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.