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Lasting Legacies
 

During Orca Month in 2023, through stories and videos, we'll honor the Lasting Legacies of the Southern Resident orcas and celebrate the legacy of the 50th anniversary of the Endangered Species Act.

Coming soon!

 

Bonnie Gretz

L43 Jelly Roll 1972 - 2006 & L95 Nigel 1996 -2016. Sketch and story by Bonnie Gretz


7/11/99:

While attending "Whale School" in the San Juan Islands with a professor from Orange Coast College in California, Dennis Kelly, I had a lovely encounter with L43 Jelly Roll (named after Jelly Roll Morton for some reason!), and her young calf, L95 Nigel (born in 1996). We found L pod in Haro Strait and were slowly cruising with them, when Jelly Roll surfaced right behind our boat, practically on the swim step! She went under the boat, and surfaced again within 5' of us, with the calf right next to her. Then she disappeared, and left him bobbing around on the surface. He checked us out, but patiently waited for mom to reappear. He then took off, and we could see her underneath him. The encounter lasted about 10 minutes, and I felt privileged to have "baby sat" little Nigel for Jelly Roll! I did see him again as he grew into a beautiful young male, and was devastated when I learned of his death in March of 2016. The drawing is from my whale journal, which I have kept from the beginning of my adventures with wild orcas and other cetaceans, from 1994....and happily still adding wonderful encounters to the third volume!



Debbie Stewart



Skagit K13 and Ripple K44 Photo by Sara Hysong-Shimazu, Story by Debbie Stewart



It was a glorious Independence Day in 2011. Azure blue skies with a few wispy clouds provided a canopy over Tahoma and Kulshan bursting from the horizon like sentinels shielding a carefully guarded secret of evergreen and marine jewels. My mother and nephew were in town visiting (I was in the last couple of weeks of a six-month temporary work assignment with my permanent home in Austin, TX). We had a lot of activities planned for the week and one of the highlights we were most looking forward to was a whale watch. As our good fortune would have it, members of all three Southern Resident orca pods had gathered to the southwest of San Juan Island.


The Southern Resident orcas were new to me. Until about six weeks prior to this day, I was unaware of the capture period. I was unaware of the different orca ecotypes. I was unaware of the many tribulations facing the Southern Residents with lack of prey, toxins, noise and how these things impacted the reproductive capabilities of this endangered pod.


I met J2 Granny, the oldest living orca and matriarch and her companion L87 Onyx and many other members of all three pods. I heard their stories. I started to understand their culture, language and rich social bonds. It was nice to see them foraging, socializing and presumedly having a good day for a wild orca. I could feel something awakening in me. A hint of something yet to come that these orcas would not go quietly from my life even as I prepared to depart the Pacific Northwest for what I expected to be forever. And little did anyone know that they had a big secret in store that would be revealed very soon.

Less than 48 hours later, on the morning of July 6, the secret was revealed. K27 Deadhead was seen with a newborn calf K44 born sometime in the previous few hours. It was great news! However, by this time, I also knew that he had an uphill battle ahead of him to survive his first year. I spent the next many months following Orca Network sightings for news of the pods and reports of K44 and his family. At long last on April 26, 2012, K Pod was back in Puget Sound and K44 was with them! I felt elation and relief.


K44 was been given the human name of Ripple. For me there could not be a more apt name as Ripple has left an indelible impression which swelled into a wave that washed me to the shores of Puget Sound on this very day in 2015. I have been inspired to become a certified naturalist, a board member of a local non-profit dedicated to whales, and spend countless volunteer hours toward causes related to orcas and the Salish Sea ecosystem.


Ripple is nearly ten years old now. He remains K27’s only living calf and the last calf born to K-Pod. I have only seen him a handful of times in his young life, but those memories are vibrant and precious. Some days it is difficult to come to terms with the endangered status of the Southern Residents and the failed policies that have led us to this place. But alas, that wave was started by a “Ripple” continues to inspire and propel me forward.

