Give up? I don't plan on it.

Earlier this week a new study was published entitled, “Identifying drivers of demographic rates in an at-risk population of marine mammals using integrated population models”. You may have seen in shared on NOAA’s social media with this in the caption: “A new study…revealed that the abundance of Chinook salmon, a key prey species, is not strongly linked to the birth rate of [Southern Resident] killer whales.” You can find the paper here:
https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ecs2.4773

It's always important to read the publication itself and not just the media headlines. If you do so, you’ll find a more nuanced result, such as evidence of a continued link between abundance of Chinook and Southern Resident survival, and evidence of a weaker correlation between Chinook and fecundity. The paper alludes to the issue of small numbers statistics, where with a small data set from a small population size, it can be difficult to tease out the relative impacts of many different variables.  There’s also a lot of stochasticity involved in these models – random, unpredictable events can greatly sway results one way or the other.

But overall, it is a depressing paper. It mentions that other factors such as continued impacts from the live capture era, inbreeding, disease, and competition with Northern Residents may be key drivers in Southern Residents’ ability to recover, topics that have also received attention in other recent publications. Yet these are things we can do nothing about. So what do we do with this information? Give up?

I don’t plan to give up. The Southern Residents themselves clearly haven’t given up. There may be some powers that be that would prefer to give up, if only because it would make their jobs easier, but I don’t plan to let them do so quietly. In these situations, I always return to a memorable quote I heard from Ken Balcomb. You don’t even need the whole context, just the phrases “paper salmon” and “paper whales” and “state of the art math magic” sum it up. As long as there are real-world Southern Residents I will be continuing to advocate for more real-world salmon for them.

NOAA has two public comment periods open right now: one on their prey increase program for Southern Residents and one on management of Southeast Alaskan salmon fisheries. We plan to share some more detailed suggested talking points before the March 11th comment deadline, but you can find links to all the information you need to start diving into these topics yourself on our J60 Bold Action Guide here:
https://www.canva.com/design/DAF8DvLR48g/ZqPBH4dJfxQGpj1E-VTWNQ/view

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