The Truth About the Orca “Uprising” With Sarah DeWeerdt

​​Since May 2020, the instances of orcas ramming boats, biting off bits of vessels and sinking yachts off the coast of Portugal and Spain in the Gibraltar Strait has gone from a handful of encounters to 100s. In this episode, Executive Director of Sentient Media, Ana Bradley, and science journalist Sarah DeWeerdt discuss the uptick in orca interactions with boats in the Gibraltar Strait, the dangerous media narrative circulating that animals are “orcanizing” and what we can learn from the tragic death of the orca some call Lolita after 53 years in captivity.

Sarah DeWeerdt is a freelance science journalist in Seattle covering biology, medicine and the environment. She is working on a book of essays about the family history of the southern resident orcas of the Salish Sea.

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Transcript: 

Sarah DeWeerdt  

A lot of orca scientists, and including many of the ones who are studying this Iberian orca population are really becoming increasingly concerned about the media framing of in the way that it’s been presented as attacks and aggression and uprising and things like that. There’s a lot of concern that this framing could result in harm to this really critically endangered population. That incident where the boat was recorded, shooting something at the orcas is really evidence of that. So I think that’s something that we should definitely be careful about in terms of how we talk about it.

Ana Bradley  

Hello, and welcome to the Sentient Media Podcast where we explore the science and majesty of the animal kingdom. So today, we’re with Sarah DeWeerdt, a freelance science journalist in Seattle, covering biology, medicine and the environment. She’s working at the moment on a book of essays about the family history of a son of Southern Resident orcas in the Salish Sea. Thank you so much for joining us, Sarah.

Sarah DeWeerdt  

Thank you so much for having me. I’m really excited to talk to you.

Ana Bradley  

I’m excited to have you here with us, you know, it feels right now like orcas. And actually, when you look deeper sea mammals in general, are having a bit of a moment in the media. So I’m really excited to speak to you and try and get to the bottom of what’s actually going on in our oceans. You know, we’re talking today, just a couple of weeks or not even quite two weeks, I don’t think after the captive Orca, some called Lolita died in her tank in Miami SeaWorld, and that was after 53 years in solitary confinement. So I do want to chat to you about this tragic story in a moment. But to kick things off, I really wanted to get into exploring something else. So since May 2020, the instance of orcas ramming boats or biting off bits of vessels and sinking yachts off the coast of Portugal and Spain in the Gibraltar strait has gone from what was reported before to be a handful of incidents, to getting into the hundreds. So I don’t know if you can shed a bit of light on what’s been happening in that part of the ocean since May 2020.

Sarah DeWeerdt  

Yeah, so this, like you said, has been happening off the coast of Portugal and Spain and in the Strait of Gibraltar. So there’s this genetically distinct sub population of orcas there who feed on Atlantic bluefin tuna, and their annual movements are kind of in concert with the migrations of the fish. So they’re especially concentrated around the Strait in spring and summer, it’s sort of bottleneck, you know, where the fish have to go into the Mediterranean. So this population is critically endangered, according to the IUCN, and they may have less than 40 individuals. So what’s happened is it starting in 2020, as you sort of mentioned, some of the members of this population started kind of approaching boats, especially repeatedly bumping up against them, striking them with their head or body, turning the boat, turning the rudder, and sometimes damaging the boats, largely by breaking off the rudders. And so those interactions have ramped up in 2020. And have continued since then. There is a working group of scientists that was formed in 2020, to try to document more of these interactions, figure out what’s going on, figure out how to reduce any conflicts between boaters and orcas. And so there’s a lot of information about these orcas and about this phenomenon at the website oorcaiberica.org, where a lot of scientists are posting this information, maps of the interactions, advice to voters, things like that. And what the scientists have done is they have given the names of the given the animals documented to be involved in these interactions, the name of Gladis, so after the Latin root for Gladiator, so that’s the first name and then they’ve given them an additional name to, you know, distinguish the individuals. So there’s Gladis Blanca, Gladis Negra, and so on. So White, Gladis, Black, Gladis, that sort of thing. So, in 2020, there were nine individuals documented to be involved, I think from two different groups, and now there are 15. So this behavior does seem to be spreading somewhat in the population and definitely continuing. I’m not sure I couldn’t tell how many interactions that have been in 2023. But if you look at the maps on that website, it’s dense. So it’s definitely still continuing. Yeah.