Monika Wieland Shields


K40 Raggedy ~ c.1963-2012 Photo and story by Monika Wieland Shields



K40 Raggedy was part of my first-ever “close encounter” with the Southern Residents. It was July 2001 and my parents and I were aboard the Bon Accord on a whale-watch trip out of Friday Harbor. We met up with a superpod near Open Bay, and the boat had been shut off for an hour as we watched groups of whales in every direction intermingling with one another and spyhopping, tail slapping, and breaching. Three whales suddenly popped up aiming for the boat and I slid down off the roof of the Bon Accord, video camera in hand. As K18 Kiska, her son K21 Cappuccino, and likely daughter K40 Raggedy circled the boat I could look directly down and see them underwater. Raggedy surfaced directly in front of me and the video recording captured my sixteen-year-old voice, shaky with excitement, exclaiming, “I got wet from the spray! Oh my God!” Needless to say Raggedy had a special place in my heart from that moment on, but she would remain a whale full of many more questions than I ever got answers.

Why is she K40?


From the get-go I wondered how we had a whale numbered K40 when there were, at the time, no whales K35 through K39. It turns out this is because she, along with the rest of her family group, were originally designated as L-Pod whales. Before 1977 they were always seen with L-Pod. Then, between 1977 and 1981 they started being seen with Ks, and after 1981 were almost always seen with Ks. Michael Bigg suspected they might be Ks due to their acoustic call types, and in 1986, coinciding with the birth of K21 Cappuccino into this family group, the switch from L to K was officially announced, the only time any Southern Residents have had their pod designation changed. Raggedy's family was our first clue that matrilines are probably more stable than pods, as we've seen other whales and groups of whales seemingly shift pod associations for both short and long lengths of time.


Why was her fin so ragged?


Raggedy’s name came from the five notches on the trailing edge of her dorsal fin. While it’s not uncommon for Southern Residents to get notches in their fins, we know very little about how they acquire them, and that remains true in Raggedy’s case. While Bigg’s killer whales may acquire some of their scars from their marine mammal prey fighting back, that wouldn’t be the case for the fish-eating Southern Residents. While some theorize entanglement scars might be a possibility, the whales do often rough-house with each other as evidenced by the rake marks from orca teeth they often have on their bodies. It’s possible these notches come from play or even discipline from other whales, but we will never know for sure how Raggedy got her notches.


What’s her relationship to the rest of her family?


While there is a genealogy written out for Raggedy’s sub-group of K-Pod (the K18 and K30 matrilines), it seems the mother-offspring relationships have never really been clear as the family associations were reorganized several times. What is known is that, despite living to be nearly 50 years old, Raggedy was never seen with a calf, leading to speculation that she was probably infertile. Unlike other females without offspring of their own, I never saw Raggedy babysitting or playing with calves of other whales. This always led me to wonder if it was possible that maybe she never wanted offspring if she didn’t have the natural mothering instinct.


30+ years after Raggedy’s sub-group was first misidentified as part of L-Pod they have remained somewhat “rogue”, clearly K-Pod whales by their acoustics and dominant associations but still sometimes breaking off for weeks or months at a time to travel with J-Pod, L-Pod, or even off on their own. After the death of K18 Kiska in 2004, Raggedy and Cappuccino were the only remaining members of this sub-group, but they then seemingly recruited K16 Opus and her son K35 Sonata to their wandering ways.


Raggedy went missing in during the summer of 2012, leaving the adult male K21 Cappuccino as the only living member of their family group and essentially sealing their matriline’s fate of eventual extinction. Cappuccino is one of the rare males to find a way to survive after losing his close female relations, with a continuing solid bond with Opus and her son. As a male now in his 30s, I’m hopeful that even if there are no more female members of their matriline, he will still ensure their line continues on into the future by fathering calves of his own. Every time I see Cappuccino I think about Raggedy, the whale who was his closest companion for the 8 years following his mother Kiska’s death. That is how I will always remember her: right beside the towering fin of Cappuccino, one of the easiest whales to identify regardless of the conditions due to her one-of-a-kind dorsal fin.





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