We put the entire record of the Southern Resident killer whales into one sourced graphic: every annual count since 1960, every documented capture, and twenty years of tanker traffic on both sides of the border. The decline starts with the live-capture era of the 1960s and 70s. It shows no relationship to the tanker traffic now being argued about.
Almost everyone in British Columbia has an opinion about the Southern Resident killer whales. Everyone would agree they are iconic and rightly beloved creatures. Far fewer of us have looked at the whole record.
So we built it. The infographic published today assembles every year of the count, from 1960 to the provisional July 2026 census, together with the years when whales were taken out of these waters by people and the tanker traffic that moves through them now. The record has gaps, and we have marked every one of them on the page. What is there is reliable, and some of it will come as a surprise. (story continues below graphic(
Sixty-six years, one family, and the decade it never recovered from
More than half a century ago it became common practice to capture orcas in the Salish Sea, where they were easiest to hunt down, and deliver them to a late twentieth-century fascination: the aquarium. Between 1962 and 1977 at least 224 Southern Residents were encircled in the inland waters of Washington and British Columbia so that 47 could be kept or killed. There are fewer of them today than in any year of the 1960s. This is the whole record: modelled back to 1960, individually counted since 1974, current as of the provisional July 2026 census.
Modelled population the year of the Yukon Harbor roundup — the highest figure in the series.
Modelled low four years later. A 30% loss, driven almost entirely by capture.
The high-water mark of the rebound, and the last time the population approached its pre-capture size.
Pending one final encounter with L pod’s Greater L4 subgroup. Up two on 2025.
Orcas in the Salish Sea since 1960
J pod ‚Äî the one whale-watching tours are most familiar with ‚Äî has been remarkably stable in population size for decades. What’s often overlooked is an era many decades ago that permanently affected the Salish Sea orcas. The top line in the chart below shows the overall population. The secondary chart below, using vertical bars, depicts when whales were removed by people. Outline bars are whales encircled and later released; solid bars are whales kept for display or killed in the nets. 239 rounded up, 47 never returned.
Where they were captured
Eleven locations, every one of them a place the pods used routinely — narrow inlets and passes where a net across the mouth was enough. Dot size is whales removed at that site.
Where the trade sent them
Each small square is one whale, marked by the pod it was taken from. The bar is the distance it was carried from the Salish Sea. The furthest travelled among them — flown to the Mediterranean, Bavaria, England, the Pacific coast of Japan — went the way of any late-twentieth-century cargo.
One pod stays. Two commute.
J pod is the one Canadians know — it is present in the Georgia Basin and the southern Gulf Islands on and off all year, and it is the only pod that regularly works inside the San Juans. K and L arrive in May or June and are gone by winter, out on the open coast. L pod is the traveller and the giant: about half the community, and the only group recorded as far south as Monterey Bay. It is also the pod that collapsed.
Tankers and whales: two decades, no correlation on either side of the line
Same waters, same twenty years. Washington-bound tanker traffic has been flat ‚Äî 568 to 688 entering transits a year, no trend ‚Äî while the whales declined and then partially recovered. BC-bound tanker transits doubled in 2024 with the Trans Mountain expansion, and in the two censuses since, the population rose: 73 to 74 to a provisional 76. Even doubled, the Canadian tanker count is roughly half the American one ‚Äî and a small fraction of total US-side oil-vessel traffic once Washington’s tank barges and ATBs (5,000-plus transits a year in Puget Sound) are counted. J pod, the group most resident in these shared inland waters, has been stable throughout.
WHAT THE CAPTURE FIGURES DO AND DON’T SAY. Table 2 counts whales caught ‚Äî encircled by nets ‚Äî separately from whales retained and whales dying. The 47 plotted here is retained plus died. The rest were released, which is not the same as unharmed: the operations separated calves from mothers and broke matrilines.
THE TOTAL IS CONTESTED. Published figures for Southern Residents removed range from 34 (Delta Council ch. 11) to 47 (DFO recovery strategy, Bigg et al. 1990) to 48 (EPA). The Center for Whale Research gives 45 delivered to parks and at least 13 killed. Pod attribution for pre-1974 captures is retrospective inference — photo-ID did not yet exist — and Table 2 flags several entries as only presumed Southern Resident.
DEATHS WERE UNDERCOUNTED BY DESIGN. The diver contracted at Penn Cove in August 1970 later described being tasked with slitting open the carcasses of drowned whales and weighting them down so they would not appear in the official tally. Table 2’s footnote g records a parallel case: three whales listed as retained from a 1970 Pedder Bay capture, where a fourth, an adult female, died of apparent malnutrition in her holding pen and was secretly disposed of.
THE END OF IT. In March 1976 six whales were herded into Budd Inlet with aircraft, powerboats and seal bombs. Ralph Munro, then an aide to the governor, was sailing nearby and saw it. The state sued; the whales were released; the capture era in Washington ended. Note for accuracy: Table 2 files those six under transients, not Southern Residents, so they are excluded from the capture bars in Fig. 1. The lawsuit still ended the practice.
WHERE THEY ACTUALLY ARE. “In the Salish Sea” describes summer and autumn. The population ranges the open coast from Monterey Bay to south-east Alaska the rest of the year, and in recent seasons has spent less time in inland waters as Fraser River Chinook have declined.
