Main objective of our project is to preserve orcas of Eastern Kamchatka and stop their capturing for oceanariums. During the last years several capture permits were granted for Eastern Kamchatka, one orca was caught and died in captivity and some other died during the capture. For these whales even capturing of several tens of animals can have seriously negative implications to population. Population estimates for orcas before detailed research have always been much larger than actual numbers, and the impact of capturing depends on number and size of pods and populations. Kamchatkan orcas are comparatively unexploited, and the most common opinion among Russian specialists and the public is that “there are a lot of orcas in Russia and capturing of several tens of animals will not affect the welfare of species”. That’s why to save Kamchatkan killer whales we need to study their pod and population structure and inform specialists and the public about it.
Specific goals of our project are to define the status of killer whale populations of Eastern Kamchatka and to turn the public opinion against the capturing of killer whales.
Our study take place around Starichkov Island in the Avacha Gulf of Kamchatka, 30 km from the city Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. We individually recognize the whales by the method of photoidentification using catalogue of photographs of the Far East Russia Orca Project. We record orca sounds from the inflatable boat using hydrophones and DAT recorder. To distinguish between sounds of several orca groups when they travel together we use the device for underwater acoustic localization. Laboratory analysis is conducted at the Department of Vertebrate Zoology of Moscow State University. Different orca pods have different vocal dialects, and different populations have totally different vocal traditions, thus the analysis of sounds will allow us to establish which groups are the members of which pods and how many pods and populations are there in total in Eastern Kamchatka.
To attract the attention of specialists to the problem we attended the Third International Biennial Conference “Marine Mammals of Holarctic” in Ukraine in October 2004. We presented our project and told the scientific community about the possible consequences of killer whale capturing. We also showed the video-film made from our field footage about Kamchatkan killer whales in the wild and a threat of their capturing. We prepare the scientific paper about killer whale status in Eastern Kamchatka.