Ana Bradley  

And have there been any human fatalities?

Sarah DeWeerdt  

No, about 20% of these orca boat interactions have resulted in enough damage to the boats that they couldn’t get back to port on their own. So they’ve had to be towed. So that’s important that like a lot of times, there’s no damage or very minor damage. But yeah, sometimes they do make it impossible for the boat to navigate. A total of five boats have sunk as the results of these interactions. But there have been no human fatalities. And in fact, there has never been a documented fatality from a wild orca attack on a human.

Ana Bradley  

Yeah, I mean, presumably, if an orca wanted to eat you, or, you know, up, turn a yacht and eat everybody on board, they could definitely do that. Right?

Sarah DeWeerdt  

You would think they’re a pretty powerful animals and they live in social groups, so they wouldn’t have to do it on their own

Ana Bradley  

And has this kind of behavior with orcas interacting with yachts. And I understand it’s normally kind of passenger boats. It’s not necessarily fishing trawlers or anything like that, that we’re documenting has this kind of behavior happened anywhere else in the ocean.

Sarah DeWeerdt  

So this, they’re not in any concerted way. I would say I did see some coverage of an event back in June of this year where an orca had rammed a yacht off Shetland, while the boater was sort of fishing off the stern for mackerel. And from what I can tell of the coverage of that event, there’s no damage to the boat, it sort of circled a few times and left, I’ve seen some speculation that the behavior was sort of learned in some way from the Iberian pods. I personally am sort of sceptical of that one difference between orcas and humans is the orcas do not do a lot of borrowing between different cultures. They really stick to their own life ways. And the Iberian orcas would be a different population than the orcas off of Shetland. So, to me, I don’t know for sure. I don’t know that anybody knows for sure. But I think it’s probably more likely that this particular orca was sort of interested in the mackerel.

Ana Bradley  

That makes sense. So I was wondering, like, you know, when the media kind of catches on to a narrative, and it seems like this is happening everywhere, and it’s like a huge uprising like, well, the media is calling this an uprising of the workers or they’re orcanizing and all of these terms like, is it actually fair to say that there is an increase in these interactions with boats? Or is it just that we’re paying attention now?

Sarah DeWeerdt  

I think there definitely is an increase over the years. And by that, I mean, decades, and even a couple of centuries, there have been sort of a handful of reports of orcas ramming or sinking boats. But this situation of repeated interactions with boats in a very sort of similar way, each time on the part of the same orcas is pretty well, unprecedented. In the literature, I think the media attention is perhaps doing two things. On the one hand, it’s making people aware of the phenomenon, which probably means that we’re documenting a relatively large percentage of these instances. And I think that’s probably a good thing for the scientists who are working to understand them, I think that probably smooths their way to getting, you know, information, pictures, things like that from the voters involved. So that’s great. But I think it also might make people more likely to frame any kind of boat and orca interaction in that way, which I suspect is not always going to be appropriate.

Ana Bradley  

I mean, I just like it makes me feel obviously, I’m not an expert in orcas, or whales, or sea mammals or anything like that. But just thinking about the role that these animals play in society, like thinking about our history of our relationship with whales from being a very respected kind of mythical creature to, you know, the writing of Moby Dick and the whaling industry to then you have, you know, save the whale, and all of the work that they’ve done, and then you have captive whales, you know, in captivity performing for our entertainment. You know, it feels like to me like our relationship throughout history has been so conflicted. And as we’ve touched on and as you’ve touched on, as well, the scientists are calling these animals gladiators you know, as if there’s some kind of, you know, intentional attacking or, you know, they’re out to cause harm and to kill ultimately, you know, out. What do you think about this narrative calling it an uprising, calling them Gladiators, you know? Even calling it revenge? Like how much truth do you think is in this kind of narrative that’s that’s being spun out right now?

