There have been numerous reports of Pacific White Sided Dolphins in our vicinity this past year. The most recent came from Powell River, where pods of around 200 dolphins were spotted from the shore on December 17th and again on December 28th. One of the reports from Campbell River mentioned more than 100 swimming through Discovery Passage. On their website, Wildwaterways Adventures describes this species in its list of wildlife that fill the Discovery Islands. According to the Times Colonist, “After 100 years of absence, large numbers of Pacific White Sided Dolphins are back in the northern part of British Columbia’s Salish Sea.” 

Cortes Currents asked independent biologist Alexandra Morton if she has heard reports of them from Campbell River, Cortes or any of the other Discovery Islands. 

Alexandra Morton: Absolutely, there’s whale watching vessels down there, I have friends that live down there. I’ve also seen them there myself.  Pacific White Sided Dolphins have definitely been moving throughout the coast.

There’s a move to start harvesting them again and try to reduce their populations to protect wild fish. 

I don’t see the wisdom in that. There’s many reasons to harvest things, but we know from so many examples that when you kill the predators, you actually weaken the prey. Predators are so important. They remove the sick, they cleanse the population of pathogens that could reach damaging proportions. They are part of the ecosystem and I think we need to tread very, very carefully about removing predators.

(Morton has a long association with Pacific White Sided Dolphins.)

Alexandra Morton:  When I first moved to the Broughton Archipelago in 1984, nobody had seen Pacific White Sided Dolphins in that area. The old timers weren’t aware of this species.

I went to the Broughton Archipelago to study Orca, and to do that I had a underwater microphone piped into first my boat and then the house 24 hours a day. 

On Christmas Eve in that year, I picked up their vocalizations on our hydrophone. 

I didn’t know what they were, and so went out on Christmas Day. I don’t think my little boy was particularly thrilled, but anyway, I needed to see what species this was. I found seven Pacific White Sided Dolphins. 

In my arrogance, having just arrived in the area as a scientist, I assumed they were lost because Pacific White Sided Dolphins are generally considered an open ocean species where they’re seen in groups of hundreds or even thousands.

Over the next 10 years, I either saw them or heard them, or received a report from people about them being there, a couple of times every winter. It was only during the winter months.

In 1994, the number of days that I detected dolphins on the hydrophone, or saw them, or got a report from a neighbour, reached almost 20% of the year. The number of dolphins escalated from that little group of 7 to over 500, even 1,000 on some days. 

Some days they were just everywhere. If you scan your eyes and you’re like, “Okay, that’s 10, 10, 10, 10, 10, oh, that’s a hundred.’ And then you scan the whole, ‘How many groups that size, approximately?’ It was up to a thousand. 

What was interesting is they spiked in the winter. Summer sightings happened, but they were very rare and it was very small groups of young dolphins. Then over the winter, October through March, the big groups came in. 

My colleagues to the North, off Haida Gwaii, we’re seeing small juveniles babies. I never saw them. 

 The Dolphins initially were afraid of all the orca that they encountered, but one day a group of offshore orca came into the Echo Bay area, into the Broughton, and the dolphins just cozied right up to them. They started porposing right along the side of the whales, and I thought, ‘okay, you guys know each other.’  

Gradually over the years, the dolphins figured out there were some orca, the talkative ones (the residents), and they were fine. The dolphins actually became incredibly harassive of these whales. They buzz around their faces like flies, they’re just rude.  

But the transients, which we now call Biggs Orcas: the dolphins learned to be afraid of them. So if you encountered a silent orca, the best strategy was to run fast in whatever direction.  It was quite interesting to see them have a lack of direction and kind of bounce off the walls and in some cases, just jump right onto the beach and die just to get away from these transients.

That provided me with stomach samples, where I was able to deduce what these dolphins were eating. 

 It was a fascinating period of time to watch  these animals enter the Broughton Archipelago and learn how to navigate it.

Cortes Currents:  The Times Colonist talks about them being introduced to the Northern Salish Sea. How long have they been coming in here?  

Alexandra Morton: What do we know about their history here? 

Yes, I was very curious. Are these animals being pushed out of some area and that’s why they’re coming into the Broughton? Or are they being attracted by something that I don’t know is going on? It’s hard to know what fish populations are around if they’re not the target of a commercial fishery.

 But what I did know is that their bones, dolphin bones, were throughout the midden at Echo Bay. The school in Echo Bay was located right on a midden, and the children played on the beach all the time. And I saw quite a few ear bones, teeth and vertebrae that looked like they were from the dolphins.

So I began to investigate the scientific literature on what has been found in the middens for food items for First Nations  before we came, over the thousands of years  before I came.  One of the papers said that a large portion of the marine mammal diet of some Broughton First Nations, was Harbour Porpoises.

 This paper was published in 1988 by a man named Mitchell and he reported that up to 24% of mammal remains at some First Nation middens in the Broughton were Harbour Porpoises. But I wondered was it really Harbor Porpoises? So I bundled up some of items that I found in the midden in Echo Bay, and I sent them to the Royal Museum in Victoria. To a woman named Becky Wigen, who was doing the analysis for Mitchell.

She said, ‘Oh, these are Pacific White Sided Dolphins.’ And furthermore, she said, ‘as soon as I began to hear reports from you and others that these dolphins were coming in, I went back and looked at the items.’ She said that quite a few of them were in fact from dolphins.

