Bigg's Annual 2025

2025 Salish Sea Bigg's (Transient) Killer Whale Annual Sightings

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We define a sighting as a unique group of whales seen on a unique day, and the location of each dot indicates where a group was first reported for that day. The size of the circle indicates the relative group size.

It was yet another record year, with 1860 unique sightings confirmed within the Salish Sea. The question is, is their meteoric rise finally starting to level off? Between 2023 and 2024, their presence rose by nearly 30%, something we had seen several times over the last decade. Between 2024 and 2025, however, the increase was less than 2%. It will be extremely interesting to see if 2026 remains in this range, yields another dramatic rise, or potentially even shows a decrease.

With the total number of sightings similar to 2024, it's not surprising that the year-to-year comparison showed an increase in six months and a decrease in six months, all of the changes relatively small. The months Bigg's killer whales were here the most were June, August, and May, while the months they were here the least were December, November, and January.

Despite winter sightings being lower overall for Bigg's, one thing that stands out to me is how many T-Parties there were in that time of year, represented by the larger circles! Of 252 sightings that occurred over those 3 months, 35 of them (13.8%) were groups of 10+ whales. On 5 days there were groups of 20+ whales!