ODFW releases draft management plan for Southern Resident orcas

Last year, Oregon added the Southern Resident orca to the state’s endangered species list, giving it added protections nearly two decades after it was federally listed under the endangered species act in 2005. Now, a new draft management plan has been released by the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife to help whale numbers.

Currently there are 73 Southern Resident orcas traveling in three pods along the West Coast. About 48 whales within two of those pods spend time here in Oregon. There are three main causes for declining whale numbers, including loss of prey, disturbance from vessels and environmental contaminants. The agency is currently taking public comment on the plan that hopes to address these issues. Howard Takata is the Southern Resident orca conservation coordinator with ODFW. He joins us to share more on the plan.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. Oregon added the Southern Resident orca to the state’s endangered species list last year, giving it added protections nearly two decades after it was federally listed. Now, the question is, what should the state do to boost the numbers of these endangered marine mammals? The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW) recently released a draft management plan to do just that and it’s currently taking public comments.

Howard Takata is a Southern Resident orca conservation coordinator with ODFW, and he joins us now. It’s great to have you on Think Out Loud.

Howard Takata:  Hi, Dave. Thanks for having me on the program today.

Miller:  What are Southern Resident orcas?

Takata:  The Southern Residents are a unique population of one type of orca, the Resident orca. This type feeds on fish, primarily salmon. There are other types of orcas as well: Transient or Bigg’s orcas, which feed on marine mammals; Offshore orcas, which prey primarily on sharks. And there may be a fourth type of orca that researchers discovered last year that feeds on sperm whales. So just one particular population among many.

Miller:  And where can these be found near Oregon?

Takata:  They did some satellite tagging studies in the past decade and they found that the Southern Residents, although they spend a good part of the year up in the Salish Sea, Washington and British Columbia, two of the three pods will travel down the coast during the winter and spring. So they’ll go up and down the Oregon Coast, going as far south as Monterey Bay, California, looking for salmon during that time. So it’s an important travel corridor for the majority of the Southern Residents. Also, the mouth of the Columbia River, in particular, is considered a foraging hotspot for them, early in the springtime, when Spring Chinook salmon are returning to the Columbia.

Miller:  How big is the population right now?

Takata:  The current population size is 73 orcas. That’s as of last year’s census that they do every year.

Miller:  Sometimes when I’ll ask a question, like that about population, the response is an estimate or range. But these numbers are so small and I guess the monitoring of them is so careful that that’s a real number, right? When that census was done, it was exactly 73 individual orcas?

Takata:  That’s correct, Dave. One thing that’s helpful about orcas is their dorsal fins and the saddle patches, this area of pigmentation right behind the dorsal fin, is unique to each individual orca. So they’ve basically got photographs of all of the Southern Residents. And they do surveys once or twice a year up in the Puget Sound area, so they can get a complete count of every member of the Southern Resident population.

Miller:  That also means that we have a really clear sense for their population decline. It’s been a 25% decrease in just two decades. What are the reasons for that decline?

Takata:  The primary reasons appear to be a lack of prey, specifically a lack of Chinook salmon, which is their preferred prey. Environmental contaminants can compromise their immune systems and affect their reproduction. Disturbance from vessels and other activities produce noise, such as dredging or construction activities.

Miller:  Do all those threats exist in Oregon waters as well?

Takata:  Because they’re down here in the winter and spring, when salmon are relatively scarce compared to other times of the year, I think they are probably affected by a lack of prey during that time, but not so much as maybe in the summer and fall up in the Salish Sea. They used to rely pretty heavily on Chinook salmon returning to the Fraser River in British Columbia. But those populations have declined over the years. So that seems to be sort of a pinch point for them, as far as prey is concerned. That may be why they spend more time near the mouth of the Columbia in the springtime.

They’re exposed to contaminants primarily through their consumption of contaminated prey. So potentially, juvenile Chinook salmon in the Columbia River, if exposed to contaminants during their time in freshwater, can carry those contaminants through their lives. And when they become adults in the ocean and become prey for Southern Residents, those contaminants can then be transferred to Southern Residents. So there’s certainly potential for activities in Oregon to ultimately affect Southern Residents in that way.

And like I mentioned, because they’re down here in Oregon waters mostly in the winter and spring, and there’s not a lot of boating activity off the Oregon Coast during that time, we’re not really sure how often vessels encounter the Southern Residents. So that’s one of the things we’re gonna be looking into.

Miller:  So that gets to my next questions. Where do you feel like, at the state level, you have the most ability to either prevent the loss of population of these orcas or ideally boost the population?

Takata:  One of the biggest things we can do is to recover wild salmon populations. And one of the strongest actions we can take to do that is to restore their habitat. That, in the long run, is gonna be what helps to provide the Southern Residents with an abundant source of prey. So that’s one of the biggest actions, throughout the state, that we can take. And then also addressing contaminants. Like I spoke to earlier, that can affect their prey, Chinook salmon. I would say we’re not really sure about the impact of vessels in Oregon waters and how they might affect the orcas, but that is something I think we are going to look into.

Miller:  How are you gonna do that? One of the pieces of this draft plan is to look into the potential of vessel disturbances. So what is that actually going to mean?

Takata:  What we wanna do is … The State Marine Board is the state agency that actually has the authority to establish new regulations. So ultimately, they’re the ones that would establish and implement a new regulation. But ODFW plans to encourage the State Marine Board to have a meeting of key stakeholders, [including] whale watching charters and guides probably who have the best chance of encountering Southern Residents when they are out there, but also other voting groups and coastal communities, non-governmental organizations, all the relevant stakeholders, to see just how often actual Southern Resident orcas are encountered out in Oregon’s marine waters.

Because there’s so few of them, and they’re down here during the winter and spring, it would be, I think, difficult for us to do some kind of a research study, not to mention it would be very expensive and difficult to do under our current budgets. So I think we’re gonna rely pretty heavily on information that people can provide who are out there all the time.

Miller:  Howard Takata, thanks very much.

Takata:  Thank you, Dave. It’s good talking to you today.

Miller:  Howard Takata is a Southern Resident orca conservation coordinator with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, which has released its first draft plan to manage endangered orcas off the coast. They are now taking public comment on that plan.

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