Sarah DeWeerdt  

We don’t know for sure why these orcas are doing this. And I think that, you know, this idea that it’s an uprising, that sort of thing. You know, which is often kind of tongue in cheek idea that the orcas are kind of doing this to punish and target the sort of rich and comfortable sort of thing. I’m not sure what the origin exactly of that mean, but I suspect that because, you know, boating is associated with the rich people sort of, on the internet, you know, saw an opportunity to make a connection to this cultural connection, these cultural conversations that are going on about wealth inequality, and the role of the super rich in the climate and environmental crisis. One thing to note is that, often people talk about yachts, but the interactions have mostly been with small sailboats, a couple of motorboats a couple of small fishing vessels. And I think, in fact, one research boat was involved at some point, too. So these orcas are not exactly stinking oligarchs here, right? And there’s no evidence that there’s a leader of these activities or anything like that. So it’s not sort of the organized, sort of concerted effort.

Ana Bradley  

It feels like if we are calling it, you know, revenge, and if we are calling this an uprising, then it implies that there is some kind of collective guilt on behalf of humans, that we know that we’ve exploited these animals for for many, many years, presumably, I mean, do you have a sense about how much human activity in the ocean outside the ocean, how much our activity actually affects orcas? 

Sarah DeWeerdt  

Hugely. Absolutely. I mean, I think that, you know, one reason that that idea is so powerful is that we do in fact, have to feel guilty for, you know, I think I can talk about the population of orcas that I know the most about, which is the Southern Resident killer whales here and the waters around Seattle and British Columbia. Those are also a highly endangered population, scientists have identified three threats to them at the moment, lack of food, their preferred prey is Chinook salmon, which are very scarce. Now, toxins. So there’s all of these sorts of chemicals that we’ve released into the environment that now have been banned, but they’re persistent chemicals. And so those are just moving up through the food chain. And they are, you know, accumulating in the fat tissue of the whales. And then, you know, when the whales are hungry, they get mobilized when the whales are nursing, they get mobilized and transferred to the calves, then the other threat is is vessel noise. So a lot, you know, and strikes, but mostly vessel noise, which can interfere with their hunting behavior, they sort of cannot hear echolocation off their prey over the noise of the vessels. So those are three huge threats. And the Iberian orcas, one of the things that they share with the southern residents is that they are also a highly endangered population that relies on a highly endangered source of prey, and one that has also has also really prized prey for humans, you know, so there are, you know, there are sometimes interactions between the Iberian orcas and fishing vessels, they actually have learned how to sort of steal tuna off of a long lines, and but that can result in injuries and, you know, that sort of thing. So yeah, I would say between our effects on their natural environment and the history of captures, and persecution, just killing orcas. I would say we have a lot to answer for, for sure. And so that probably plays into why that cultural narrative about an uprising is so powerful,

Ana Bradley  

how long the orcas live, or how long can they live?

Sarah DeWeerdt  

Yeah, so females tend to live longer than males. Females are thought to be able to live for potentially as long as 100 years, the males tend to live shorter lifespans maybe 50 to 60 years. orcas are actually one of the few species aside from humans, where females undergo menopause so on The older females, we’re finding out more and more about just how crucial they are to their families and their populations. They’re these sort of repositories of ecological knowledge. So leading the group to two sources of food, that sort of thing.

Ana Bradley  

So it’s feasible that there are orcas who remember when the ocean was quieter, and there was less of this human activity.

Sarah DeWeerdt  

I think that that’s true, although, sort of depending on the population that you’re talking about relatively few. The southern resident population, for example, has lost a lot of matriarchs in the last few years. And of course, a lot of that knowledge may go with them.

Ana Bradley  

Yeah, I heard recently that in the North Sea, there hasn’t been a healthy calf born in over a decade..

