PORT TOWNSEND — In January 2002, Sue Long drove to Dungeness Bay to watch a drama unfold. A female orca had been found dead on the spit, and a juvenile male, probably her offspring, had beached himself on the spot and refused to return to the water, despite the efforts of marine mammal rescuers.
“They’d start pulling him out into the water, and he’d come back,” Long said.
“The whole crew was pouring water over him, trying to keep him alive.”
Upset by the struggle, Long got back into her car and drove to Port Williams, thinking a walk on the beach would calm her down.
There, she saw an even more disturbing sight — the dead female orca, lying on a trailer, the head and dorsal fin cut off, strips of blubber flayed from her body.
“I wondered what happened to her,” Long said.
Then she learned that the carcass of the female, known as CA-189, had been buried on a farm in Sequim to let the flesh decay, then sent to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration marine lab in Seattle for further cleaning.
Last week, the bones arrived at the Port Townsend Marine Science Center, where Long and other volunteers are documenting them prior to reassembly.
Bone atlas
The goal: to create the first bone atlas for an Orca whale.
“We’re breaking new ground,” Karen Lorenzo said as she placed a chevron bone in front of a grid to be photographed. “Nobody has written this out for us.”
The bones were packed in four large boxes, the Marine Science Center Staff and volunteers unpacking the first and laying out the contents.
DeLorenzo, a volunteer, helped Long, a retired radiology technician, photograph each individual bone from six different angles: front, back, sides, inside and out.
Roger Wilson, a retired science teacher, and Katherine Jensen, a book indexer, used calipers to take measurements of the vertebrae, marking down the measurements on printed diagrams.
For Jensen, being in contact with the orca’s bones is fascinating.
“I’ve sure I’m never going to be this near to one in the wild,” she said.
“There’s something magical about working closely, intimately, with these bones.”
Artist Kim Copp of Port Townsend documented the sternum, creating free-hand drawing with measurements.
Document 200 bones
In all, the volunteers have to document more than 200 bones — vertebrae, chevrons, ribs, shoulder blades, sternum, radii, ulnae, phalanges.
“An orca skeleton is very similar to a human skeleton,” said Liza Jacobson, an AmeriCorps enviromental educator who is leading the first phase of the project.
“The only thing that is different is they don’t have hind legs.”
The volunteers are still waiting for the skull, which takes longer to clean due to cracks, and the right flipper, which was frozen at the NOAA lab.
Toxin level high
When CA-189’s blubber was tested for toxins, the reading for PCBs was the highest ever recorded for an orca — approximately 1,000 parts per million parts blubber, Jacobson said.
Possible reasons: CA-189 was a transient, ranging from the coast of California (the CA part of the name) to British Columbia.
Transients live and hunt alone or in pairs, as opposed to a resident orcas, which live in pods, and eat seal instead of salmon — one possible explanation of the high concentrations of PCBs.
“They eat higher on the food chain,” Jacobson said.
Although there was no obvious sign of disease, CA-189’s reproductive system may have been damaged, which may have contributed to the PCB concentration; it’s lower in females that reproduce, Jacobson said.
The photographs taken of the bones will be placed on the Internet, allowing marine mammal researchers all over the world to study them, perhaps answering questions about how pollutants affect whales and why CA-189 died.
“We need to learn what we can,” Jensen said.
“I hope not, but I’m personally terrified that there will be a generation that will never encounter these creatures.”
Earlier this year, the volunteers received training in photographing and measuring bones from Lee Post, a Homer, Alaska, resident who is experienced in whale-skeleton articulation.
They also learned how to replicate orca teeth, which are hollow and deteriorate from exposure.
For DeLorenzo, working on the Orca Project is one way of increasing awareness of the natural world and the peril it faces.
For Long, the work is a way of healing the grief she felt watching the juvenile orca’s struggle to remain near the place where the female died that winter day.
“It’s come full circle,” she said as she photographed orca bones. “It’s great to be able to do this.
“It feels like closure.”
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Port Townsend/Jefferson County reporter-columnist Jennifer Jackson can be reached at jjackson@olypen.com.
