Whale Tales - J2 Granny

THE SOUND OF BROKEN PROMISES
By M.L. LYKE, Seattle P-I Reporter

PART 1: Navigating a changing sea 
Monday, October 9, 2006

PART 2: Ignorance, fear lead to a death by art
Tuesday, October 10th, 2006

PART 3: A black and white gold rush is on
Wednesday, October 11th, 2006

PART 4: Orcas' quiet world shattered by sonar, intruding civilization 
Thursday, October 12, 2006

PART 5: Loving orcas once feared as ‘demons'‘?
Friday, October 13, 2006

PART 6: When Granny is gone, will her story be the last chapter?
Saturday, October 15th, 2006

PART 1: Navigating a changing sea
Monday, October 9, 2006
By M.L. LYKE, Seattle P-I Reporter

The water suddenly humps up, a liquid green mountain. The old one explodes from inside it, five tons of black-and-white muscle parting the sea.

For a second, she twists in the air, then splashes back down on her side, a signal to the tribe swimming south off San Juan Island.

Her relatives hear the crash from a half-mile off. They dive down, turn and quickly arc after the old female, cutting white wakes, breathing hard. Puh-whew. Puh-whew. Vaporous 6-foot plumes erupt from their blowholes before they suck in each new breath.

She leads, they follow. She is their tribal elder, keeper of family knowledge. She holds the maps for survival. She knows when salmon return to the rivers' mouths, knows the kelp forests where they hide, knows the ancient underwater canyons and crevasses that once held great schools of fat chinook.

She has lived long, seen much, some of it best forgotten: Bullets, bombs, nets, babies born dead. She understands the world of orcas. It's always about survival, always about community.

Her family travels together, porpoising in easy rhythm, their black fins slicing the surface like so many windmills. They hunt together, spread out in lines that stretch for miles. They talk, using chirps and whistles, squawks and squeals that sound like metal files on a saw blade. Scree-eeeeeee, scree-eeeeee.

They play, surf boat wakes, toss jellyfish, sensuously rub and roll atop one another in sexual romps.

Their bonds are strong and formal. They travel with their mothers for life. They are family.

It's the world of humans that remains a mystery.

Decades ago, the small land mammals shot at Granny. They chased and corralled her in pens.

Now they surround her in noisy boats, shout and clap and laugh when she surfaces to breathe.

Humans have a number and name for her: J2, Granny. Researchers identify her by the nick in her fin, the white patch on her back and the scratches on her side. The littlest ones, flopping and plopping out of rhythm with the adults, mouth Granny's fins and rake her side with their sharp new teeth.

Some researchers put her age at more than 90. Those are people years and people names, land concepts.

Whatever time is, and however it is marked, she is a respected leader in her tribe, matriarch of J-Pod, the close-knit group of killer whales that fish the Salish Sea, native name for the inland waters that stretch from lower Puget Sound to British Columbia.

Her family has fished this territory for thousands of years.

But in her life span, the seas have changed. The fish have changed. She has changed.

Does Granny sense something is wrong?

Does the old female know her tribe is in trouble?

Conquering nature
Only a few humans have witnessed the birth of an orca in the wild. This event, too, is a group effort.

The mothers give birth underwater after about 17 months of gestation. Several family members swim below to bring the newborn to the surface. They help the infant draw breath through its blowhole, then family festivities begin: orcas slap the water with pectoral fins, zip about in high-speed antics, lift the newest family member onto their noses and backs, again and again.

Granny's successful birth must have been cause for great celebration in J-Pod. Some scientists estimate up to 50 percent of orca calves are stillborn or don't make it past their first six months of life.

Granny was tough from the get-go.

Like other orca babies, she was born folded in half, then flopped out to her full 7 or 8 feet and began nursing from her mother's milk. Back then, in those first decades of the century, the milk was not a poisoned cocktail.

Though scientists debate the ages of older orcas, the Center for Whale Research on San Juan Island estimates Granny's birth date as 1911. Center researchers say Granny was likely mother, grandmother, sister and aunt to her extended J-Pod family, which numbers 24 members.