They have different shaped teeth and there are small physiological differences in their bones and ear bones. So that meant that the dolphins were returning, not invading.  

What was interesting is that the older people in my community – the hand loggers and fishermen that were in their eighties when I arrived – had never seen Pacific White Sided Dolphins before.

 I don’t 100% trust observations from people who aren’t really paying attention to the dolphins or to marine mammals, but I did in this case for the simple reason that these dolphins liked to bow ride. People were getting wet just trying to get their mail to the post office from their float houses. If you were in  a small open skiff and you had a dog in your boat, well you got extra attention because the dolphins are curious about the dog.  In many cases seemed deliberately splash people. So when they said they had never seen this before, I had to believe  that was absolutely true, whereas Harbor Porpoises are hard to see and they don’t bow ride and so that’d be a less accurate history of sighting, but for the dolphins, I believed it. 

 I began to look into Pacific White Sided Dolphin movements along the entire Northeastern Pacific. There was this remarkable paper published on  the appearance of fish in Monterey Bay in California, and they’ve had cetaceans bump up and down that coast. Pilot whales will displace Risso’s Dolphins, will displace Pacific White, and this thing moves up and down the coast. What they did was a core sample in the sea floor of Monterey Bay, and they found that large schools of small schooling fish, different species, were pulsing in and out of that area on approximately 30 to 40 year cycles. Their core samples were striped with the presence of these small oily schooling fish, which attracted dolphins. 

At the same time, I was going up to wherever the dolphins had fish crowded at the surface and getting samples to see what they were eating. 

One of the things they were eating in the beginning were Capelin.

I sent samples down to the Pacific Biological Station because they were not known to be in the Broughton or  in this area of the BC coast. Dr. Doug Hay positively ID’d them. Yes, they were Capelin. Then he said an interesting thing, Capelin are moving south on both the Pacific and the Atlantic. He had received reports of capelin further south from the Arctic, in both oceans. 

Shortly after that we had this huge influx of Pilchard.  Nobody knew what they were, except the older fishermen were like, ‘oh my God, those are Pilchard. We have not seen those for 40 years.’ There were huge schools of them, and the dolphin were chasing them around. So over the nineties and into the early two thousands, the dolphins only came in the winter, but then they began to come year round. 

 While I’m not as focused on it, I do talk to other researchers.  Whatever happened has peaked and is declining.  Now there’s fewer dolphins coming in, even though they’re still very obvious because they’re such a charismatic species. 

Large groups of them have now been seen down in the Salish Sea, whereas the Broughton is just a little bit north of there. They are periodic residents to this coast.  

They did comprise an important part of First Nation diet.

 What was so interesting is when I was trying to figure out what they were eating, I noticed that their echo location would start as soon as the sun went down, the steady buzzing and clicking. As soon as the sun came up, echo location would die off.

And now they were into their vocalizations and they were just goofing around. It was really impossible to figure out what dolphins were doing because there really didn’t seem to be any point to it, as opposed to Orca, which are very methodical.  You can see what they’re doing.

 At one point in Echo Bay, we had open ocean draggers that were fishing right in the Archipelago, which had never happened before. I noticed that they were anchoring during the day and then they would start fishing at night. I was like, ‘ah, they’re fishing at the same time as the dolphins.’ 

So I went  to them and said, ” Why do you anchor during the day and fish only at night?”

They said the Pollock were too deep for their nets during the day, but at night they came up shallower and they were catching huge amounts of Pollock. 

I had no idea we had Pollock in the Broughton Archipelago because they never came to the surface.

One dolphin,  a large female being chased by the killer whales, tragically jumped out of the water into a pool on the beach, couldn’t get out of it and died.  I took her whole stomach and it was just chockablock full of very large Pollock ear bones.

Pollock are a fish predator, which may very well eat juvenile salmon or small herring or many other things. 

So now you have a predator eating a predator on salmon, keeping them in check perhaps?  These are the kinds of balances that we don’t know about when we just blunder in and say, ‘okay, oh, we don’t like the look of that.’

 We have to be very careful with these balances. I’m not sure where this push to cull them, or to harvest them, is coming from, but we’ve thrown the system out of whack so significantly. I think our best bet is to allow it to rebalance itself.

Cortes Currents: Do you have anything you wanted to add?

I began to photo identify the dolphins, just like we do with Orca, to try to tell them apart. I was able to identify hundreds of them.  Then when I got too distracted with the salmon farming fight, another researcher took over the work.

We’re learning about their families and their long-term relationships with each other.

I think it’s very important for our own survival at this point to begin to respond to the world around us as if they were our neighbours.

 This extends to salmon as well because of this remarkable science that now exists where we can read their immune system. So  they can talk to us and they can tell us how they’re doing, whether they’re doing great, or suffering from a virus, or a parasite, or high water temperatureS. 

I think the survival of our species, our children and grandchildren really depends on reestablishing this relationship of respect.

 When we see something and we just want to kill it because we think it’s in the way, I think we need to reconsider that and try to fully understand as much as we can, the balance that we live inside of.  So if these dolphins are here, what are they doing? What is their role?  How are they affecting this ecosystem? These are the important questions going forward,  that I think people need to focus on. 

Top image credit: Pacific White-Sided Dolphins following behind the boat – Photo by A. Davey via Flick (CC BY SA, 2.0 License)

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