and uh yeah, it's it's I grew up calling them killer whales, and so I that's what we do in in the sort of scientific literature.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_01: They're usually referred to as killer whales.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_01: But um the people are are quite passionate sometimes that we can't call them killer whales, that they should be orcas.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_01: But if you actually look at the derivation of the term orca, it means uh belonging to the kingdom of the dead.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_01: Uh you know, it's a it's back in early Latin that um and so it's it's uh you're not really doing them much of a uh a good service referring to them as orcas as opposed to killer whales.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_01: So um yeah, they're uh there's various different names.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_01: Uh the First Nations on our coast have many different names for the for the species.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_01: So if you if you tally them up globally, because killer whales are probably second to humans as the most widely distributed mammal on the planet.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_02: Really?
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_01: Different cultures all over the world have different names for them.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_01: So um yeah.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_02: All right.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_02: So it's not uh it's not an exact one or the other.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_02: Because you often hear, you know, people you'll you'll use the term I am sorry about that.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_02: Um you'll use the term killer whale, and you know, the the self-righteous want to immediately correct us, and you know, they're only to be called orcas.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_02: And I I just sometimes wonder about that.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_02: That doesn't seem to be breeding a great relationship between people who are somewhat interested and people who are not fully interested.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_01: I I think I I agree.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_01: I think killer whale is an unfortunate common name because uh killer, what does that mean?
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_01: You know, certainly they are killers, but m all predators are killers, and they're no Which is almost everything.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_02: Almost all birds are predators.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_01: Insects have feelings too.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_01: But again, orca really, its derivation is essentially the sort of the same as as killer whale uh if you look back at uh the etymology of of uh of the name.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, like I said, they they um when I was young, they were all called blackfish.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, they're they're not just black, they're black and white, and they're not fish.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_01: But it's interesting also that they are dolphins, that they're the largest of the dolphins, uh.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_01: So they're not really a whale per se.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_01: But of course, whale and dolphin it's like what a boat or a ship in in many sense.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_01: It's all to do with relative size.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_02: Also, people really like dolphins.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_02: They think they're cute, they like the squeaky noise.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I like dolphins as well, but it's easier to group, I think, a killer whale with larger cetaceans.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but none.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, so a couple of more things that I wanted to ask you.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_02: I interviewed Peter Pyle.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know if you know Peter.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_01: I I I've not met him, but I certainly know of his work uh in the Farallons and so on.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_02: Well, and this is a Farallon story that he shared um um for an upcoming book I have called Why We Love Mammals, which by the way, when we're done, I'll be inviting you to be a part of that book.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_02: But he shared a story that it he spent a quarter of a century on the Farrallons off and on, and they were studying great white sharks.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_02: And you had mentioned the open ocean um pods that focus on sharks, but you didn't mention great whites.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_02: In 1997, um there was a single whale watching boat off the off the Fair-Lones, and um Peter got a call to get out here immediately, and they witnessed their first pod off the Farallons, and it cat they captured and killed um a great white shark, which they had filmed, and the um the shark, the uh killer whales tore it open, pulled out the liver, and swam away, leaving the rest of it.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_02: But, and they're they're speculating that it was the smell of the liver, all the other great whites took off for two months.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_02: They normally had 15 or 20 living around the Fairlands, and they were all gone that day.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_02: And they went as far away, some were tagged, they went as far away as Hawaii.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_02: Um, do you is there is that an ongoing thing?
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_02: Killer whales taking out great white sharks?
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_01: It it seems to be.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_01: The offshore ecotype on this coast um targets sharks, as I mentioned, and they do go just primarily after the liver because it's incredibly rich with lipids.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's highly energetically valuable for the whales.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_01: Um, there in over the last 10 years or so, there's been a lot of work in South Africa that has shown a similar effect with um a small population of killer whales that target great white sharks down in that area, in particular in particular two male killer whales called port and starboard based on the direction that their their bent dorsal fin goes.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_01: And uh evidently these two killer whales have been responsible for for removal of a lot of great white sharks in the area.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_01: But again, the same uh feature that Peter Pyle noticed, sharks that are in the area just disappear when there's been predation on on that species.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so um I think it's called a necromone.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_01: It's like a pheromone, but it's to do with the uh perhaps a scent of the uh the shark that's been killed, and it it causes the others to get out of the area.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_01: So it's uh apparently a real thing.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_02: Well, that that is just it's absolutely fascinating.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_02: I I just the more I learn about this animal, the more I loved it.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_02: As a young man, you know, Jacques Cousteau was my hero, and I kind of thought I would take the path that you took and study killer whales, but um I got married, and the fastest way to afford a house was not through marine biology, unfortunately.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_02: So I shifted gears and I'm only now coming back to it, but I'm absolutely loving it.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_02: And uh, and the more I learn, the the more interesting it becomes.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_02: Now, you've obviously read about these killer whale attacks on sailboats in the uh, I believe in the North Atlantic or off the coast of Europe.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_02: What what do you make of that?
