Our Southern Resident Killer Whale Research

When OBI was founded by a small group of community scientists in 2015, we were motivated to start long-term data collection efforts to help capture some of the changes we were starting to notice in Southern Resident orca habitat usage and social behavior. Even as our mission has expanded since then, our initial goals still remain at the core of our work. Below you will find a summary of our three main projects involving the SRKW, and you can also learn more about our research philosophy here.

ACTIVITY Budget

Long-term monitoring of Southern Resident behavior

We modeled our field data collection off work done in the 1970s and 1980s to allow for direct comparisons of overall activity budgets of Southern Residents between then and now. We record objective notes around the spacing, speed, and orientation of a group of whales and allow for these different combinations to guide how we cluster observations into behavioral categories. This allows us to go beyond the basic designations of traveling, foraging, socializing, and resting to look for more nuanced categories of killer whale behavior. Our first paper utilizing this long-term behavioral monitoring is currently in review and we hope will be published later this year.

habitat usage

Tracking Salish Sea Presence and Absence

One of the most noticeable changes over the last two decades has been shifts in Southern Resident killer whale habitat use. At the time of their endangered listing, the central Salish Sea was considered their “core summer habitat”, but now their presence is much less predictable, and they are often gone for weeks or months at a time during the summer months.

Explore Our Sightings Maps

With a broad network of community science partners including the Pacific Whale Watch Association, Orca Network, and regional sightings groups on social media, we collate and verify reports to help keep accurate year-round records on Salish Sea-wide presence and absence of Southern Residents. In additional to publishing several peer-reviewed papers with this data, we also regularly assist other agencies in assessing Southern Resident killer whale presence and how it intersects with current or proposed management actions.

acoustic communication

Pairing Hydrophone Recordings with Drone Observations

Monika’s first introduction to the world of whale research was through Southern Resident acoustic communication, and it’s a topic that remains near and dear to her heart. As of 2024, OBI has been part of a collaborative project with the Center for Whale Research hoping to gain new insights into if Southern Resident killer whale vocalizations can be linked to specific behaviors.

Working together on the water in the fall in Puget Sound, we are deploying a hydrophone array to help us localize specific calls and linking those recordings to drone observations of whale behavior.The hope is that if we can find vocal cues of key survival behaviors like foraging, prey sharing, or nursing, those observations can be applied to areas like the outer coast where we have passive acoustic monitoring of Southern Residents but very little visual observation of behavior to help determine how they are utilizing their broader habitat outside of inland waters.

Puget Sound Research Project

While we were doing fieldwork in Puget Sound with the Center for Whale Research, we invited our Patreon supporters and Whale U students to ask any questions they had about our drone/hydrophone project. They had the chance to ask about the logistics, the purpose of our work, what it’s really like in the field, the specific encounters we had, or anything else they were curious about.