VANCOUVER — When two pods of southern resident killer whales meet each other in the waters off British Columbia and Washington, they line up fin-to-fin at the surface, facing each other in a silent greeting ritual.

Then, with no discernible signal, they burst into a flurry of breaching and tail slapping, as though to celebrate the event.

But orca researcher Deborah Giles hasn’t seen this ceremony for years. The orcas don’t have much to celebrate lately. Perhaps because they are dying.

Grieving mother orca J-35 has made headlines around the world with her insistence of carrying her dead newborn calf around for more than a week, nudging it through the cold waters off the Pacific coast. As of Wednesday night, she had not let go of the dead infant. Members of her family took turns carrying the tiny calf. But that image provides just a glimpse into the suffering that the entire population has been enduring.

The whales are starving to death, according to researchers.

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The southern resident killer whale family is made up of three groups called J-pod, K-pod and L-pod.

Three out of the endangered 78 southern resident killer whales counted last summer have been declared dead in the past six months and none was due to old age. More than half of the whales were sired by just two male orcas, signalling the number of breeding-aged adults is far too small.

Young orcas are struggling to survive to adulthood. K-pod has not had a successful birth since 2011.

Between 2014 to 2016, there were 11 calves born in J-pod and L-pod. Dubbed the ‘baby boom,’ it reignited hopes that the orca population would recover. But only half of the whales are still alive today.

One of them, four-year-old J-50, is so malnourished that she has grown only to the size of a one-year-old, said Giles, a conservation biologist with the University of Washington.

She is out on the water nearly every day. The “spunky” whale’s condition has been deteriorating throughout the summer, she said.

“I’ve personally never seen a whale that thin and still swimming around,” said Giles, who has been studying the southern resident killer whales for 13 years. “If she continues on this trajectory, we will lose her.”

Southern resident orcas like her are struggling mostly because they don’t have enough of their preferred prey — Chinook salmon — to eat, according to researchers. Experts say the reasons for the dwindling Chinook salmon numbers are largely human-related, including climate change, overfishing and destruction of spawning habitat.

This leads to several problems. The whales are malnourished and therefore less resilient to stressors. In addition, because they are underfed, they metabolize their blubber where environmental toxins are stored.

It also means there’s not enough food to sustain all three pods in the same area at the same time, leading to inbreeding. There are at least two recorded cases of parents mating with their own offspring, Giles said.

If the endangered southern resident killer whales go extinct, there will still be orcas in the world — in fact, their mammal-eating cousins in the same B.C. waters are thriving and orcas in other oceans are doing well.

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But humans around the world owe a lot to the southern residents in particular, said historian Jason Colby.

“This is the population of cetaceans that, more than any other population on Earth, transformed our thinking about whales,” said Colby, who teaches environmental history at the University of Victoria.

Colby recently authored a book on the history of how people’s interactions with fish-eating southern resident killer whales galvanized the public into seeing all whales as intelligent creatures worth saving rather than monsters that need to be hunted to extinction.

“Just a few decades ago, we were shooting them, we were thinking about machine gunning them in B.C. — and now we are captivated by the sight of this mother carrying around her dead calf,” he said.

“From my perspective, southern resident killer whales made us better people and we have a moral debt to them, to help them recover from what we have done.”

Colby hopes the now famous photo of J-35 pushing her dead newborn to the surface will spur policy-makers to make the difficult decisions needed to save the whales.

And while the Canadian government seems determined to build the Trans Mountain pipeline, which will result in increased tanker traffic in the orcas’ territory, Giles applauded the same government’s July decision to limit Chinook fisheries’ quotas by 25 to 35 per cent.

The federal government also began requiring all vessels to maintain a 200-metre distance from orcas, giving the whales more space to forage for food.

Giles, who sits on Washington’s task force on southern resident killer whale recovery, said the U.S. government needs to follow Canada’s lead.

It’s too early to know whether those type of measures will be enough to save the fading population. But Colby said humans have no excuse if the whales become extinct.

“We are watching them die off right in front of our eyes and we are responsible. We are poisoning them and we are starving them.”

For now, researchers are keeping a close eye on J-35 and J -50. Giles spent about 15 minutes with the four-year old Wednesday night.

“You can see the outline of her skull, and you can see her ribs,” she said.

“One should never see the bones of a whale, unless they are in a museum.”

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