Beam Reach

Do you feel cognitive dissonance when seeing killer whales with this desert backdrop?  As a Pacific Northwesterner used to emerald shorelines and snow-capped volcanoes, I sure do.

Some day Beam Reach will visit the Vermillion Sea and listen in on this playful pod that recently interacted with an ecotour in Baja .

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On July 2, 2008, Val Veirs presented some of the most exciting research results yet gathered by Beam Reach students and staff.  In a talk entitled “Spatial confirmation of vocal communication between a killer whale calf and its natal family” (Powerpoint link), Val presented an analysis (by Val, Jason, and Scott) of a sequence of calls we heard while towing our hydrophone array in fall, 2007.  As these calls occurred, a juvenile whale (Oreo, J38) left its mother and brother, approached the array from the port side, turned underwater, surfaced off our bow, and then regrouped with its family.

With our ability to localize each of the calls, we learned that J38 was exchanging calls with its mother and/or brother.  (The latter two were too close together to determine who was making the calls that came from their area).   Val’s cool Flash animation of the localized orca call sequence marks an initial confirmation that orcas communicate by exchanging calls, rather than by having a leader issue all calls to the rest of the pod.  In fact, one interpretation of the call sequence is that juveniles not only communicate with their immediate elders, but also argue adamantly with their mothers as they rebelliously explore their environment!

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One of the grandest gestures we humans in Western Washington can make for endangered orcas and salmon is to finally remove the Elwha dams.  The result would be a wonderful experiment in salmon restoration, as well as sediment dynamics.

I remember thinking that the removal was just a couple years away when I lived in Port Angeles for a couple months in 2002. For a LONG while we’ve all been thinking that the Elwha dam removal would be imminent.

I also imagined it would be more or less unprecedented.  Yet, today I learned that our neighbors in Oregon have set a remarkably good precedent by breaching the Marmot Dam on the Sandy River, a tributary of the lower Columbia near Portland.  This video of the river removing the dam in a single day should give us all hope in the current plan (sic) to let the Elwah sediment be transported naturally by the river.

How shall we help catalyze similar progress in Washington?

Thanks to the latest edition of Wild Salmon & Steelhead News for spreading the good news.

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