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_02: What's going on there?
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's a fascinating phenomenon that's not going away.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_01: It's still continuing, and it's been many years that this particular pod of orcas has been has been targeting sailboats, especially and breaking their rudder.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_01: And the rudders, when they're broken on these boats, they often have a big hole in the bottom and they go down.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_01: And so uh many of us have been discussing this and pondering it.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_01: And a few years ago, I went to a special workshop in Madrid, in Spain, to meet with other uh killer whale specialists and and try and come to grips with that's what what this is all about.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_01: And it's been misinterpreted widely, I think, that this is an aggressive behavior, and it's clearly not an aggressive behavior.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_02: We're you're gonna have to explain that because it sounds aggressive.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_01: Aaron Powell It does sound aggressive, and with the name killer whale, you know, people immediately assume that the that they're out to eat the people in the boat or something, but they're not.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_01: What it is And there hasn't been a fatality, right?
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_01: Aaron Powell Not that I'm aware of, no.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_01: There's been some serious problems for people when they're in the water, but they've so far been uh been rescued and so on.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_01: But again, uh the cover whales, there's no record of them killing a human anywhere intentionally in the wild.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_01: And um so that's not that's not what's driving this.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_01: It appears to be simply a fad, uh a sudden development of a novel behavior that spreads in the population.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_01: And uh it's just a play thing, really.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_01: Uh but what I learned in this workshop in in Madrid was that these are, well, we knew that these were bluefin tuna specialist whales, that they go after bluefin tuna that migrate in and out of the Mediterranean for spawning, and they target these fish.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um but what I didn't know going into this was that the abundance of bluefin tuna has increased dramatically in recent years.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_01: So I think what's behind this is that these whales that specialize on bluefin tuna, they don't have to work so hard to find their daily food requirements.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_01: They have all the spare time on their hands all of a sudden.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_01: And so, you know, they just can't eat one more tuna.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_01: So what do we do now?
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_01: Well, there's what's this over here?
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_01: It's a boat.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't want to be anthropomorphic to any great degree, but they probably think, well, let's go check it out, and there's this thing moving underneath it.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um and so they push at it and it pushes back and it just escalates to the point, you know, these are powerful animals that they'll push it back and they'll break it.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_01: And so it um it appears to be almost like a game to them.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_01: There are other sort of fads that we've noticed on this coast.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_01: For example, southern residents in certain years have started um swimming around with salmon on their heads.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_01: And well, it's a we it's a weird f fad, basically.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_01: It may only last for one summer, and a lot of whales are doing it.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_01: Typically it's with salmon species that they don't prefer, like sockeye salmon.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_01: But they'll the salmon will be they'll kill the salmon and then push it around on their head.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_01: And it's not just one or two animals, it's many in the group.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_01: And then the behavior will disappear for several years, and then suddenly they'll be doing it again.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_01: So these whales are complex creatures that have sort of these cultural quirks that uh may be unique to certain populations.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_01: For example, northern resident killer whales up off northern Vancouveran, they are very much into rubbing on smooth pebble beaches.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_01: It's a behavior that they do daily, and they'll scratch for an hour or two rubbing on these smooth pebbles, and it just seems to be pleasurable.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_01: The southern residents that have this weird occasional uh salmon hat wearing behavior, they don't rub anywhere.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_01: It's just not part of their culture.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_01: And so every different killer whale population has different cultural traits that um sometimes are very sometimes are quite strange, like breaking sailboats, um, and other times um are, you know, they're often related to, of course, how they make a living, whether they're washing seals off a off an ice floe in the Antarctic or coming up on beaches in Patagonia to snatch young sea lions in the shallows.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_01: They're all highly specialized whales that um that have these quirks that or techniques for for foraging that are passed on across generations.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_02: That's just fascinating.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_02: And the idea that it's possible they're doing this because they've got some free time and it's really hard to play Sudoku uh when you're underwater, so uh maybe taking out a sailboat is something they do.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I'm curious because you mentioned not wanting to be anthropomorphic, and I've I've spent a lot of time thinking about that and talking to a lot of people about it, and I I find it's almost impossible to not be.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_02: I understand that old school is absolutely don't, you know, humans are at this level and all other animals are down here, and we shouldn't try to project.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_02: But do you find it borderline impossible to not do that?
