After a Canadian orca pod’s decline, now ‘you can see the whales coming back’

Jim Borrowman cut the engine of the Nisku in the gray water of the Johnstone Strait, relinquishing his boat to an eastbound tide. He unraveled the line of a hydrophone – a cylindrical, underwater microphone – and dropped it portside.

On the other end of the cord a pint-size Honeytone speaker in the cabin broadcast a conversation from the deep: the ethereal, two-toned call of an orca whale to her clan.

“I think they’re what we call ‘A1s,’” said Mr. Borrowman, browsing a database of local orcas on his phone.

Mr. Borrowman has been watching, and watching over, these whales for decades. He was one in a band of Vancouver Islanders who successfully lobbied in the early 1980s to set aside a protected area for Northern resident orcas, which lost a third of their population to hunting and capture in the 1950s and ’60s.

This early act of ocean preservation laid a foundation from which decades of important research – and a deep local allegiance to the whales – have flourished. Galvanized by this data, environmentalists and First Nations just won a battle to evict commercial open-net fish farms from the area, which compete with the orcas’ food supply.

With early signs of abundant salmon, and a small but decades-long uptick in Northern resident population numbers, it feels to some like nature rallying.

“You can see the whales coming back,” says Alexandra Morton, an author and marine biologist who has studied salmon in the Johnstone Strait since the 1980s. She was part of a group that occupied a Vancouver Island fish farm in 2017 in protest of the industry.

The A1s spotted by Mr. Borrowman from the bow of the Nisku are one pod of one type of orca, called Northern resident killer whales, which number some 400 and live along the coast of British Columbia.

They’re doing particularly well, and have been growing by a handful of members each year since the ’70s. Northern residents are the most reliable visitors to the Robson Bight (Michael Bigg) Ecological Reserve, where Mr. Borrowman has served as a warden and run a whale-watching tour business with his wife, Mary, for decades until recently retiring.

“This is a beautiful, sensitive estuary at the terminus of a 100,000-acre watershed, the last untouched one on the east coast of Vancouver Island at the time,” he says.

It’s unique for another reason. At two known beaches at the mouth of the Tsitika River, Northern resident orcas rub gracefully along the seafloor pebbles in what scientists have dubbed a unique “cultural behavior.”

It was this behavior, first captured in underwater footage by Robin Morton, Alexandra Morton’s late husband, that convinced the public, the press, and finally the federal government to set aside about 3,000 acres of water plus shore buffer as a protected area closed to boat traffic.

Today, volunteer wardens with the Cetus Research & Conservation Society Straitwatch program monitor the reserve and gather population data on the whales and their pods.

Despite the rugged nature of Vancouver Island, these waters do not exist in a bubble. In the 40 years since the reserve was created, the threats have become harder to see. Today, the whales’ major issues are food scarcity, noise, and chemicals in the water.

But if the threats to orcas have become more complex, the responses have grown increasingly well-informed by a bedrock of research, much of which has come out of the ecological reserve and its orbit.

“[The orcas] needed salmon farms gone. Other things got added to the list. They needed the boat noise reduced,” said Ms. Morton. “But the reserve was our first step in that direction, and it was a very important one.”

Decades of research have since shown that major pathogens and lice leak from the farms’ huge, suspended net pens straight into the paths of migrating salmon, ravaging their thin-skinned young and immobilizing the adults.

Pacific salmon are also an important food source and cultural pillar for First Nations. They are intricately linked to the ecosystem, and scientists have even tracked nutrients from decomposed salmon high into the mountains.

Ms. Morton campaigned for decades to close the fish farms. Nothing changed until she and Hereditary Chief Ernest Alexander Alfred, with a group of other First Nations people, peacefully occupied a Vancouver Island salmon farm owned by Marine Harvest.

That protest led to a 2018 agreement with the British Columbia government requiring the consent of three First Nations – ‘Namgis, Kwikwasut’inuxw Haxwa’mis, and Mamalilikulla – for fish farms to operate around Vancouver Island.

First Nations closed more than a dozen salmon farms in and near the strait. Then, the federal government announced it would ban all open-net farms in British Columbia by 2029.

The decision is not universally supported by First Nations along the coast: 17 have agreements with salmon farming companies, which collectively employ around 270 Indigenous people, according to the Coalition of First Nations for Finfish Stewardship. Overall, open-net salmon farming accounts for 4,690 jobs and $447 million in gross domestic product across Canada, according to the BC Salmon Farmers Association.

But for many, it was a turning point. Coho and especially Chinook salmon stocks spiked this year in Vancouver Island and its inlets, according to the Pacific Salmon Foundation, after years of downturn.

It’s too early for data to directly link farm closures and the jump in salmon numbers, but many scientists agree that the farms can only be making it harder for wild fish.

It’s a rare win for the ecosystem, says Ms. Morton.

“There’s many people who have fought 30, 40 years like I have to protect something, and they don’t see it rebound,” she says. “And yet I’m getting that opportunity.”

Boat noise is also a problem. Research suggests orcas are better at catching salmon in quieter waters, probably because they communicate while hunting. In waters noisy with boat engines, “basically they’re trying to yell over the noise,” said Astrid Waite, Straitwatch North coordinator.

That research has encouraged both the British Columbia and Washington ferries that serve Vancouver Island to lower their noise levels.

The orcas face silent threats, too: persistent organic pollutants, which are remnants of chemicals used liberally by industry and in agriculture in the ’80s and ’90s. They remain in the water and have been found in high levels in orcas’ bodies and breast milk, along with carcinogenic and mutagenic chemicals from oil spills and wildfire smoke.

That information – gained from years of meticulous research – is a powerful starting point, says Ms. Morton.

“It is very, very important for us to look at some creatures and figure out what they need and give it to them.”