In what appears to be a repeat scenario from last year, a female adult Southern resident killer whale and her three-and-a-half-year-old calf are rapidly declining in health.
This adult killer whale, called J-17, was looking thin last fall as well, and didn't bounce back over the winter.
According to Joe Gaydos, with the SeaDoc Society out of the University of California, Davis, one of the reasons for her declining health could have to do with pregnancy and lactation.
He said the mother's milk in marine animals is high in fat and it takes a lot of energy to feed a baby.
“You have to produce a lot of milk, a lot of energy to feed that baby. Salmon are scare and once the baby gets weened and is eating fish on her own, if there isn’t a lot of fish to fatten back up on, it creates a negative energy balance.”
Making things worse is a lack of Chinook salmon, increasing shipping noise and traffic.
“I always tell people, ‘the best time to plant a tree was 10 or 20 years ago and the next best time is today.’ It would have been great if we could have been taking stronger actions on chinook and vessel traffic 10 years ago but we haven’t so now is the time to act and I don’t think it's too late,” said Gaydos.
The office of the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans called the deteriorating health of southern resident killer whales "concerning" in a statement.
The total population of southern resident killer whales is 75.