Arbitrary Categories

We humans are really good at categorizing things.  Pattern recognition is, after all, a survival skill:  these plants are edible, these will kill you if you eat them; this animal is good to eat, this one will steal your food, this one thinks you are good to eat, etc. These things can be somewhat arbitrary, though, since different human cultures disagree on which animals are good to eat vs. which animals are good to keep as pets or working animals.  Maybe the killer whales do, too.  After all, to a large carnivorous cetacean, a harbor seal pup and a mature Chinook salmon are about the same level of filling, but a resident will pass by the first to eat the second and a transient, vice versa.

I find it a curious thing, how humans categorize things and then just assume that categorization has some inherent truth to it, when most often those categories are totally based on a particular experience or perception that may have no bearing in greater reality.  Critters on the beach at low tide are a good example. If you study intertidal marine invertebrates, you will learn about tidal zones and the different animals who live in different zones. It's presented as a kind of gospel truth:  you will never find sea stars above the lower intertidal, there are just some animals who don't ever occur up high on the beach because they would dry out and die in the hot sun.

Once upon a time I was asked to do a beach walk for a group of girl scouts who had been doing a unit on oceans.  It happened to be late November, and the time of their regular meeting was not really a great one for having a low-tide beach walk, but we worked with what we had and explored a narrow strip of rocky shoreline just at sunset.   It was cold, but at least mostly dry that day, and the season was a typically wet one.  I was a little disappointed that, given how low the tide was, we were only going to see a few things--the things I had been taught to find in the upper intertidal, because you only found certain animals there...right?  Imagine my surprise when we discovered green sea urchins and shaggy sea mice waaaaaaay up high on the beach where they "didn't belong." I couldn't understand it, not a single reference I could find could explain this anomaly.

And then I realized: all the research that had been done to categorize the intertidal animals of the Salish Sea had been done during extreme low tides, during the day. As it happens, those daytime low tides here happen near Summer Solstice and into the summer, and our usual summer drought climate means all those tender squishy critters need to stay low on the beach or risk becoming anemone-leather before the next high tide. But in late November, when the days are much shorter, cooler, and wetter, hanging out near the high tide line is not nearly so risky.  It makes good sense, biologically, to mix up your territory, because if you're too predictable, you make easier prey.

Still, it seems this kind of categorization is something humans can't do without. We need categories, hierarchies, levels of affiliation and allegiance.  "Favorites." I am forever perplexed by the idea that each individual needs to have a single, favorite something...color, food, sport, whatever.  Whenever I am posed with a security question for an online account, I need to choose very carefully the question that doesn't require me to declare a "favorite" something, because my favorite now might not be my favorite in a month or a year or even an hour. Consistency, as they say, is the hobgoblin of a small mind.

This is true on online quizzes as well, although it is something of a frivolous example.  Often a quiz will show a number of pictures and ask you where you would prefer to live. If there's a picture of water and a picture of forest, or a picture of a waterfall and a picture of the sea...how do I choose?? I live where all of these things are beautiful together in ways they can't be alone.

So it is gratifying to me to observe one of my favorite summer phenomena in the San Juans: the salt water dragonflies. They do not, of course, breed in salt water, because they are fresh water insects.  But often at the dock, and sometimes even out in the middle of the straits, I will see a big, beautiful, blue darner dragonfly flying past. I first encountered these creatures at alpine lakes in the Oregon Cascades, and remember vividly an afternoon I sat very still letting one hatch out of its larval form on my knee, unfurl its gossamer wings, and eventually fly free. They are one of many species of dragonflies here in the Pacific Northwest, and among the largest. Their abdomens are like chips of cloudless sky, so vividly blue. (This will sound ironic, but they are among my favorite creatures...yes, I have several, but I can never choose one above the others, even though it might seem like I could given the primary subject of this blog.) To see these creatures that you will never find in any field guide to a saltwater shoreline flitting about over the open water reminds me that, whatever categories our human minds place on the world, the world will keep on doing what it likes. The dragonflies love to fly over saltwater here, and to me it's a marriage of the marine and upland environments that I recognize in my soul as well.

