We have lost a number of Southern Resident orcas in the last year. The hard thing to take is that J-32 was a young breeding mother, and died with a fetus inside her. First thoughts has been that the calf died in utero and may have been what killed the mother. With the population so low, the loss of even one young cow is truly painful. We have to admit that the recovery efforts are failing, for reasons we still don’t fully understand, but have some strong suspicions. Among them are pollution, fish and herring stocks, and an inability to recover from the theft of their young and the murder of their old from the pods in the 1960s and 70s, as documented in “Black Fish”.
Canadian marine mammal scientists who spent most of Saturday performing a necropsy on killer whale J-32 say the female orca had been pregnant with a full-term fetus.
We don’t have much time to get this trend reversed. And Canada is not helping by allowing destruction of the habitat in the Mt. Polley Mine Spill to dump hundreds of tons of mercury into the Frasier River system with no cleanup. This will directly affect their food source, by poisoning the Frasier River salmon that spawn in and above the lake.
Filed under: Puget Sound | Tagged: Puget Sound |
