"I think it is pretty exciting and long overdue," said University of Washington whale researcher David Bain.
The last federal money for field studies was awarded in 1972, and helped Friday Harbor Wash., resident Ken Balcomb of the Center for Whale Research begin counting the whales each year. Since then, Balcomb has struggled to find private money to maintain the annual census, the effort that tipped off experts that the whale population had plummeted from 99 to 78 in just five years. Scientists say that new orca births have brought the count up to 82 as of last summer, but the numbers are still low, and researchers all over Puget Sound now agree that research is needed to figure out why the population is dropping. Orca researchers say they could use as much as $5 million over the next three to four years.
"This is a huge shift in priorities," Bain said. "It is a really big step forward, but it is short of what we need to do."
Generally, Bain and other researchers agree that studies should focus on three principal concerns: toxic chemicals, which may be causing immune and reproductive problems; food availability; and the effect of whale-watching, which can stress the whales. Scientists may learn many important things about the whales, he said, such as how to classify them for additional protections. Listing these whales as endangered would protect their habitat and force a cleanup of Puget Sound, empowering special interest groups to sue over non-compliance. In order to be listed, though, an 11-member National Marine Fisheries Service Biological Review Team had to prove that the group in question had declined beyond repair, and that it was a "significant" species, subspecies, or a distinct population segment.
In theory, Endangered Species Act protection was a no-brainer - the whales were in trouble, and they deserved to be saved. On paper, however, scientists ran into some trouble. Team members agreed the population had declined precipitously, but since current taxonomy classifies all killer whales as a single species worldwide, they vacillated over the "significance" of the Southern Residents to the species overall. Were the Southern Residents genetically distinct? Would the 200-member Northern Resident population re-colonize the habitat if their southern neighbors died off? Biologists claimed there wasn't enough information to answer questions like these, and therefore decreed that labeling the group a distinct population segment was problematic without more specific data.
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