Sarah DeWeerdt  

There are a lot of problems with reproduction, and, you know, loss of calves in their early years, which I think some scientists have suggested to me is, to some degree normal but but certainly much, much more prevalent now,

Ana Bradley  

for me, like when I first started reading about the, you know, the orcas interactions with boats, coupled with, you know, my very basic, you know, understanding that orcas communicate through sonar, they communicate through noise, and that vessels obviously, impair their ability to communicate, I couldn’t help but think that there was that period, you know, in May 2020, and surrounding months, where the ocean would have been quieter, when there would have been less activity. Of course, there were still some, but it was reduced. And there’s that kind of natural feeling of like that be, you know, did they suddenly get a din of noise that we create in the ocean suddenly disappear? And then return? And I, oh, you know, the moment thinking, wow, life can be so much better without this den, you know, get out get out of here. Is that just fantasy? Or is there any evidence to back that up?

Sarah DeWeerdt  

I don’t know for sure. In the case of the Iberian orcas one speculation that I’ve seen, and I’m pretty sure that it’s speculation is that there could have been increased poaching of tuna during the lockdown periods. So they were actually sort of more, you know, sort of beset by human activity. One thing that there has been, I don’t think it’s published, but I’ve seen a presentation on the southern residents where, you know, there was I remember all of this sort of speculation or all of this, wondering about how these quiet ocean and the changes in our activities, we’re going to affect orcas and other whales. But what they have actually documented with the southern residents is that there was actually an increase in boats around the orcas. And that’s because, you know, people could socialize outside outdoor activities were okay, so there’s this sort of surge in recreational boating, more boats around, possibly more boaters who sort of didn’t know the rules about how to engage with orcas, and then kind of space that they need to be given. There was also activity was sort of more spread out during the day, so fewer hours of peace sort of thing or the orcas. And then also, of course, fewer opportunities for boater education because of that social distancing. So I don’t think that we can assume that COVID And the lockdowns were an unmitigated good, you know, this sort of nature is healing sort of meme, it’s, it’s, it can be more complex than that.

Ana Bradley  

So it is fascinating and almost the exact opposite of what I assumed. So thank you, thank you for shedding light on that. Is there any evidence that this, their interactions could just be them playing with the boats?

Sarah DeWeerdt  

That is increasingly what scientists suspect a couple of pieces of evidence in favor of that is that most of the individuals that are actually interacting with the boats are juveniles, juveniles are sort of more likely to do novel behaviors, right? There are a couple of adults in that Gladis group, but they’re mostly observers. And then I think the longer it goes on, the more that Scientists suspect that it might be play, there was some speculation earlier that it could be a result of one of the orcas having had a negative interaction with a boat in the past and perhaps being injured. And I’m gonna get my notes out, because I’m gonna want to make sure that I say the right one. Yeah, the one of them. Gladis Negra, who’s a juvenile female, she was part of the group that sort of first began interacting with boats in 2020, she was seen with a wound on her head and 2020, a wound on her dorsal fin in 2021, those wounds have healed seemingly just fine, no after effects, but I think that that sort of fueled some of the speculation that it could have been sort of a response to a previous injury or negative interaction, that kind of behavior would be scientists believed more of a one off where it wouldn’t continue, and it wouldn’t spread throughout the population. So I think people are, seem to be moving back a bit from that hypothesis and, and sort of saying, regardless of how it started, they’re continuing because there’s something about it that they enjoy, whether that sort of play or whether some other, you know, word would be most appropriate to assign.

