A Rare Encounter

Today was a lucky day, despite the Residents being out of range. We had Transient orcas in our area and decided to run up north to get to them.

The Transients are the same species as our Resident orcas: Orcinus Orca, but they belong to two different cultures which eat different foods, speak a different "language," have different family structures, and even look slightly different. These differences are also common in human cultures. We humans are all the same species, but we belong to different cultures. The "Ts" are always a treat because we don't see them near as often as our famous Residents.

We met up with the T18s and T30s north of Saturna Island in Canada (over 40 miles round trip)! We had some awesome looks at the two sprouter males, T30A and T19B. T30A is fifteen years old and T19B is thirteen. (For a thirteen year old he's quite large and we look forward to seeing him all grown up and monstrous.) He's almost reminiscent of our Resident male J30, who is also huge for his age.

Just to give you an idea how special this trip was, our friend Adam, a marine biologist, has NEVER seen the T30s after thirteen years of being on the water studying these guys! How cool is that???

Megan Young, Naturalist