After a decade of service on the SeaDoc Society’s Board of Directors, Rochelle Severson and Kevin Campion will cycle off, with Board Member Ardi Kveven taking over as Board Chair.

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.

It occurred to me as we bobbed around Hein Bank that even though we weren’t staring at literal humpback whales, we had been circling their story for hours. The cacophony of seabirds that ribbonned out across the channel for hundreds of yards was not there by accident. They were feasting on the same forage fish that make the Salish Sea a habitable home for humpback whales.