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_02: To try to wonder, you know, what I mean, you know, it's I mean, because what you mentioned is anthropomorphic, right?
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, you've got some free time, idle hands, and they're like teenage boys, you know?
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_02: It's like, well, I gotta do something.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_02: I might as well sink a couple of sailboats and you know I mean, what what is your what is your real thought on anthropomorphism and and is it really something that it's so critical to avoid?
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_02: Or or is it just natural?
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_01: Uh yeah, I think it's natural.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_01: You see young whales out there uh when we're working with a pod that are uh playing with each other, they're playing with objects in their environment, like you know, pushing a jellyfish on their nose or or getting some kelp on their flipper and swimming around with it.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_01: You know, they're they're doing things that we can immediately relate to.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, these are very social animals that live in very complex societies that are very stable across years.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_01: Perhaps the most stable is the resident type, where a young whale born into the pod stays in that pod for life, um, whether it's male or female.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_01: They don't leave the group into which they're born, which is bizarre.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_01: Uh most, just about all social mammals, with the exception of these orcas, um uh have dispersal where uh when an individual reaches maturity, it leaves on its own accord for mating opportunities or it gets kicked out.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_01: And ultimately it's a mechanism to prevent uh inbreeding.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_01: But uh the resident killer whales have a trick where they can recognize the relatedness of of different pods that they mix with by dialects that encode the different relatedness.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_01: But in any event, getting back to the anthropomorphic sort of question, uh yeah, I think um you know we try and be objective scientists and so on, but um uh you can't help but uh interpret what a lot of what you're seeing in these socially advanced complex animals as something that we can relate to as humans.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_01: And so uh it it's just a natural thing that people do, I think.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_02: I just I love that.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_02: I I really do.
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_02: And um now is it my understanding is that most of the pods are matriarch-driven.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_02: They're the ones passing down the knowledge, they're the ones kind of running things and letting everybody know what's gonna be happening, where we're gonna hunt, how we're gonna hunt, who's gonna hunt.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_01: The the old grannies, they live uh perhaps uh twenty or thirty years after they have menopause in their early 40s, which is a very unusual feature for a mammal.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, of course, humans have menopause.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_01: And the idea is that these matriarchs, the old grannies, as we call them, they're the ones with all the knowledge about where to go to intercept which run of salmon or where to go to find young harbor seals for, you know, if it's a transient type.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_01: And um early on, of course, we we didn't recognize this, and uh it was thought that the males with the big dorsal fin in their, you know, in the group would be the mating males, the, the, the bulls that are making all the babies in the group.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_01: It's not it at all.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_01: They're the grown-up sons of the females in the group.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_01: And so new pods form, at least in the resident type of killer whale, form by uh splitting of the uh formerly large group.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_01: So if a pod gets too big, it starts splitting into smaller groups that spend less and less time together.
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_01: Their dialects gradually drift apart and they become kind of a unique social entity on their own.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_01: So it's a very unusual social system and one that is um without precedent in other mammals.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_02: I think that's that's fantastic.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_02: All right, two final things and I'll let you go, which I hate to do.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_02: Um number one, I understand there's a pod, and I could be completely wrong on this, so just correct me.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_02: But I understand there's a pod in Alaska where all of the males were killed in the Exxon Valdez accident, and there's females only, and so eventually the pod will just die off because they don't let other males in.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's called the AT1 group, and it was very small when first identified in the in the early 80s, and then in 1989 the Exxon Valdez spill happened, and there were photographs of this pod um swimming right through the oil.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_01: And so it's clear that there was a lot of mortalities in that group from exposure to the oil, but they were uh precarious even before the spill.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_01: They've never been seen to have a calf in the group, and they will uh they will go extinct, basically.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_01: They they will die off.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_01: And and this may be not such an unusual thing for small, highly specialized killer whale groups that once they're they get too small and they they won't outbreed with other groups because they're kind of xenophobic in many ways, um that they uh they will just wink out over time.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_01: And this is one of the dangers being a specialist form uh of of predator, because if if they come to rely on a particular kind of prey where they're that's their entire focus, if that prey suddenly becomes uh less available or not sufficiently available to support them, they will, as I mentioned earlier, they will succumb to higher rates of mortality and may just vanish.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_01: And so um we've done some modeling exercises with this and showing that specialists can be very successful as long as everything's stable.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_01: But if things go unstable, they can uh they can have a higher probability of of disappearing.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_02: And eventually everything becomes unstable, right?