This blue darner flew into the cabin on my whale watching boat near Smith Island, miles from any freshwater source. It circled the cabin and landed, apparently exhausted, on a window sill. I kept it safe for the rest of the cruise and let it go at home, where I knew it would find plenty of companions.

Busy, busy...lots of time on the boat and various other obligations are keeping me from writing a proper post just now.  But two quick things:

1) IT'S RAINING.  This is wonderful.  The temperatures are cooler and there has been rain off and on for the past couple of days.  It doesn't break the drought, but it sure feels and smells fantastic.

2) A happy story from further north, of a young transient killer whale who found herself stranded but, with a little help from some humans, rode out the low tide and swam free again. 

Drama in the deep?

No sooner do I post about Onyx and Granny when there seems to be something up between them.  Apparently J2 Granny is spending more of her time now with the J19 family group, composed of J19 Shachi, J41 Eclipse, and new grandbaby J51 (not yet given a nickname). Whale watchers out yesterday reported Onyx traveling along and making some pretty loud, piteous calls on the San Juan Island hydrophones last night.  Onyx was spotted with a K pod family group today.  This is all very curious and I am wishing, not for the first or last time, there was some way to know what was going on with the SRKW socially, some way to understand it aside from the human assumptions that are all we have with which to interpret their behaviors.

L87 Onyx was born into L pod, but lost his mother as a subadult.  He hung around with K pod for a while, before J8 Spieden seemed to adopt him when he was a young adult.  Spieden, who often traveled with Granny and Ruffles, died in 2013, and it was at that point that Onyx and Granny seemed to become close companions. 

Recent research has shown that adult male orcas who lose their mothers are significantly more likely to die themselves in the subsequent year, although don't know why that is. This research points to a compelling mother-son relationship, which seemed in Onyx, Spieden and Granny's case to be so important as to generate a foster-son relationship between the younger male and the matriarchs.  But at the end of the day, we've only been researching this species, and specifically this population, for about 40 years now, so to claim that we "know" anything about animals whose interactions we can only observe for the fraction of their lifetimes they spend at the surface of the Salish Sea is pretty presumptuous.

In any case, I'll be watching what happens with Onyx closely.  He is a favorite of mine (really, which of them aren't?  But he is one I can identify easily at a distance, so I am more aware of time spent with him), and I hope everything works out in his favor.  Hopefully I will be fortunate enough to see him tomorrow, when I'm out on the whale boat for the day.

On Names for Living Things

Names are curious things. What we call another living thing says as much about as, or more, than it does about them. Think of what we call each other, the endearments and the epithets, inspired by our own perceptions and feelings toward another and not necessarily about any inherent truth. In the Western world, most often our parents choose our names for us before we are born, based on the memories of past relatives or their hopes for the person we will be, without knowing anything about our personalities.

There are some who find the name "Killer Whale" problematic. How can assign the name "Killer" to  these animals, who demonstrate such strong family bonds, emotions, and intelligence?  Who can be so like us, gentle and curious, expressive and loving?  A passenger once said to me, "Killer?  But they're so beautiful!" as if beauty and killing are somehow opposite.

If you've ever seen the Transient Killer Whales hunt, you know where the name "killer" comes from.  They are vicious, calculating, cunning hunters. They are merciless toward their prey, seeming to employ psychological warfare as much as their powerful jaws in the hunt. I have seen a transient killer whale drape the entrails of a seal over her rostrum like a trophy. I have seen porpoises hurled through the air, frantically flailing their tails in an effort to escape the killers. There is no question why this is one of their common English names.

Many prefer to refer to these animals as "orcas," derived from their Latin name, Orcinus orca. However, the Latin translates roughly as "demon from hell," which isn't really much better than "killer" in my estimation.

