Just 74 southern resident orcas remain, as of the latest count by the Center for Whale Research. The count has hovered around this low point for several years.
The 2024 census tallied 73 orcas in the southern resident J, K and L pods. In the next census period, which ran from July 1, 2024, to July 1, 2025, four births were documented. Two of the calves and one adult died.
It’s a mixed story, said Michael Weiss, research director with the Center for Whale Research. J pod increased by two, L pod was stable and K pod declined. K pod is at its lowest point since the survey began, with just 14 orcas.
“What we had was a bunch of calves being born and half of those calves dying, and you can’t sustain a population if you can’t get calves to be born and survive their first couple years of life,” Weiss said. “That’s all tied to the state of the moms, and the moms need fish.”
Southern resident orca census
The recent census found 74 members in the J, K and L pods, nearly as few as when the counts started in 1976 with 71.
The endangered southern residents, a fish-eating population that can be seen along the West Coast of the U.S. and B.C., were listed for protection under the federal Endangered Species Act 20 years ago. They face multiple threats, from a lack of their primary food, Chinook salmon, to underwater noise from vessels that makes it harder to hunt, as well as pollution and inbreeding.
The release of the latest census comes as the Trump administration has proposed rolling back protections for endangered species and blown up a Northwest agreement over dam operations in the Columbia Basin to help restore salmon.
L128 was born to first-time mom L90 in September 2024. L128 was seen looking thin in October 2024, and was not seen again.
In late December, J41 gave birth to female J62, and Tahlequah, also known as J35, had female J61.
J61 was identified on Christmas Eve, and confirmed dead on New Year’s Eve. Tahlequah carried her body for at least 11 days in what is understood by some scientists to be an indication of grief.
Tahlequah in 2018 carried a calf that lived only half an hour for 17 days and more than 1,000 miles.
In April, researchers spotted J40 with her first calf, female J63.
After the census concluded, researchers saw J36 pushing her deceased female calf. Researchers aren’t sure if the baby took a breath or was a stillbirth.
Just a few days later, J36’s younger sister, first-time mother J42, gave birth to J64, also after the census date for this year. Mama and calf appeared to be nursing when scientists saw them in the Strait of Georgia, Weiss said.
It may be too early to clearly assess J64’s health, but researchers were excited to know the mother was able to reproduce because she is the result of inbreeding (her brother is also her father).
The loss of the calves this year has been hard, said Deborah Giles, a killer whale scientist with the SeaDoc Society, but it’s not abnormal for this population.
A 2017 paper co-authored by Giles found that more than two-thirds of the southern residents’ pregnancies end in loss because of a lack of food. It may be getting worse, Giles said.
There are other populations of fish-eating killer whales elsewhere that are just as inbred but their populations continue to increase, Giles said; the difference is the southern residents are nutritionally deprived.
Southern resident killer whales reproduce about half as many calves as northern residents, which can be found around northern Vancouver Island and southeast Alaska, and the mammal-eating Bigg’s killer whales. It’s hard to say exactly how much of this difference is due to lower birth rates and how much to higher infant mortality. But the result is the same: Southern residents stand alone in the northeastern Pacific in orca decline.
The composition of the northern resident killer whale population has been used as a baseline for one of the criteria for removing the southern residents from the Endangered Species Act listing.
The big difference is the number of orcas under 10 years old – making up about 47% of the northern resident population but only 15% of the southern residents in 2025. Scientists largely attribute this to low birth rates and calf survival in the southern resident population.
Adult male K26, the oldest surviving male in K pod at the time of his death, went missing in the late summer of 2024. K pod did not see any documented births last year.
K20’s calf K45, born in 2022, was the first baby the K pod had seen in 11 years. K pod has the highest likelihood of going extinct in the next half century, Weiss said.
“If we lose K pod we’ve both kind of scratched off one of the criteria for ever delisting the southern residents,” Weiss said, “and we’ve lost a cultural group, a cultural lineage, forever that’s not coming back. There are calls that K pod makes that the other groups rarely ever make. So there are these sounds that are kind of inherent to the Salish Sea that would never be made again.”
K pod especially spends a lot of time on the outer coast of Washington and goes all the way down to Monterey Bay to fish. One lever to pull to boost southern resident recovery, Weiss said, would be breaching the lower four Snake River dams.
Nearly a quarter of Snake River spring-summer Chinook populations and 14% of wild Snake River steelhead populations had fewer than 50 spawners last year.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found breaching the dams necessary alongside other actions to rebuild the highest-risk salmon runs in the Columbia Basin.
Tension persists over the competing demands on the Snake: irrigation, hydropower, transportation, fish. And climate change has added another layer of strain.
A bill from U.S. Rep. Dan Newhouse, R-Wash., seeks to bar federal funding from being used for research that could open a pathway to breaching the four lower Snake River dams, such as alternatives for energy generation or transportation. The bill had a hearing in September.
Efforts to recover salmon in the southern residents’ range continue.
Just one year after the largest dam removal in history, a Chinook salmon was documented in the lower Williamson River, heading for spawning habitat that has been inaccessible for more than a century.
Meanwhile, water temperatures and water quality have improved since the flows were restored.
Salmon were swimming upstream of the former dam sites the same week the Klamath dam removal project reached completion in October 2024. More than 7,700 Chinook swam upriver of the former site of Iron Gate, the lowermost dam in the system, in 2024.
“The Klamath River is still in that process of healing from those dams, and the scars are still fresh,” said Barry McCovey Jr., director of the Yurok Tribal Fisheries Department, at a news conference this month, “but the progress that we’ve made in just one year is pretty incredible; and it provides us with a lot of hope for the future.”
The Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe has held its third coho fishery in more than a century on the Elwha, free of dams. Meanwhile, litigation over dam operations on the Columbia River continues.
