Eleven killer whales are locked in by ice in a Canadian bay, with only a small area of open water for them to surface, the mayor of a nearby village said as he appealed for help to save the marine mammals.
A hunter found the killer whales, also known as orcas, on Wednesday morning in Hudson Bay, in northeastern Canada. Two of the orcas appear to be adults; the remaining nine are smaller in size, said Petah Inukpuk, mayor of Inukjuak, an Inuit village home to 1,800, in Quebec. Other reports said there were 12 orcas in the pod.
A video taken by villager Clement Rousseau showed the opening to be just large enough for one or two of the orcas to surface at a time. A team from Canada’s fisheries department is expected to arrive at the ice hole on Thursday, according to Canada’s CBC.ca.
They are in a confined area, Inukpuk told NBC News on Wednesday, noting that there is no more open water.
From time to time, they are in a panic state and other times they are gone for a long period of time, probably looking for another open water (space) which they are unable to find,” Inukpuk said. “They keep going back to the same spot.
Killer whales are highly social and typically travel in groups from two to 15, though there can be larger groups, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency. They are most numerous in colder waters, such as Antarctica, Alaska and Norway, although they can also be found in temperate and tropical waters.
Inukpuk said killer whales were not spotted in the area every summer, but every second or third one. But this is the first time that they are locked in, he said.
The winter was unusual this year in that the bay did not freeze up as it normally does at the end of November or beginning of December, the mayor said.
There was open water after Christmas but about three days ago it got really cold and there is no more open water presently, he said.
Deborah Giles, a graduate student researcher at the University of California, Davis, who has studied killer whales for eight years, said the main issue facing the orcas would be if the air hole remained open.
It is absolutely tragic to think about this, you know, if that does close up, she said. That’s really what their biggest problem is right now.
Among the ideas discussed to save the animals was using an icebreaker, she said, although Inukpuk said such equipment was in Antarctica at this time of year. A Canadian fisheries official told CBC.ca that some icebreakers were being used in the Saint Lawrence River, where three commercial ships got stuck this week.
Geoff Carroll, a wildlife biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game who helped release two California gray whales in a similar situation that made international headlines in 1988, said his experience in the effort known as Operation Breakthrough also showed the power of other methods.
Our experience up here was that it seemed like the local knowledge and the low-tech approaches to working with the whales were the ones that worked best, Carroll said. It seemed like there were lots of high-tech efforts made to get those whales out and they kind of failed one after the other. What really worked was when we got local guys with chainsaws cutting one hole after another and we could kind of walk the whales out that way.
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