Ana Bradley  

That’s really interesting. You know, we’ve kind of touched on this earlier, but it does feel like everywhere. I look this summer, and throughout this year, really, there’s whale news in all kinds of different media. We’re going to list a few. We have the instance in the Faroe Islands, where they, the Faroe, the people living there, they call longfin pilot whales every year, and the cruise ship from the UK was in dark when the people on Faroe Islands were driving in and then cold 78 of these longfin pilot whales in front of the tourists. So you had the people doing the work. And then you have the people the tourists obviously very upset about it. And the media reported it as you know, awful the the Faroe Island was doing this. So these longfin pilot whales, you then have, you know, people mourning the death of Toki, Lolita, And then you also have people still going and paying, of course, to see animals like her perform in captivity, then you have this there was the sea otter, I don’t know if you saw this, or if I sent it to you before, but the sea otter in Santa Cruz, who was playing, essentially with surfboards, but getting in the way of the surface and was labeled, you know, as a menace. And then there’s all the memes that came out of that. And then you have this very recent footage from I think, last week of a leisure boat or yacht, whatever, in the Strait of Gibraltar where these other interactions have been happening, where it appears that the people on the boat were shooting the orcas as they because came close to their thing. I mean, I don’t think it’s been confirmed yet that it was a gunshot. But it certainly looks like that in the video. And then that was right next to a boat of people who were out, you know, touring to try and see and experience, you know, orcas in the wild. You know, we have like these complete, like, you know, polar opposite behaviors, and polar opposite representation in the media as well, where you have like the media saying that these are uprising, their manifesto, they’re called out for revenge, etc. But oh, it’s so sad that Toki died. You know, like, it just seems like these media narratives are at odds with each other, that we as people are kind of at odds with each other in terms of how we feel and what we think about these animals. Like, I don’t know, I mean, how does it make you think about about how we’re talking about how we’re interacting or how we understand what’s going on in our oceans.

Sarah DeWeerdt  

One thing to say is that this idea of an orca uprising is often sort of couched in positive terms, right. And like I was saying, sort of interacting with these conversations about wealth and environmental damage. And you know, on the one hand, it’s just really fun for us to sort of share those memes and like that sort of thing and feel clever, and engage and wordplay and things like that. So that’s one thing. I mean, I think that’s why the behavior persists among humans, right is it’s play. I think there’s also maybe some sort of desire for this kind of like, we’re seen as Ex Machina sort of thing. You know what I mean, writing these wrongs that we don’t seem to be able to this idea of an orca uprising is a really different culture, especially as a positive thing is a really different narrative for Western culture. Right? I think, you know, usually like you’re saying it’s either it’s either conflict or we have to Save the Whales. But I’ve been sort of thinking about what if we could be in solidarity with the whales? And what if we could be sort of aiming at the same thing. And I’m not saying that we could, you know, sort of literally organize with them or anything like that. But I’m sort of thinking more about framing our actions and intentions in that way, I think could be quite a profound thing. So I think that that’s worth continuing to think about. But I will say that a lot of the a lot of orca scientists, and including many of the ones who are studying this Iberian orca population are really becoming increasingly concerned about the media framing of the narrative and the way that it’s been presented as attacks and aggression and uprising and things like that, because they fear that this might increase conflicts between humans and orcas. And, you know, historically, whenever those conflicts increase, orcas lose the you know, and so I think that, that there’s a lot of concern that this framing could result in harm to this really critically endangered population mean, again, less than 40 individuals that is small, and orcas do not reproduce fast. So yeah, and that incident where the boat was recorded to have been shooting something at the orcas is really evidence of that. So I think that’s something that we should definitely be concerned about and careful about in terms of how we talk about it.

Ana Bradley  

You know, I love this idea of us, perhaps taking this moment to think about this species and their perception of the world and how we can perhaps make it better for them. I mean, you’re, you’re obviously an orca superfan. And I was wondering if you could shed a little light on how orcas perceive the world perhaps.

Sarah DeWeerdt  

So orcas are very highly social creatures. They’re very intelligent, very auditory creatures, the parts of their brain that are related to auditory processing, and social relationships, and also spatial navigation are just very, very highly developed. They actually have a cerebral cortex that’s much more highly folded than that of humans. And that’s sort of a blunt instrument in terms of, you know, intelligence, right, but, but it’s really striking. And another thing that we’re starting to learn about is that they’re also very, very tactile creatures. So sort of research with aerial drones, and also D tags, which are these kind of temporary suction tags that researchers will attach to workers are we are revealing that they are just almost constantly in touch with literally in touch touching members of their of their families. And they have, they’re also known to have very, very sensitive skin. So yeah, a lot very, again, complex societies, lifelong social relationships and sensory systems that are different enough from ours, that I think we have to sort of marvel at, you know, what they might experience is

