Two orcas from the Pacific Northwest were spotted with dead salmon on their heads, an act first documented in the 1980s. Scientists aren’t sure what it means.
By Jonathan Edwards, The Washington PostIn this Jan. 18, 2014, file photo, endangered orcas from the J pod swim in Puget Sound west of Seattle, as seen from a federal research vessel that had been tracking the whales. People have been buzzing for weeks because scientists and a whale watcher this fall on separate occasions spotted two killer whales with dead salmon atop their heads while swimming in Puget Sound in Washington state.
Two weeks after Pasola’s sighting, Deborah Giles, science and research director at the nonprofit Wild Orca, was aboard the organization’s research vessel Cheena in water just off the northern Seattle metro area when she looked over her right shoulder and saw an orca balancing a salmon on her head - long enough to notice but not long enough for Giles to identify the whale or for her field assistant to wheel around and get a photograph.
But they can also just as quickly die out, which is what happened to the salmon-hat craze of 1987. While observers caught the occasional salmon-on-head moment over the ensuing decades, they were few and far between, never reaching the heights of the late 80s. Giles said her recent research shows that, although female killer whales are getting pregnant and giving birth at relatively high rates, fewer than a third of those calves survive, which Giles attributes to the ever-present threats plaguing the southern residents, particularly that they are normally in “chronic stages of being hungry.”
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