Sightings of Southern Resident killer whales in the Salish Sea 1976-2014

• Main Authors: Larson, Shawn, Olsen, Jennifer, Osborne, Richard
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: Western CEDAR 2018
• Subjects: Orcas; SRKWs; Killer Whale sightings; Fresh Water Studies; Life Sciences; Marine Biology; Natural Resources and Conservation; Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology; Killer Whale; Orca; Orcinus orca; Killer whale
• Online Access: https://cedar.wwu.edu/ssec/2018ssec/allsessions/25; https://cedar.wwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2460&context=ssec

Southern Resident Killer Whales (SRKWs) or orcas, Orcinus orca, are resident year round in the Salish Sea, the inland waterways of Washington State and Southern British Columbia. The Whale Museum (TWM) has been collecting opportunistic sightings reports on SRKWs since 1976 with a goal of providing managers and regulatory agencies with reliable spatial data on SRKWs. Information in this database comes from five identified killer whale sighting sources and is systematically evaluated for accuracy before integration into the data set. To date, TWM sighting database has documented a total of 83,428 SRKW sightings in the Salish Sea. Sightings are concentrated in a few key hot spots with an overall pattern of consistent presence in the Central Salish Sea during the summer months and an increasing presence in Puget Sound Proper during the fall and early winter months. A notable shift in SRKW presence in Puget Sound in the late nineties was possibly driven by increased foraging on fall chum salmon after a group of L pod whales became trapped in Dyes Inlet in 1997. The Whale Museum’s dataset highlights the importance of long-term monitoring and shows how opportunistic datasets can be valuable tools for illuminating long-term spatial and temporal patterns.