Six Killer Whales Extend Stay in Puget Sound for Record Time

The “slippery six,” half a dozen killer whales whose home range is out on the Pacific Coast, are still feasting on harbor seals in the Puget Sound inlet of Hood Canal five months after their arrival -- an unprecedented stint, biologists say.

They’d been reported gone on Wednesday, but were spotted again on Friday.

“We’re all calling back and forth,” said volunteer observer Judy Dicksion, who lives near Seabeck on the 60-mile-long Hood Canal. “Everybody’s like ‘Oh, yeah!’ ”

Before the Friday sightings, state biologist Steve Jeffries was prepared to declare the orcas gone. These transients usually head for Southeast Alaska by this time of year for the summer social season, he said.

And they’ve probably more than halved Hood Canal’s seal population, which had numbered about 1,200 before they arrived.

But the orcas -- two females with two calves each -- can’t seem to tear themselves away from the seal smorgasbord that runs the length of the deep and narrow channel.

Jeffries was on the canal Friday morning and saw no sign of the whales. He also spotted very few seals hauled out onshore.

There are still plenty of seals to be had, though, and the orcas had no problem catching them last week, when Jeffries saw three kills in three hours. He and other Department of Fish and Wildlife researchers determined that the Hood Canal seal population was close to the reduced density reported after a two-month visit by 11 other transient orcas in 2003.

Researcher Volker Deecke of the University of British Columbia had expected them to head for Alaska and their male peers sometime this month. The seal-density data suggested that too.

Also, the number of boats in the area increases significantly in the summer, and killer whales “are like boat magnets,” Jeffries said. He urged boaters to leave the whales alone.

The transients are among a population of hundreds along the coast, from Alaska to California. They tend to hunt marine mammals in groups of four to six, and appear less social than the resident orca populations that feed on fish in the region’s inland waters.

But research on transient orcas -- and the offshore coastal population -- is in its early stages.

“Everybody thought they were going to leave,” he said. “We don’t have all the answers.”

Hood Canal and its fat seal population offer perfect conditions for orcas to instruct their young, Jeffries said.

“If you’re training youngsters to hunt, it’s probably the perfect place,” he said, though “they’re going to be so spoiled from hunting in Hood Canal it’ll be hard for them to make a living somewhere else. It’s kind of like a dead-end canyon” and the seals are easy pickings.

“It’s amazing to see them hunt,” Jeffries said. “They’re able to kill seals without any effort at all. They’ll be swimming along, and then they just go down and pick up a seal.”

The result: Some seals are afraid to go into the water. But they must, to eat.

“We never saw a seal on the surface get attacked,” he said. “Always they went down with no seal visible and come up with a seal.”

The killing is hard to watch, Jeffries said. “They either hold them under water and drown them or come to surface and ram them and thump them and fluke them to death and then tear them apart.”

The orcas never hunt in one area for long, said Dicksion, the volunteer observer.

“It’s kind of like they know not to overfish,” she said. “Or they leave the seals alone for a while so they become unwary and think the orcas have left.”