On land, the 1910s were a time of great excitement. America was swept up in the controversial theories of Sigmund Freud, the adventures of South Pole explorers, the new pleasures of talking movies and a provocative South American dance called the tango.

A clever inventor had figured out a way to start a car without a crank. More than 450,000 were on the road in 1910, a few years after the Model T hit the American market.

By 1920, there would be 8,131,522 automobiles mucking up the air, spewing out the lead from additives in gasoline. Early researchers would discover the lead was linked to IQ deficits in American children.

Who considered what it did to orca development as it fell from air to sea?

Lead was only one player in the fouling of young Granny's home. Particles of the coal used to heat homes, power steamships and provide fuel for industries were already accumulating in the Sound by the 1910s. Between 1900 and 1940, the particulates would increase hydrocarbon pollution an estimated 20 times over.

Puget Sound's bully, booming settlements belched black with the stuff in the first decades of the century. All around the Sound, industrious men set about conquering nature. They felled forests with handsaws, replaced tall firs with wheezing smokestacks.

In Seattle, with a population creeping from 200,000 to 300,000, entrepreneurs dredged up streams to create grand canals. They hosed down hills and filled in tidal flats with the dirt and debris, muddying the Sound.

Its citizenry thought nothing of dumping sewage and garbage right on the seashores for the tides to wash away.

The sea was Mother Nature's toilet. One tidal flush, and everything disappeared from human view, into the sea where Granny swam.

'Smell of progress'
With the start of World War I, industry boomed in Seattle. Boeing began building aircraft, and shipbuilders and timber mills worked super-speed to supply military needs. By 1918, Seattle would be one of the leading ports in the country.

So what if Puget Sound skies hung dark with pollutants and the air stank of sulfur? It was "the smell of progress."

Why would anyone think twice about dumping wood waste or barrels of chemicals into Puget Sound? No regulations controlled industrial runoff.

In 1912, Asarco began using its lead smelter property near Tacoma to refine copper. Byproducts included arsenic, sulfuric acid, liquid sulfur dioxide. They poured into Commencement Bay for the next seven decades, as Granny developed from infant to calf to mature female.

At the same time, pulp and paper mills were using chemicals to bleach their products. The chlorine and dark pulp liquor ended up in the waters, poisoning shellfish and other marine life.

Around Everett's sulfite-spewing mills, fishermen told compatriots not to bother putting protective paint on their boats to kill harmful organisms. The pollution would do it anyway.

Sediment studies show another harmful industrial pollutant was building up in Puget Sound in the first half of the century: PCBs, polychlorinated biphenyls, fire-resistant chemicals used to insulate industrial equipment. The long-lived PCBs, linked to cancer, build up in an animal's body over a lifetime.

The industrial pollutants, the airborne particulates, the human waste and the wood waste settled into the sea that was Granny's home. By 1951, a federal report would rate Puget Sound as the sixth-most-polluted area in the United States.

Granny fished and played in the dirtied waters, draping kelp strands over her back, sliding them through the notches in her tail, lifting them 4 feet in the air, then ... Slap! Splash! shattering the water's surface with her decorated fluke.

How could she fathom the changing chemistry of her emerald sea?

PART 2: Ignorance, fear lead to a death by art
Tuesday, October 10, 2006
By M.L. LYKE , Seattle P-I Reporter

On land, the early decades of the 20th century were a time of ambition and promise.

On the water, they were a time of turbulence and mistrust.

Old fears and hatreds ruled the seas.

For centuries, humans had viewed orcas -- which are actually super-size dolphins -- as bloodthirsty beasts. They believed the predators would attack, kill and devour a man in an instant, like so much fish food.

Sailors told tales of Jonahs rotting away in the bellies of the gluttons with the menacing teeth. The Aleuts of Kodiak Island called orcas polossatik, "the feared ones." The Haidas of British Columbia called them skana, "killing demons." Some Northwest tribes held that orcas had supernatural powers, that they were sea-gods who captured canoes, dragged humans underwater and transformed them into killer whales.

