The murderous whales of the southern residents are an in danger of protected critical extinction under the Marine Mammal Protection Law. Its current population is approximately 73. Animals are social and live in very united family groups led by mothers and grandmothers.
The whales receive monitoring numbers from the center for the investigation of whales and are closely observed by researchers, photographers and whale observers, particularly when they are close to the communities along Puget Sound, as Seattle.
“I would venture to say that it is the population of whales well studied on the planet, regardless of the species, because it has been happening for 50 years,” Giles said.
How, then, this surprising behavior escaped from researchers for decades?
They did not have the right perspective.
“It is a really cryptic behavior. It is almost completely happening underwater and is a piece of algae cast between two animals that has only 2 feet long,” Weiss said.
More recently, researchers have started using drones to document whales from an aerial perspective. As drone technology has improved, the data they have collected have also collected.
“What has really changed to us in the 2024 field season: we obtained a new drone,” said Weiss, and said he provided a video of greater resolution.
He said the researchers first noticed a whale pushing algae against another whale in April and then observed whales rubbing each other for about 15 minutes.
Once the researchers noticed the strange behavior, they began to see it more frequently.
“We begin to see it a lot, to the point where most of the days we fly the drone, we see at least a couple of whales doing this behavior,” Weiss said.
The researchers suspect that the behavior has been happening all the time.
“We didn’t have the right advantage. I think this is something that has probably been happening since time immemorial,” Giles said. “I think we just scratched the surface of understanding these animals, partly due to technology.”
South residents have been in the center of attention of conservation efforts for decades. The whales face a series of threats, including the decrease in the quantity and quality of dams, toxic pollution and the alterations of the noise of the glass, according to the commission of marine mammals. Some investigations suggest that southern residents are on their way to extinction, if no more aggressive measures are taken.
Weiss said the new findings offer another reason why it is important to take care of the species.
“Discovering something like this, at the end of the game for how long we have studied them, he says that there is much more to learn and that they need to be close to learn those things,” he said. “This is not just a collection of 73 whales … It is a unique culture and also a society. These are whales with a set of traditions that date back to thousands of years.”
