Thousands of fifth-graders will cycle through Camp Orkila on Orcas Island this summer to engage with our marine ecosystem. As we round the corner into Spring, the counselors who will guide those kids (5,800 total!) are deep in preparation and training.
Last week, our team was honored to lead a low-tide beach walk at Camp Orkila to train this year’s Orkila staff. All of the counselors received a signed copy of our best-selling (and award-winning!) book for fifth graders, Explore the Salish Sea: A Nature Guide for Kids.
As I write this, sitting in The Woods taproom where Southern Resident is brewed, Two Beers has donated more than $15,000 in support of the SeaDoc Society’s collaborative work to save Southern Residents.
Not to mention the story they’ve helped tell on thousands of boxes and cans sold throughout the Pacific Northwest over the last five years. In that initial creative design phase, their team was insistent that the whales’ story and SeaDoc’s mission be clear and prominent on the packaging.
For decades, fish-eating killer whales in the Pacific Northwest have been observed harassing and even killing porpoises without consuming them—a perplexing behavior that has long intrigued scientists.
A study published today in Marine Mammal Science, co-led by Deborah Giles of Wild Orca and Sarah Teman of the SeaDoc Society, a program of the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, looked at more than 60 years of recorded interactions between Southern Resident killer whales and porpoises in the Salish Sea to better understand why they exhibit this behavior.
While conducting research up in British Columbia last month, our Science Director Dr. Joe Gaydos got some quality hang time with a bald eagle. You could call this an animal attack, but we’ll call it a nice little going-away present before the beautiful raptor sails off into the horizon soon after the bite. Subscribe and you’ll be first to watch the full episode, coming soon!
Predator-prey relationships are strong evolutionary drivers and prime movers and shapers of our natural world. They also make for dramatic stories that seem to portray black-and-white cases of cause and effect. Ecosystems, however, function at such a high level of complexity that seldom are things as straightforward as they appear.
In Yellowstone, introduced wolves take down elk and the park’s forests grow and streams revert to meandering courses. In the Salish Sea, seals and sea lions are protected and salmon populations crash. Along the Pacific flyway, we stop poisoning and shooting bald eagles and suddenly seabirds are struggling.