Ana Bradley  

It’s like, they’re on such a different plane that we can’t even we can’t even comprehend like, we can’t even imagine what it is how they perceive the world, but we have these certain touch points, at least that through study and research that we can say this is true. They are sentient, they are social animals. I mean, I I heard somebody put it like they use sonar, like we use DMs, you know, they’re constantly in touch and checking in on each other. And of course, you know, knowing that it makes it kind of all the more tragic, perhaps when we think when we take them away from each other. So I think it would be good to talk about the Orca that some call Lolita, who sadly passed recently in her tank in Miami and that was 53 years in captivity that she had. I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about her story about what you know of her of her experience.

Sarah DeWeerdt  

Yeah, so um, the Orca that was sometimes known as Lolita, sometimes known as Toki. And sometimes known as called Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut, which is her Indigenous Lummi name that was given to her in 2019 I believe she was a Southern Resident Orca. She He was captured along with six other young orcas in Penn Cove, which is on the coast of Whidbey Island near Seattle in August of 1970. This was an era when there was were a lot of orcas being taken from the wild for theme parks, and I believe it’s about 1/3 of the Southern resident population was either captured or or died during roundups during this period. And their population has never really recovered. There was this sort of lull in births when the calves that were taken would have come into reproductive maturity and so it just really these like ripples of these events, I suspect still affecting their population and their lives today. She was about four years old at the time, theme parks want to young whales easier to transport, easier to train. I should also mention that if people want more information about Toki, in her life, the writer Emily Gambone did a three part series for the nonhuman rights project a few years ago, and I think it’s really chock full of information and pretty definitive, so Toki was sold to Miami Seaquarium in Florida for $20,000. She was put in  with another Southern Resident killer whale, an older male called Hugo. They shared the smallest orca tank in North America. And that was when her name was changed from Toki to Lolita after the Nabokov novel, which gross, so she performed with Hugo for 10 years. They didn’t mate, orcas are dolphins, dolphins are famously horny, but they never had a calf. You go actually died of a brain aneurysm he had had this history of ramming his head repeatedly against the tank, and so probably was related to that. So after Hugo died, Toki never saw another orca again. And again, this is an animal that in the wild would have like he would have spent her whole life with her mother, her siblings, her family group, her cousins, that sort of thing. Like I said lifelong family bonds. But she was essentially kept in solitary confinement, aside from a few dolphins now in then, who I think there’s some suggestion that they bullied her in various ways. Had to perform four shows a day. So she was an L pod. Well, there’s three pods in the Southern Resident community, J K and L. Researchers played a recording of L pod calls to her in 1996. And she sort of responded and so sort of based on that we saw she sort of remembered these calls her native dialect after 25 years. Her mother is thought to be a whale called L 25, or Ocean Sun. I’m not sure if there’s a lot of hard evidence about that. But Ocean Sun is the oldest Southern Resident killer whale at the moment and she’s thought to be 95 years old. L 25 never had another calf after that round up and Toki herself never had a calf. So sorry. Ah, I’m sorry. So the Lummi Nation, other Indigenous groups, animal rights activists campaign for her release for years. She was finally retired from doing shows in 2022. And then in March of this year, the Sea Aquarium announced an agreement with a nonprofit called Friends of Lolita or friends of Toki to retire to her to a sea pen sanctuary or to return her to release her in a sea pen sanctuary in the Pacific Northwest friends of Toki took over her care at that point, her care was I think, by all accounts really improved Lummi elders were able to regularly visit her connect with her sing songs to her interact with her. And there were active plans to move her she was just starting to get used to this sling that would have been used to move her to the sea pen. But then yeah, I think it was last Wednesday or Thursday. Thursday she started seeming really uncomfortable. And Friday, she passed away of what the vets say is acute kidney failure. So yeah, that unfortunately, release never came to pass.

