Good morning, Mr. Chair.
I'm a senior research scientist and director of the marine mammal research program at the Coastal Ocean Research Institute, which is part of the Ocean Wise Conservation Association, which also includes the Vancouver Aquarium.
My responsibilities here include leading a 10-person team that conducts studies of marine mammals in the wild. We conduct some pure research projects, particularly in population genetics, but most of our projects have direct conservation implications, and some are essentially research-informed conservation projects.
I myself have conducted 29 seasons of field studies on killer whales in the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Oceans. I co-chaired the team that drafted the resident killer whale recovery strategy and I served on the team that drafted the action plan for the same species. I also assisted with the drafting of five other marine mammal recovery strategies or management plans.
My team works alongside the institute's ocean pollution research team, which conducts cutting-edge research on persistent organic pollutants in marine mammals and other species, and on microplastics in the marine environment.
I'll confine my comments for the rest of this talk to conservation challenges facing the so-called southern resident killer whale population, a population of whales now very much in the public eye, along with the St. Lawrence belugas and North Atlantic right whales.
In 2014, I teamed up with two colleagues working in the United States for NOAA at the Southwest Fisheries Science Center, Dr. John Durban and Dr. Holly Fearnbach, on a project to assess the nutritional status of northern and southern resident killer whales. This study was motivated by compelling evidence published by Dr. John Ford in 2000 and 2009 that in years of low chinook salmon abundance, the annual mortality of both northern and southern resident killer whales increased substantially. In other words, the whales were up against a food ceiling or, to use a technical term, the carrying capacity of their environment in those poor years.
Since 2015, my team has used a small boat-launched unmanned drone to photograph the southern and northern resident killer whales from the air. This allows us to measure their fatness and shape very accurately, and also to determine whether they're pregnant at a very early stage. Most importantly, the photos allow us to look at changes in the condition of the whales' bodies from year to year and from season to season to assess their physiological responses in relation to fluctuations in their food supply. Their food supply is principally chinook salmon, and it fluctuates substantially from year to year for both natural reasons and anthropogenic reasons.
Our key findings from the photogrammetry study thus far are as follows.
The growth rates of southern resident calves and juveniles are far slower than those of the northern resident killer whales. The southern residents are leaner, on average, than their northern resident counterparts. Bigg's killer whales, which eat marine mammals, are much more robust than the resident killer whales from either population.
Most pregnancies in the southern resident killer whale population do not produce surviving calves. We can see pregnant females very often in the fall. They usually give birth in the winter or early spring, and we've been seeing them show up the following year not pregnant and with no calves.
We've learned that the leanest members of both the southern and the northern resident killer whale populations, on average, are lactating females. It's hard being a mother. Winters are hard. Southern resident killer whales tend to gain weight during the summer months, even in lean salmon years. In other words, the summer season is the most important time of year for the whales.
We haven't done seasonal comparisons of northern resident killer whales, just the southern ones.
All of these findings are consistent with nutritional stress. The southern resident killer whales simply aren't finding enough prey to stay in good condition.
I'll relate some of our other findings. We often see killer whales swinging their heads as they swim in a manner consistent with scanning below using echolocation. This is consistent with other studies. Periodically they dive deep and chase salmon to the surface. They use that surface as a kind of wall, restricting the fishes' escape options until they can catch them. Chases to the surface may take several minutes, and boats coming into proximity during a chase can interrupt it and allow the fish to escape.
Also consistent with other studies, we found that southern resident killer whales have well-defined, preferred foraging hot spots, and they tend to transit between those hot spots fairly quickly. In the northern residents, we found that injuries from vessel interactions, particularly propeller strikes, are more frequent than photos taken from boats would suggest. In other words, the whales are hit by boats more often than we had previously realized.
Our findings would suggest the following relatively simple management actions.
We think that efforts should be redoubled to increase the availability of chinook salmon to southern resident killer whales in the short term, as well as the long term, by closing sport fishing on the whales' foraging hot spots, as was started this year, 2018.
The effect of this is to preserve for the whales the adult fish that have made it through a gauntlet of perils as they approach their spawning rivers and move into the whales' key foraging areas. It's important to understand that the benefit to the whales of fishing restrictions increases with proximity to the whales' foraging areas. A fish that's spared nets 500 kilometres away has a substantial chance of dying before it gets to a place where the southern residents can prey on it; a fish spared off of Victoria is immediately available.
We think that underwater noise, which interferes with the whales' ability to find prey, needs to be reduced. This can be done by promoting quieter ship design and operation. Noise reduction is particularly important in lean salmon years, when the whales must search large volumes of water to find their sparsely distributed prey.
We think we need to increase efforts to reduce the risk of ship strikes. The new marine mammal regulations will help to reduce this risk by sport and whale-watching vessels, but initiatives to support systems to alert operators of large vessels about whales in their vicinity should be supported. In full disclosure, I have to say that my research group at Ocean Wise is in the process of establishing such a system.
Finally, I think it's very clear that we need to redouble efforts to rebuild the chinook salmon stocks in the long term—as well as the short term, of course—through restoration and protection of spawning areas, protection of riparian habitats, and maintaining and protecting the quality and complexity of estuarine and nearshore habitat areas in the salt water. These areas are important for the survival of chinook smolts.
We need to preserve these salmon stocks in the long term also, through the continued careful management of commercial and sport fisheries. It's my belief that the department has made considerable progress in this area in recent years as well.
Thank you very much.