Tag Archives: Orca

Orca Skeletal Mount at Pearson College

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The Finished product of the work of skeletal preparation of L51 is now  suspended above the lab benches in Catrin Brown’s Biology Lab. The mount was made by students and Hans Bauer, a former faculty member who volunteered for the job, along with Hugo Sutmoller.

See the flensing of the orca L51 by Pearson College students

 

 

 

A serious contaminant of Orcas in the southern Vancouver island area is PCBs. Male Orcas accumulate these chemicals throughout their life, whereas females are purported to increase in levels until a birth, whereupon the levels in the tissue drop as a result of lactation.

For more information on contaminants in the Orca Food web, see the following Link:

“Is Victoria Sewage Contaminating Southern Resident Killer Whales?“
A Technical Submission to the SETAC Victoria Sewage Scientific and Technical Review Panel
By Gerald Graham, Ph. D. Marine Environmental Consultant
On behalf of the T. Buck Suzuki Environmental Foundation

 

ORCA skeleton assembled

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This article appeared in the Jnuary 17 , 2002  number 8 issue of the Collge newspaper

It’s a grand jigsaw puzzle – hundreds of bones, huge and tiny, all to be reassembled into the skeleton of a whale. Graduates returning to the June reunion will know the first whale project, and everyone at Pearson since then will know the vast frame of a whale erected behind the swimming pool. The present Orca project is well underway, and, happily for those currently working on it, well past the smelly stage.

Biology teacher Catrin Brown, a team of students, and Han Bauer, the first Biology teacher at Pearson, took the project a stage further this week, examining the skeleton of a porpoise – rather easier to fit into lab space! – in order to understand better the structure of the killer whale. Catrin gives us following explanation.

Catrin’s Explanation

In September 1999, a 27-year-old female killer whale known as L-51 was found dead in the waters off Race Rocks. Her death was presumably the result of a prolapsed uterus from a difficult childbirth a few months before, and fate of her young calf was unknown.

A team of Pearson divers towed the whale ashore, where it was disembowelled and transported back to the college in gorey chunks. Sections of the carcass were then suspended from the college docks, where ocean life feasted on the decaying meat over a period of months. Eventually the clean bones emerged and after a summer of drying and bleaching in the sun, the smell receded and the promise of a skeleton took shape.

At this stage outside help was sought, and found in the person of Hans Bauer, Biology teacher at the founding of the college, who is now retired and living in Sydney, near Victoria. With his good humoured guidance, students tackled the task of removing some of the more tenacious marrow by boiling the large bones in large vats over a fire. Many students have been involved in various stages of this project including Katy Green (year 25), Joao Marquez (year 26), Francoise Guigne (year 27) and Jaffar Saldeh (year 27).

We are now close to the stage of reassembling the bones into a permanent mount for display on campus. As the population of killer whales inhabiting the Juan de Fuca Strait has recently been declared an endangered species, L-51 is likely to be a focal point of interest.

January 17, 2002. number 8.

Victoria’s killer Whale Early Warning System Dec 1986.

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By Robin Baird –From The Cetacean Watch Newsletter , Dec 1986.
A discussion of Victoria’s Killer whale early warning system, and the installation of the first hydrophone at Race Rocks.

robin

Marcus Pistor ( PC student) Pam Stacey and Robin Baird installing the hydrophone cable on the south-east side of Great Race Rock.

cetacean

Social organization of mammal-eating killer whales: group stability and dispersal patterns

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by Robin W. Baird and Hal Whitehead
See the full PDF:KWSocOrg
Abstract
: The social organization of mammal-eating “transient” killer whales (Orcinus orca) was studied off southern Vancouver Island from 1985 through 1996. Strong and long-term associations exist between individual transients, so sets of individuals with consistently high association levels, termed pods, can be delineated. Pods consist of individuals of mixed ages and sexes, and typically contain an adult female and one or two offspring (averaging 2.4 individuals). The mother–offspring bond remains strong into adulthood for some male (and less often for female) offspring. Other males disperse from their maternal pod and appear to become “roving” males, spending some of their time alone, and occasionally associating with groups that contain potentially reproductive females. These males appear to have no strong or long-term relationships with any individuals, and adult male – adult male associations occur significantly less often than expected by chance. Females that disperse from their natal pod appear to be gregarious (having high average association rates) but socially mobile (having low maximum association rates). Differences in social organization from the sympatric fish-eating “resident” killer whales (where no dispersal of either sex occurs) likely relate to differences in foraging ecology. Transient killer whales maximize per capita energy intake by foraging in groups of three individuals,whereas no such relationship has been documented for resident killer whales