An afternoon with the T46Bs in Cayou Channel, WA.

As the T46Bs have been cruising around the San Juan Islands of late, their family group composition has looked a little different!

Earlier this year, T46B Raksha gave birth to her 8th documented calf. This brought her core matriline group size up to 9 whales, the biggest number of any family of Bigg's killer whales that regularly visits the Salish Sea! Most groups that spend all their time together are 3-6 whales; if the family grows much beyond that, one of the older offspring typically disperses. The thought is that it's more difficult to be stealthy and sneak up on marine mammal prey if your group gets to be too large.

T46B's three oldest offspring are all daughters. Her eldest daughter T46B1 Tread has already dispersed, so the question was who might be next. Both T46B2 Akela and T46B3 Sedna have calves of their own, and logically you would think the next oldest would be the next to leave, but something told me that wouldn't be the case. When we saw the T46Bs earlier this year, it was T46B3 who was typically furthest from the rest of the group, which can sometimes be a precursor to true dispersal - maybe sort of a trial run while still in the vicinity of mom?

Recently it has indeed been T46B3 and her 2025 calf T46B3A Munro that have split off, but what I did not foresee was that T46B3 would take one of her younger sisters with her! Instead of dispersing as a duo, six year-old T46B6 Sol has joined them to make a trio.

Is T46B6 there to help care for her nephew? To help her sister hunt? To relieve some additional stress from their mother so she doesn't have one more juvenile mouth to feed? Or is she perhaps doing some..."sol" searching...seeing what her future as a dispersed whale might look like?

Tracking Bigg's killer whales to the level we are now able to do is endlessly fascinating! Pictured here are the T46Bs from this afternoon in Cayou Channel, where the six current core members were heading west.