Attitudes were rooted in eyewitness accounts of transient orcas, nomadic ocean-dwelling killer whales. The transients attacked gray whales, blue whales, porpoises, sea lions, seals, even great white sharks, often jumping on their prey and holding them down until they drowned. These cunning wolves of the sea hunted the open ocean in packs.

Worried 18th century Spanish sailors first dubbed the powerful predators "whale killers," a term eventually translated into "killer whales." The sailors had no idea that one orca could be different from another.

The differences were dramatic. The oceangoing whale-killers feed primarily on marine mammals: whales, porpoises, sea lions. The killer whale pods that inhabit the Salish Sea -- called resident orcas -- don't. They concentrate on fish.

Transients and resident orcas might share the same ancestry, share the same tuxedo coloration and imposing physique, even the same animal intelligence, but they are genetically distinct. They avoid one another, even when they swim the same seas.

They haven't interbred in thousands of years.

Bullets didn't make such distinctions in the first half of the century. Whalers shot at the whale-eaters as freely as they shot at fish-eaters. So, for decades, did commercial fishermen. These "blackfish" were thieves, spoilers, defilers of human fortune. The salmon they snatched rightfully belonged to humans, not animals.

One commercial fisherman in the San Juan Islands said he knew when killer whales were coming through gill net fleets by the sounds of gunfire.

The state had no regulations on orca slaughters. It was the Wild West on the open seas. Even governments took aim. In 1939, Canada's armed services instructed pilot trainers to use the killer whales for target practice in Georgia Strait, shooting high-caliber bullets from airplanes.

"They could have easily wiped out an entire pod in an afternoon," said Rich Osborne, director of the Whale Museum in Friday Harbor.

If they did, no one was counting.

In the 1960s, when entrepreneurs began rounding up orcas to sell to marine parks, captors reported about 25 percent of the animals had scars from bullet wounds.

Did Granny see the dark holes blossom red on her relatives' sides?

Did she watch them flail and sink into the dark underworld?

Somehow, the canny female survived the humans who cursed at her, shot at her, their bullets whizzing by her bulbous head as she navigated an underwater maze of old linen fishnets, wall after wall, in search of food.

To humans, Granny and her family were a puzzle, vicious but alluring. They fascinated man in the way that all mythic beasts do, swimming in the dark corners of a psyche where apes become King Kong, Sasquatch snatches naughty children into dark forests and ripples in a turbulent lake describe the undulating backbone of the Loch Ness Monster.

This strange fascination would lead to one of the ugliest chapters in the history of Granny's family -- a death by art.

'He was in a daze'
No one knows how Moby Doll was related to Granny, but Canadian researchers linked the orca -- mistakenly identified as a female -- to J-Pod through his distinctive dialect, an old language of squeaking hinges and high-octave bleats carried generation to generation.

By the time Moby Doll's story hit front-page headlines around the world, Granny was already in her early 50s, a respected leader in her J-Pod tribe.

Was she swimming with Moby Doll that summer day in 1964 when an artist took aim?

It was the middle of July, and Samuel Burich, a sculptor and commercial fisherman, had been waiting more than 50 days for the right opportunity. Burich was under commission from the Vancouver Aquarium to create a scale-size, lifelike reproduction of an orca for its new hall. The artist wanted accurate measurements. He needed a model -- dead.

He was having a rotten time of it. Most of his crew had given up, gone home after seven weeks of waiting. The only two hunters left were Burich and fellow fisherman Joe Bauer. "We were about to pack it in, too," said Bauer, now 68.

They got lucky that July morning. Bauer remembers getting up, "a little hung over," looking out, and seeing a dozen or so whales approaching. "I yelled 'Hey, Sam! There's whales right in front of the gun site.' "

The site was a ledge that hung about 25 feet above the water on the island's east end. Bauer was armed with a camera, Burich with a musket-loaded harpoon gun. The sculptor drew a bead on the young male orca, his finger tightening on the gun's trigger.