SOURCES. Wiles, G. J. (2003), Draft Washington State Status Report for the Killer Whale, WDFW, Tables 1–2 and Figs. 5–6. Center for Whale Research annual census, 1976–2026. Puget Sound Partnership Vital Signs indicator 32. Puget Sound Institute, 27 July 2026, on the provisional 2026 count. Any published reference to CWR population estimates must credit the Center for Whale Research.
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The number in the headlines is usually wrong
It is common for media accounts to round the total population up to 80. In fact the number is lower, yet the trend is positive. In 2025 there were 74, according to the Center for Whale Research census, notched up to a provisional 76 this year once the final encounter with L pod's Greater L4 subgroup is confirmed.
Two years of increase is not a recovery. There are fewer Southern Residents today than in any year of the 1960s, and the population sits well below the recovery target tracked by Puget Sound's Vital Signs indicators.
The decade that did the damage was not this one
During the heyday of capturing live killer whales to be transported to aquariums, between the years 1962 and 1977, at least 224 Southern Residents were encircled in the inland waters of Washington and British Columbia, according to the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. Forty-seven of these were either removed, or died in the capture attempt. The modelled population fell from 96 in 1967 to 67 in 1971: one third of the family, gone in four years, for the aquarium trade.
Three narrow inlets in south Puget Sound account for three-quarters of the removals. The whales that were kept were flown to Antibes, to Munich, to Windsor, to Kamogawa on the Pacific coast of Japan. Canadian aquariums bought them too: Vancouver, Victoria, Niagara Falls. The trade ran on both sides of the border.
This history gets less attention than the current argument, and it explains more of it. The hole those years tore in L pod is still visible in the count.
Tankers do not explain the decline
In recent years, the fate of Southern Residents and claimed linkages between that and Canadian oil tanker traffic has become a cause celebre. But when you look for evidence to support this perspective, get ready for a surprise. (This is the section people will fight about.)
Tanker traffic bound for Washington ports has been flat for two decades, between 568 and 688 entering transits a year with no trend, on the numbers in the Washington Department of Ecology's annual vessel entries and transits report. Over those same years the population fell and then partially recovered. The correlation between the two is -0.34, which is weak, and in any case a series that does not move cannot explain one that does.
On the Canadian side, BC-bound tanker transits roughly doubled in 2024 with the Trans Mountain expansion, from 173 to 352. In the two censuses since, the population has gone up: 73, then 74, then a provisional 76. Tankers did not cause that. Two years in, there is no measurable harm either, despite the opposite being predicted loudly for years on end.
Then there is scale. Even after doubling, Canadian-bound tanker traffic is roughly half the Washington-bound count, and Washington waters carry nearly 3,900 tank-barge and 1,300 ATB transits a year on top of that. The vessel traffic story of the Salish Sea is overwhelmingly an American one, told largely with American data by American researchers. That shapes how Canadian decisions get talked about, and Canadians are entitled to notice.
The pod that lives here is the stable one
J pod is the group most often seen from the Gulf Islands and the southern Strait of Georgia, present in these inland waters on and off all year. No pod is more exposed to vessel traffic. It has held between roughly 22 and 28 animals for fifty years. The community as a whole was listed as endangered under the US Endangered Species Act in 2005.
L pod is the traveller, ranging the open coast as far south as Monterey Bay, and L pod is the one that collapsed, from 59 animals in 1993 to 33 today. It is also the pod that lost the most whales to the captures.
No whale from J pod is known to have been taken, on the documented record. J pod spends the most time in the shipping lanes and has held steady. L pod spends the least and has lost close to half its number. If proximity to vessels were driving the decline, the results for these two pods would be reversed.
Salmon
What has changed over these decades is Chinook, above all Fraser River returns. NOAA Fisheries puts prey availability at the centre of the recovery problem as well. The whales spend less time in the Salish Sea as those runs shrink. That is the population the numbers describe: one still short of where it stood before the captures, feeding in an ocean with less food in it.
That does not make vessel traffic harmless. A small population has less margin than a large one, and a spill in these waters would be irreversible. Haro Strait and the southern Strait of Georgia are designated critical habitat under the Species at Risk Act, which makes managing that risk a Canadian job, and we treat it as one. Guarding against a risk is not the same as having proved a cause.
On the numbers
Every figure is sourced in the graphic itself. The census comes from the Center for Whale Research; the 1960-73 segment is a matrix-model projection from Olesiuk et al., reproduced in the 2003 Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife status report, and is drawn as a dashed line because it is a model and not a count. The capture record is Table 2 of that same report, compiling Bigg and Wolman, Asper and Cornell, Hoyt, and Olesiuk. Tanker transits are from the Washington Department of Ecology's vessel entries and transits series, and the DFO recovery strategy gives the Canadian figure of 47 whales removed.
Published totals for whales removed range from 34 to 48 depending on the source, because pod attribution for pre-1974 captures is retrospective inference. Photo identification did not yet exist. Annual BC-bound tanker figures before 2023 exist in Ecology's yearly tables but have never been compiled into a single series; that gap is marked on the chart.
If you can improve any of it, tell us. We put the whole record in one place so it could be checked.
Ian Biana writes for the Resource Works Accelerate team and can be reached at [email protected].
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