Ana Bradley  

Thank you, Sarah. I know it’s really hard to talk about. And I said at the beginning of this podcast as well, I really like it just it’s a very, there’s something so deeply tragic about this treatment of these. I mean, all treatments of animals that we do, there’s something that’s so so tragic about what happened to her and her story. I did read that there was a strange phenomenon that took place. I think in the time kind of leading up to her death, where the J, K and L pods came together in this very kind of usual unusual way that they came together off the west coast of San Juan Island. Is it true that these meetings between the three pods is unusual? And do you think it had anything to do with what was happening with with her?

Sarah DeWeerdt  

Yeah, so we say rare and unusual. But these gatherings definitely would have been much more common in the past, as the salmon populations, Chinook salmon population that the southern residents rely on has declined, they’ve really changed their habits. And that’s is probably very burdensome on then on them. And I think also has been a source of a lot of grief for people who love these whales, and you know, like, watch out for them and that sort of thing. So that’s the first thing is that the don’t think super pods, super pods are when all of the whales in the population are present. I don’t think that they necessarily would have been an everyday thing, but they certainly would have been more common than they are now. And I remember that day that so that was last Friday. It was really striking day. So we’d had this heatwave in the Pacific Northwest, the heat wave had broken but the smoke from the wildfires that we’re dealing with now hadn’t yet moved in. It was just like, this moment of gorgeousness, and there were a lot of orcas from another population, called Biggs, orcas, they mammal, marine mammals. So there were a lot of them around to they don’t interact with the southern residents. But still, there were probably 130 orcas in the Salish Sea, it was just this like feeling of abundance. And I was sort of monitoring the sort of Facebook groups where people share information about sightings of whales. And it was just so joyful. The southern residents hadn’t been seen since early July. For some of the residents. It was the first time they’d been in the inland waters since January. And then the news about Toki is crushing, you know. So the thing that I would say about the Super pod is that very few of the Southern Resident killer whale population were alive at the time of her capture in her subgroup, which is known as the L 12s, 10 of the 11 whales were born after the capture, aside from the whale that we believe might be her mother. And so they wouldn’t have known her personally. And I sort of speaking scientifically, I can’t think of any mechanism that would, you know, allow that kind of communication to occur, right. So, to me, it sort of feels a little bit more like a kind of cruel, dramatic irony you get, here’s this moment of abundance, and this terrible thing is happening across the country.  But scientific worldview isn’t the only worldview, right? You know, there are more things in heaven than Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy. So I would want to hold open a space for the unexplainable. What I would say is that this idea that the surface super pod was them, you know, saying goodbye to her or something like that. I think we liked that idea, because it’s a pretty story, and it’s comforting to us. I don’t think we should allow ourselves to be very easily comforted, right? I think that we have to take our rage and grief about her loss and sort of take our rage and grief and use it to end cetacean captivity and also ensure the continued survival of the Southern Resident killer whales. So there’s proposal to breach four dams on In the Lower Snake River, which would open up a huge amount of spawning habitat for chinook and make it a lot easier for the whales to get what they need to eat, as I understand it, the the decision of that may be made about that may be made as soon as the end of August. And I think that and other actions that we can take to make sure that the southern resident population and other orca populations will recover and remain healthy and thrive is really the most important lesson that I sort of take from Toki’s death.

Ana Bradley  

Absolutely. I think you’re absolutely right, like we should allow us we should use this moment to really double down on how we want the world to look in the place we want to create for, for all animals. And, you know, not going to these parks would be a thing, perhaps assessing, you know, how you can vote and what policies you can get behind to help ensure protection for wild and farmed animals. I think we’ll add some links to the to the bottom here. For people who want to take action. And yeah, thank you so much, Sarah, for your time. And for sharing all of this. It’s really hard to speak about and really important that we get the stories out there and share it in that nuanced way that, you know, allows people to think more than just about revenge or the narratives that that we construct. So yeah, thank you so much, Sarah.

Sarah DeWeerdt  

Yeah, well, thank you so much for having me and given me a wonderful opportunity to cry on the internet of things. I really enjoyed talking to you, even though it’s hard. Thank you.