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, exactly.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, there really is no flat line in nature.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_01: That that's right.
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_01: And and so there there's an advantage to being a specialist, you know, the track of all trades, master of none.
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um the generalist specialist can actually outcompete the generalist because they get really good at what they are doing, but it's precarious and they can they can be very vulnerable.
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_01: Now, it's a kind of a different situation with this group in Prince William Sound, Alaska.
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_01: They are mammal specialists, but they didn't seem to um mix with the broader population of the transients, the Gulf of Alaska transients, as they're called.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_01: And so they may have already been highly uh inbred and and the population had shrunk to the point that the Exxon Valdez uh was kind of almost the final straw.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_01: There are some still alive today, but they're not going to persist for much longer.
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_02: Hey, uh, for those of you watching, I'm throwing my email up on the screen, Scott at naturally scott.com.
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_02: Any comments you have, please send them.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_02: Any questions for John, send them, and I'll pass them on to him.
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but we always appreciate the comments and the questions.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_02: John, my final question for you on what I hope is the first of at least a couple of podcasts, because this has been fascinating.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_02: Tell us about your your most interesting, your most exciting day in the field.
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_02: What, or just pick one, I'm sure picking a single one isn't going to be easy, but just grab one out of the air and share that with us.
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I guess I guess the most the most exciting for me was um after you know 30 years of uh 20 years of uh of studying killer whales and learning about them here in British Columbia, um, I got married, um, met my my future wife on a natural history tour boat.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_01: I was naturalist and she was uh cooking.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway, we got married, and for our honeymoon, we went to Patagonia, and we spent three weeks on the beach there uh watching these uh killer whales that are highly specialized in coming up on the beach, partially stranding themselves to snatch young and and naive sea lion pups.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_01: And so uh it was very dramatic.
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_01: We'd make a little blind out of bushes on the beach so that the sea lions can't see us and stay away from this particular beach that they're very vulnerable at.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_01: And um, yeah, it's just like clockwork.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_01: At high tide, the orcas would come in and they they uh just mill around until they hear the little sea lion pups swimming in the shallows with their flippers, making noise in the pebbles, and then they rush in and and grab them.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_01: So um it's kind of the ultimate um predator experience when it comes to orcas is seeing that traumatic behavior on the beach.
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_01: So that's that's just one one of many um adventures that I've been fortunate enough to have to experience with.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_02: I would put that down as an unusual honeymoon.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_02: I I don't think you know people think Paris, Niagara Falls, maybe Disney World.
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_02: No, we're gonna go watch Orcas uh tackle some some sea lions.
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_02: Well, congratulations on coming up with something that's probably unique and certainly fairly uncommon.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_02: So there you go.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_02: John, thank you so much for being with me today.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_02: I've really, really enjoyed it.
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_02: If you're watching us on YouTube, by the way, do me a favor and hit subscribe.
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_02: Every time you do, YouTube pushes the videos out to more people and they get to hear stories like John's.
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_02: If you want to drop a comment or click like, that's fantastic.
• 34:21
  SPEAKER_02: We really want people to get out there and enjoy this.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_02: John, I really sincerely appreciate you being here today.
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_02: This has been fascinating.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you so much.
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_01: Well, thank you, Scott.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_01: It's been a real pleasure, and and I really enjoyed doing this.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_02: So fantastic.
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_02: I wrap up every show the same way, John.
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_02: I implore people to get outside and get outside.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_02: I don't care if it's your back porch or your front yard or your local park or your beach or an international trip.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_02: Get out there.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_02: My goodness, you never know what you're gonna see on one of these trips.
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_02: And when you are out there, stay safe and stay curious.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_02: John, thank you again for being a part of this.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_02: Everybody watching, thank you so much for doing this.
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_02: I'm Scott Harris, your host of Naturally Scott.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_02: I hope you love this show as much as I love recording it, and that we'll see you again next week.
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_02: Have a terrific day.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_00: You've been listening to Naturally Scott with Scott Harris.
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_00: Naturally Scott is hosted by Scott Harris, produced by Justin Harris, directed and edited by Frank Sierra.
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_00: Follow us on our YouTube channel at Naturally Scott and Instagram at naturally Scott Harris.
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_00: If this conversation resonated with you, please follow the show, leave a review, and share it with someone who needs to hear it.
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_00: Naturally Scott thanks you for viewing and listening to this podcast.