Jeffries and fellow researchers say the feast was made possible by a year-long overabundance of harbor seals in and around Hood Canal, a natural channel that separates Washington's Olympic and Kitsap peninsulas. For nearly 12 months leading up to this latest frenzy, harbor seal sightings were being reported at an alarming rate. Specialists and local biologists estimate that the seal population had climbed from a base of 800 to as high as 1,200 to 1,500 before the feeding began.
"It was just a matter of time before the whales figured out where the food was hiding," Jeffries told a local news station. "When they found out, it was open season."
To meet metabolic requirements, Jeffries guessed that the average transient killer whale probably needs one or two seals a day. If each whale averaged just one seal daily, the take over two months would have been more than 600 seals. Some of the males in the group probably needed two or three seals a day, adding to the carnage immeasurably.
Still, neither Jeffries nor any of his colleagues in local environmental organizations could remember a group of transients staying in one place for more than two weeks since Orca research began in earnest 30 years ago this month. While resident orca whales remain in the same geographic vicinity for months at a time, transient orcas have been determined to be genetically distinct, and one of the reasons for this distinction is the species' tendency to move around.
In Southeast Alaska, for instance, National Marine Mammal Laboratory biologist Marilyn Dahlheim says transients keep moving for months and months on end - presumably because their prey become wary after a time. Dahlheim says that perhaps these transients found their way into Hood Canal "more or less by accident" while cruising the Pacific coast for prey, or monitoring the spring gray whale migration north to Alaska from Mexico.
"There are a number of reasons why they might have been down there," Dahlheim told a reporter from Anchorage, Alaska. "Unfortunately, since nobody saw them until they crossed under the Hood Canal bridge, we just don't know what to say."
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