Cloudly conditions made for very nice and moody photos as we found a pod of orca, the T037s, travelling together through the small islands off of Nanoose Bay. This pod consists of 4 members across 3 generations:

T037 Rocky III/Pizzafin ♀ (1979)
T037B Harald ♀ (1998)
T037B1 Lance ♂ (2012)
T037B3 ♀ (2022)

These orca were doing classic orca things as we were watching them, travelling! They cover huge distances in a single day, close to 100 miles! They need to keep moving around since these animals are mammal eaters. They prey on things like the Harbour Seals and Sea Lions most commonly, and these animals are pretty smart. If a pod of orca hangs out in one spot for too long, their prey starts to notice them more. Since orca rely on stealth during their hunts, their prey being more suspicious of them leads to lower success.

Moving from place to place helps prevent this lowered success rate and keep them better fed. Today while we were watching the T037s there weren’t any snack stops, but we did see a strange directional change. While travelling in basically a line from when we first found them, they suddenly turned nearly 90 degrees and took off. Looking back where they turned we noticed something interesting, the blow of a humpback whale! Did their negative interaction with Olympus earlier in the day make them wary of the humpback in the area? We will never know for sure, but it sure looked that way!

Since we knew they were there, we figured we might as well head over and say hello! With a very distinctly hooked dorsal fin and beautiful underside to the tail flukes we had no doubt as to who this was; it was Dalmatian (BCY0160)! Dalmatian is a 8 year old whale, born to Heather (BCY0160) in 2015. Heather hasn’t been seen in a few years (since 2020) and we wonder if she is swimming in the big ocean in the sky. We thought we might have noticed a harbour porpoise taking shelter from the orca in behind Dalmatian as well, maybe another example of compassion in humpback whales? They have been known to defend other animals from predation and will put themselves between predators like the orca and prey like a porpoise. Could have also just been a coincidence!

After not too long we decided to leave Dalmatian and head back to the Harbour. The photos from today that you can view below were taken by Naturalists Aly Kohlman and Ella Hillbrecht!

July 25, 2023, 3:30 - T037s off Nanoose bay

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