Locally, "blackfish" was the term I was raised with.  My grandfather, a commercial fisherman, railed against the blackfish who competed with him for salmon. When my mother saw them swim past our house one morning, when I was in my earliest throes of whale obsession, she burst into the house calling, "the blackfish are out!" It is the name preferred by my Snohomish Lushootseed language teacher (the Lushootseed word for this animal is impossible to print in an English alphabet, and nearly impossible for a native speaker of English to pronounce).  When I made the mistake of using the word "orca" in class, he informed us that he refused to use the word because it "was from a dead language meant to confuse people," and that statement has been the source of much reflection for me about how we use language to relate to other living things.  Of course, "blackfish" is also the name of that famous movie about Tillikum and Dawn Brancheau.  Because I still occasionally run across a passenger who doesn't know that killer whales are mammals, though, I don't use "blackfish."

And then there is the matter of which population of killer whales we're talking about.  The SRKW are usually referred to locally as "residents," more recently "rezzies," (not a term I use). That is the term that distinguishes them from the "transients," with a much more offensive shorthand term. But then some people were upset that "transient" had a negative connotation, and decided to call them "Bigg's" killer whales. We might just as easily have started calling them Salmon Eaters and Mammal Eaters, but that wasn't how it happened.

As I mentioned in my last post, I dislike naming one animal after another, which is why I still refer to the mammal eating killer whales as Transients. I also prefer to call Dall's porpoises by their alternate name, "spray porpoise," which I feel is more descriptive of their behavior anyway. Of course if I refer to them that way nobody knows what I'm talking about, because Dall's porpoise is the accepted English common name...not so, yet, with the "Bigg's Whale."

It is my impression that naming one animal after another (human) animal reinforces a perception of humans owning animals, being somehow removed from the animal experience and superior to it. Any student of animal behavior can tell you how different from animals we are not, the desire to anthropomorphize aside.

After all, if I told you I was thinking of a beautiful living creature that lived all over the world, had different diets, customs and languages among its different populations, but had in common strong family ties and emotional bonds as well as intelligence and curiosity, and the ability and propensity to be a vicious killer...would you know if I was talking about a human, or a killer whale?

Renewal

It has been a long time!

When it was confirmed that J1 Ruffles had died, I lost heart for posting. The whales seemed to lose heart too.  Fewer breaches, less excitement. And very few babies, a big concern for the fragile Southern Resident population.

Two years ago, the Fraser River Chinook salmon run was dismally low.  We hardly saw the SRKW at all.  Transient Killer Whales* came in to the Salish Sea and gave my whale watch boat something to see, but I missed my friends.  Happily, they were gorging on record Chinook runs on coastal rivers, far beyond the range of my boat. 

Beginning last fall, we started to see the fruits of those record runs, when a new Lpod baby was spotted in late summer.  But sadly, that baby didn't survive.  Another huge blow came last December when J32 Rhapsody was found dead on a Vancouver Island beach, pregnant with a full-term female calf, her first.

And then J16 Slick, 42 years old, surprised us all with a brand new calf first spotted on New Year's Eve. Two more calves were born to Jpod--including Slick's own first grandcalf--and another newborn was seen with Lpod.  Four new babies!  And so far, all are doing well.  I am so grateful.

This summer has provided me a lot of time with my friends, watching the new babies play, seeing Ruffles' grandson, Ripple, growing into a healthy subadult, and Ruffles' son Blackberry growing his adult fin that looks more and more like his father's each time I see him.  L87 Onyx has been given the coveted spot of J2 Granny's foster-son, and it makes me glad to know that the orphaned Onyx and Granny have each other.

The whale boat delivers curious gifts sometimes. A couple weeks ago, I met a pair of women on the boat who were just finishing a week at a writers' retreat on Whidbey Island I have sometimes considered applying to.  They encouraged me and extolled the wonders of the retreat location, and were captivated by the whales and what I could tell them about their social structure.  We spent most of the southbound cruise in deep conversation, speculating about the whales' ways of being.  I felt really energized by the encounter.  In what I am sure is a related development, in recent days my muse has been pestering me to write for a wider audience than just myself, so I'm reactivating this blog to that end.  We'll see what the muse has in mind for me next.

*There are those in the research community who insist upon calling these whales Bigg's Killer Whales, or even Bigg's Whales, after Dr. Michael Bigg, who is considered the "father of whale research" in these parts.  (J26 Mike is named in his honor, too.)  My personal feeling is that we shouldn't call animals after people, who are, after all, animals too. More on this later.