Oregon Public Broadcasting

The resident Orcas of Puget Sound have been on the endangered species list since 2005 and there are several hypotheses for why they’re not recovering.

Scientists suspect lack of food, vessel traffic and pollution are to blame, but no one knows for sure. Ashley Ahearn reports on one team of researchers that’s relying on a secret weapon with a killer nose to figure out what’s troubling orca whales in Northwestern waters.

Sam Wasser likes to talk about poop. And he’s especially excited about killer whale poop.

“It looks like a combination of algae and snot. It varies in color but it’s very mucusy,” Wasser describes the matter.

Ashley Ahearn / KUOW

A transient orca whale surfaces near North Pender Island.

Wasser is the director of the Center for Conservation Biology at the University of Washington. Right now he and his team are based out of Snug Harbor on San Juan Island studying killer whales, but they’ve developed techniques to analyze animal poop from all over the world. Wasser says poop’s not gross, it’s scientific gold.

“We can measure the diet of the animal, we can get toxins from the feces, DNA so we can tell the individual’s identity, it’s species, sex and all of this is in feces. So it’s literally a treasure trove of information.”

With that information Wasser’s been able to help prosecute ivory poachers in Africa, track wolverines in the Rockies and better understand predator-prey interactions between wolves and caribou in the tundra.

But finding wild animal poop, especially whale poop, isn’t easy, so Wasser has taken a creative approach to staffing his organization.

“This is Tucker our scat detection dog. Say hi Tucker,” Wasser introduces his helper. 

Ashley Ahearn / KUOW

Tucker the scat-sniffing dog tries to hone in on orca poop, which floats to the surface of the water.

Tucker is an 8-year-old black Lab mix. He’s what those in the dog world call “ball obsessed.” He’ll do anything for a game of fetch – even if that means sniffing out floating whale poop from a mile away – because he knows that when he finds the poop he gets to play with his ball.

Killer whales have been found to have the highest concentrations of toxic substances like DDT, flame-retardants and PCBs of any creature on the planet. If scientists can understand more about the contaminants in these animals, they may be able to explain why they’re not recovering.

Tucker and the team’s heading out of Snug Harbor when another researcher radios in with the identification numbers of a pod of killer whales spotted passing nearby North Pender Island.

“K you ready? T10 T10B T10C T26 and T26A,” Giles recites the numbers.

Deborah Giles is a PhD candidate at the University of California Davis and an expert on killer whale behavior. She works with Wasser’s team in the summer and today she’s at the wheel, steering the boat out into some pretty rough water. White caps slap at the bow as we pick up speed.

But we’re rewarded when black dorsal fins emerge several hundred yards ahead of us.

“There they are! They’re at 11."

Liz Sealy, Tucker’s trainer, describes what the dog is doing in the bow of the boat as we criss-cross the waters where the whales last surfaced – on the look out for poop.

“So he’s actually sniffing around for whales, for poop to see if he can find anything. What he’ll do if he doesn’t have anything is he’ll come back and settle down and sit right next to me. When he gets excited he’ll start standing up on the bow, wagging his tail, getting really animated. So for now he’s just checking the scene,” Sealy said.

Tucker wanders back and forth across the bow but doesn’t seem too excited. The team spends about 20 minutes bobbing along after the whales, but alas, Tucker comes up empty-snouted. The winds are too strong and the water’s too rough for him to lock onto a strong scent.

No poop?

“No poop,” Sealy laments.

Despite this unlucky mission, the team will continue to collect samples from killer whales in these waters throughout the summer.

With samples collected in the past, Wasser’s team has been able to show that during periods of high vessel traffic – say Fourth of July weekend for example – the whales have higher levels of stress hormones in their poop. They can also tell when the whales are undernourished and correlate that with lower fertility rates.

There are about 86 resident killer whales in the region and that number hasn’t increased since 2000 when the population crashed.

Wasser suspects that the toxic chemicals in these whales may be playing a role here.

“They disrupt major hormonal pathways so that your body’s ability to regulate reproduction, metabolism all those things can be negatively impacted. It’s accumulating effects that are occurring and we’re just trying to show the mechanisms that lead to that outcome,”Wasser said.

For Deborah Giles, that outcome is pretty clear.

According to Giles “There are females that haven’t had calves yet and really they should have been having calves by now. Also we’re losing males that are just coming into reproductive age. That’s a huge hit to this population.”

It’s tricky to pick apart the various factors that make life tough for orca whales. Lack of food, vessel traffic and toxic pollution all pose a threat to these animals.

But Wasser says that by studying poop, “We can look at all these things collectively and then hopefully apply this to problems relating to human global health.”

Wasser says a sample of whale poop is kind of like a snapshot of pollution levels in our coastal waters and that’s a photograph we might all want to have a look at.