Sounder The Islands’
Serving Orcas, Lopez and San Juan County
The mighty clingfish
– Page 6
WEDNESDAY, January 6, 2016 n VOL. 49, NO. 1 n 75¢ n islandssounder.com
Earthquake shakes the island
An icy new year dip
by Anna V. Smith Journal reporter
Mandi Johnson/Staff Photo
“Guys, there’s ice in the lake!” exclaimed a young Polar Plunge participant. Dozens of people braved the freezing termperature 11 a.m. on New Year’s Day to run headlong into Cascade Lake. The thermometer read 32 degrees and there really was a layer of ice on portions of the lake. While many of the plungers did an about-face and ran right back out, the polar bear pictured above walked right into the chilly lake as though it was mid-summer. The annual plunge is sponsord by the Orcas Island Rowing team.
It was cold, crisp night, just before midnight, and Scott Damon had settled down to watch a movie on his boat, docked at West Sound Marina on Orcas Island. He had turned on his TV with the volume up high when he felt his 85-foot boat start to shake violently. “I thought it was an explosion on the boat,” Damon said. “So I ran down to the engine room with a flashlight to find out, but there wasn’t anything there.” Confused, Damon returned to the galley to check out the rest of the boat. When he found everything untouched, he thought it must have been an explosion on Orcas Island, or an earthquake. Damon would later find out the disturbance was a 4.8 magnitude earthquake that hit at 11:39 p.m., Dec. 29. The quake was 7.2 miles off the west coast of the San Juan Islands and 34 miles underground. “I went to sea for years for the Merchant Marine, and I’ve never experienced anything like that before, so that was a first for me,” Damon said. “It must have been a
Dead baby orca found near Vancouver by Leslie Kelly
Sounder contributor
The baby orca that was found dead on the west side of Vancouver Island on Dec. 29 is not a member of the J-pod or L-pod, Michael Harris, executive director of the Pacific Whale Watch Association, confirmed Monday. The whale was a female transient whale, not a member of the southern resident population of orcas that frequent Puget sound waters. “Nothing is absolute until we get the results of the DNA tests back,” Harris said. “And that will take months. But we are pretty confident that this calf was a transient.” He said they made comparisons of a photo of the dead calf to the group’s catalogue and found no shot that matched the dead whale. He added that there are as many as 500 transient whales that swim up and down the coast. Although a determination of how the whale died won’t come until the DNA results do, Harris said there was no trauma to the whale. “Right now the Department of Fisheries and
Oceans in Canada believe it died due to an infection,” he said. “There was no trauma. It was not attacked and we can safely say it had nothing to do with any military activity in the area or ship strike.” Whale officials worried that the dead calf might have been one of the eight new babies born over the last year to the J-Pod or L-pod group of killer whales in the Puget Sound waters. “Baby whales often die,” he said. “Their mortality rate is about 50 percent. Sometimes it’s just not a viable calf.” Sometimes, too, calves get separated from their pods and encounter turbulent surf. And that can lead to their deaths. Harris said there were five calves born this year in the J-pod and three were born to the L-pod. On average it takes 14 years for a female whale to mature and produce her first calf. Females will give birth about four or five times. Harris said people can help with the survival rate of baby orca calves by continuing to work
on salmon recovery. “We need to get these fish going again,” he said, mentioning chinook specifically. “In the years where the salmon numbers go up, the number of babies go up.” Harris said that an abundance of chinook salmon for the fish-eating orcas has been the key to the recent population boom. According to the association’s website, J54, the newest member of the J-Pod’s baby boom, was first seen by whale watchers near San Juan Island and is the second offspring of 22-yearold J28. The association said the baby boomlet is the largest since nine calves were born in 1977. The southern resident orcas are listed as endangered but their population this year is now tallied at 84, he said. In December 2014, an orca from the southern resident population was found dead near Comox, carrying a full-term female calf. Necropsy results determined she died due to complications from the pregnancy.
heck of an after shock.” The earthquake was felt by a number of islanders, and 301 people on San Juan Island reported feeling light shaking to the U.S. Geological Survey. 60 people reported to USGS on Lopez Island, and 108 people on Orcas Island reported feeling shaking. There have been no reports on the islands or elsewhere of damage to buildings or people. While USGS measured the quake at 4.8, its Canadian counterpart Natural Resources Canada measured it a 4.7. “For the islands, this is a notable event. It’s one of the biggest quakes on the islands in decades, and it’s not common,” said Brendan Cowan, director of San Juan County Department of Emergency Management. “That being said, it’s not surprising in any way shape or form to seismologists and scientists.” In this case, no tsunami warnings went into affect. The depth of the earthquake hindered the tsunami threat, because it did not cause a vertical shift in the sea floor. Earthquakes either cause the land to move up and down or sideto-side. If land mass moves up
SEE EARTHQUAKE, PAGE 5
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