Thanks so much for your help, @seadocsociety.bsky.social! One Health is all about collaboration, and so is saving species!

academic.oup.com/bioscience/a...

Our killer whale field work will continue through this month and the data collected will inform important killer whale health records alongside @whaleresearch.bsky.social.

“It’s challenging because she’s put all this energy into gestating this calf that does not result in a viable offspring,” SeaDoc Society Scientist Deborah Giles told the Seattle Times. “...We need to be having females being born and living so that they can go on to give birth themselves.”

Full-scale ecosystem restoration will save salmon, orcas, and us. It is time to go all out and take care of this place as if our lives and our livelihoods depend on it. Because they do.

We must also reduce ocean noise that pervades the orcas’ feeding areas, and clean up the persistent toxic chemicals that we dumped in the ocean and now contaminate the whales we profess to love.

Our scientific understanding of the Salish Sea and how it works tells us that we are long past the point of band-aid measures like increasing hatchery salmon or culling pinnipeds. We need to restore shorelines that support the food and habitat that salmon need so they can flourish.

Right now, citizens of the Salish Sea are faced with a decision: dramatically change how we think about and invest in ecosystem restoration or risk losing Southern Resident Killer Whales forever.

The sight of J35 mourning her dead calf is a stark and dreadful memorial to the fact that we’ve allowed the Southern Resident population to fall to what is nearly its lowest point since the Center for Whale Research started monitoring it in 1976.

Losing a newborn leaves a hole in one's heart whether you’re a human or an orca. The only difference is that while we seem to be the masters of our own destiny, the long-term survival of the Southern Residents lies in our hands.

Our feelings have the same physiological bases as the orcas', so we can and should use the same words. Calling Tahlequah's behavior “mourning” reminds us that these animals think and feel, just as we do.

J35’s relatives are believed to be bringing her salmon to eat while she carries her dead baby, and I also don’t think we should be afraid to speak of those as acts of caring or love.

So, can we scientifically call J35's behavior mourning? Yes! Not only do I think we can call it mourning, I think we must call it mourning.

Are we, after all, so arrogant to think we have the market cornered on emotions even though other highly social animals have the same hard wiring?

But as Carl Safina reminds us in his treatise on animal emotions, Beyond Words: What animals think and feel, if animals have the same brain, same hormones, and same neurotransmitters as we do, why wouldn't we expect them to have the same emotions?

For years scientists vigorously avoided using emotional terms like happy, sad, playful or angry when describing animal behavior.