How to Save Orcas? A Report Says "Old Fish"

Everybody likes Southern Resident Killer Whales (especially when SRKWs are billed as our friendly neighborhood “orcas”), but collectively, we aren’t doing enough to save them.

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We have a pretty good idea what Southern Resident Killer Whales need and what they’re not getting. Now, a group of 31 orca scientists has released a report that sets out a large number of things that we should be doing to save the whales we claim to value. Most of these recommendations are pretty familiar. But some are explosive and they have largely been off-limits for discussion by government groups reluctant to enrage commercial fishers, recreational fishers, or tribes.

The scientists involved work in both the U.S. and Canada. They developed this consensus report at a three-day March workshop in Vancouver. The new report talks about familiar stresses caused by underwater noise from vessels large and small, and by the toxic chemicals that wind up in SRKWs’ fat, and it recommends steps toward mitigating them.

But the bottom line is that “[p]rey limitation [that is, the scarcity of their preferred food, Chinook salmon, which are in trouble all along the Pacific coast from California to Alaska] remains the primary constraint on SRKW recovery, and the panel deemed current government initiatives on both sides of the Canada-US border to address this issue to be insufficient.” Those are fighting words.

https://www.postalley.org/2025/07/23/how-to-save-orcas-a-report-says-old-fish/