The harbor seals in Hood Canal, a 60-mile-long fjord to the west of Puget Sound, seemed anxious. Some were quivering along the banks. A few squirmed out of the water and wiggled toward high ground, passing close to people onshore—surprising behavior that suggested something spooky in the waters below. Brian McLaughlin had never seen them behave that way. “I’m reluctant to anthropomorphize,” says the fish biologist for the Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife, “but they looked really nervous.”
For good reason. Over several weeks, about half the harbor seal population in the canal—700 salmon-fattened mammals—had become lunch. During the winter of 2003, 11 killer whales—orcas—did something marine mammal scientists say is without precedent. A newly formed pack of them swam into this harbor haven and ate all seals, all the time for two months straight.
One of the killer whales, a supersize male dubbed T-14, was a well-known local. He had been captured in Puget Sound in 1976 as part of an operation to supply orcas to aquariums. After a public outcry, he had been released, but not before a temporary transmitter was attached to his dorsal fin, which created a pair of identifying scars. The others with T-14 were interlopers from the north. Scientists knew all 10 of them—a male and three female-led family groups of four, three, and two—from the waters off northern British Columbia and southeastern Alaska. They had not been seen before with T-14.
The eight-ton predators had become a gang, an aquatic Hells Angels that hunted cooperatively, skulking among the five main sites in the canal where seals haul themselves out of the water to rest. Every day, scientists calculated, each of the 11 killer whales may have eaten one or two seals.
Then at noon one Monday in March, the orcas simply swam under the floating bridge at the north end of Hood Canal and disappeared into Puget Sound. Now scientists are hoping they’ll come back. “Why these animals stayed together so long in Hood Canal is a mystery,” said John K. B. Ford, one of the world’s leading researchers on orca behavior and a marine mammal scientist at the Canadian government’s Pacific Biological Station on Vancouver Island. “Their stay is an unusual opportunity to look at predation and how it might affect populations of the marine mammals they eat.”
