Last month, scientists described two new species of killer whales, and the community of cetacean researchers and advocates online immediately erupted in the Internet equivalent of excited squeaks, squeals, and whistles.
But I felt a little bereft, my sense of killer whales as cultural beings diminished.
Killer whales – or orcas if you prefer, or blackfish, even though they are not fish at all but, yes, the world’s largest species of dolphin – are a widespread and multifarious bunch, inhabiting all the world’s oceans and staging a grand pageant of different ways of life.
Around the Pacific Northwest, where I live, there are orcas who eat nothing but fish, and Chinook salmon preferentially; orcas who hunt marine mammals like seals, sea lions, and porpoises; and orcas who hunt sharks in deeper offshore waters. Elsewhere in the world, other orcas gather by the hundreds to feast on schools of herring that they herd into tight balls, and still others work in twos or threes to topple seals from Antarctic ice floes.
As a rule, different orca groups scarcely interact and never interbreed, even when they inhabit the same waters. Each group has its own unique dialect of calls and whistles, and many have distinct traditions and even fads: one group of killer whales has recently taken to messing around with yachts; another has long enjoyed rubbing their bodies against the smooth stones of particular beaches; a third, for one memorable summer, wore salmon as hats.
Until now, all these killer whales the world over have been gathered under a single species name: Orcinus orca. So the two new species haven’t been discovered, exactly, in the usual sense of being seen for the first time, or seen for the first time by scientists. Instead they were cogitated – conjured from our increasing knowledge of the whales.
The paper describing the new killer whale species plucks two groups out from the teeming mass and sets them apart on their own: fish-eating orcas of the North Pacific are to be known as O. ater and mammal-eaters as O. rectipinnus.
It’s not that these two groups are the world’s weirdest or most outré orcas. They’re just the best studied. For the last half-century, scientists have closely tracked the individual lives of fish- and mammal-eating killer whales in the Pacific Northwest, tracing their bloodlines, annotating their familial joys and heartaches in spreadsheets. The new paper marshals behavioral, anatomic, and genetic evidence from these studies to argue that the two killer whale groups are distinct from each other and the rest of orca-dom.
The Taxonomy Committee of the Society of Marine Mammalogy still has to sign off on the change, but it’s consistent with a long-time plan. Currently, killer whales with different lifeways are classified into different “ecotypes,” a system that many scientists consider messy and confusing, and also provisional. The idea was always to sort them into separate species, we just didn’t yet have the information necessary to do so. More splits could follow in the coming years.
Still, in recent decades killer whales have also been central to the growing awareness of culture in non-human animals. And once differences are given separate species labels, it’s harder to understand them as cultural. One of the glories of global Orcinus orca was the idea that a creature could be so widespread throughout the oceans with so many diverse lifeways and yet all somehow part of the same story: orcas contained multitudes.
Of course, that resonates in no small part because the same could be said of humans. Am I just mourning the loss of a chance to anthropomorphize? I would flip it around: it was thrilling to me to think that humans aren’t that special. Splitting orcas into multiple species re-establishes human cultural exceptionalism, in a way.
Those of us who love, report on, and take meaning from science typically rejoice when new pieces of scientific knowledge bring us a truer, more accurate understanding of the natural world. But sometimes, the older scientific understanding that’s thrown over in the process had become deeply meaningful too.
Nobody likes change, and I’m not the first person to get maudlin in the face of some scientific advance. People were sad when Pluto was demoted from planet status, and when Brontosaurus was (temporarily?) deemed to have never existed.
Out in the ocean, orcas are still doing what they do and being what they are just like they were a month ago, and a year before that, unbothered by our shifting Latin binomials. When a fish-eating killer whale encounters a mammal-eater, somewhere among the skerries of Puget Sound, how close does she perceive their kinship? And if we could somehow know this, would we use the whales’ perceptions to guide our classification of them – or not?
Taxonomy is a notoriously fraught discipline, the boundary between species sometimes slippery and shaped not just by transcendent truth but by human aims. In this case, part of the human aim is to better protect orcas – from us. Around the world, some groups of killer whales are thriving while others are declining; one beloved population of North Pacific fish-eating orcas, known as the southern residents, is sliding towards extinction.
Separating orca groups into different species could make it easier to secure legal protections for those that are in trouble. If calling the southern residents ater rather than orca helps them survive, I’m glad of it, even though the change is a little bittersweet for me.
The names for the two new orca species come from an 1869 paper, which dubbed orcas off the Pacific Northwest coast with tall, straight dorsal fins O. rectipinnus and others in the same waters with shorter, blunter dorsal fins O. ater. But these were not, it later came clear, separate species; they were simply male and female killer whales.
In other words, the new names hold the history of our limited, imperfect perception of these creatures. In an odd, trickster-like way, that feels like a comfort.
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Sarah DeWeerdt is a freelance science journalist and poet based in Seattle. She is writing a family history of the southern resident orcas of the Pacific Northwest. Follow her on Twitter (X).
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Photo by Miles Ritter, via Flickr Creative Commons
I always knew the Pacific Coast’s as RESIDENTS (fish eaters) & the others (mammal eaters) as TRANSIENTS.
Hi CJ that’s right! “Resident” and “Transient” are the names applied to the fish-eating and mammal-eating ecotypes. The Transients have recently been undergoing a rebranding of sorts and are now often referred to as “Bigg’s orcas,” in honor of Michael Bigg, the Canadian scientist who pioneered photoidentification of orcas (hence how we know about their individual lives).
The “Residents” were labeled as such because, in the early years of the long-term studies of PNW killer whales, they hung around very reliably in certain parts of the Salish Sea during the whale researchers’ summer field season. “Transients” were seen less often and less predictably.
But today, the decline of salmon runs coupled with the bounce-back of marine mammal populations in the wake of the Marine Mammal Protection Act means that Transients are seen more reliably than Residents (well, Southern Residents anyway)! Orca Behavior Insitute (https://orcabehaviorinstitute.org/) does a lot of great work tracking sightings of both populations.
It’s interesting to ponder how the terms might have been assigned differently if studies were beginning today — yet another example of how human factors/activities have shaped our names for these animals.
As you may have guessed by now I cut this info from an earlier draft of the essay for reasons of length & simplicity — so thank you for the opportunity to return to it!