Then he fired. The steel harpoon pierced Moby Doll side-to-side, bruising one of the bones in the back of his skull. The stunned orca appeared to be in shock. "He was in a daze," Bauer said.

Two killer whales from Moby Doll's clan pushed the motionless animal to the surface so he wouldn't drown.

Was one of them Granny?

If she was there, she would have heard her young relative's distressed squeals as the shock wore off and the pain hit. She would have also seen the artist trying to finish off the job.

Burich kept shooting at his black-and-white prey with a rifle. The island lighthouse keeper and others joined in. The young orca wouldn't die.

It felt all wrong to Bauer. He had been surprised to see the orcas trying to save the bull, surprised to hear their calls. "I had this feeling we had a lot more there than we had bargained for."

Suddenly he knew he had to stop the bullets. Quickly maneuvering his rowboat between the firing squad and the wounded bull, he made himself a human shield for Moby Doll.

"The men kept yelling, 'You're going to get yourself killed. They're ferocious!' " said the retired fisherman. "I didn't think so. I didn't think I was in danger."

The men finally called the director of the Vancouver Aquarium to tell them they had an orca specimen -- alive. The director advised them to try to save the wounded animal.

It took some 16 hours to bring the young bull into Vancouver's harbor, still tethered to the harpoon. Once inside the harbor, the orca was put in a 40-by-60-foot sea pen and pumped full of penicillin. Scientists assumed he was female, and kids in a radio contest named him "Moby Doll." Many also assumed the black-and-white behemoth would attack them, tear them to pieces, given half an opportunity.

At first, he refused to eat, circling the pen in a counterclockwise motion, like a tiger in a tight cage. When he finally began to eat after 55 days in captivity, he took the fish gently from the humans, careful not to hurt them, despite everything they'd done to him.

Unbelievably, Granny's young wounded relative was docile, trainable, even friendly. He was not a bloodthirsty monster. And he was not dumb, as scientists who studied his complex vocalizations concluded.

In a short time, the young orca became a star, a flippered celebrity adored by a newly smitten public.

Fans would soon be heartbroken. After only three months in captivity, Moby Doll -- who when autopsied turned out to be Moby Dick -- died of an infection.

Mourning for Granny's relative, one of the first killer whales exhibited in captivity, was heard around the world. His obituary made front-page headlines in Europe.

Was there an inkling then of the bizarre twist the orca story would take?

"Our experience with Moby Doll had allowed us to make great strides in understanding marine mammals," wrote the aquarium director, Murray Newman, in an autobiography.

"But at the same time, we had unwittingly opened the way to a new kind of commercialism."

Soon, Granny would be tangled up inside it.

PART 3: A black and white gold rush is on
Wednesday, October 11, 2006
By M.L. LYKE, Seattle P-I Reporter

By the mid-1960s, Americans were tripping down U.S. highways in 76 million cars. Inside them, a new generation buzzed about four flop-haired Brits called the Beatles, about civil rights protests in the South, about the assassination of JFK, and about a war in Vietnam that was dividing the nation.

Some were also buzzing about Moby Doll, the lovable, captive orca whose popularity helped trigger a new gold rush in Puget Sound after his death in 1964.

Soon marine parks were clamoring to have their own killer whales.

Bold men could make their fortunes trapping them.

How could Granny, matriarch of J-Pod, know that the big fishing nets she had so artfully dodged would soon encircle her?

The craze for Puget Sound killer whales took off in 1965, with the assist of an entrepreneur and raconteur named Ted Griffin, a 29-year-old with a nose for publicity.

Griffin had built the Seattle Public Aquarium on Pier 56 in 1962 to attract crowds attending the World's Fair in Seattle -- the seminal event that would put the odd, soggy city in the corner of the country on the international map.

The aquarium owner was obsessed with trapping his own "horse in the ocean." He had already been out hunting orcas with tranquilizer darts and rifles -- even a modified spear gun fired from a helicopter -- when he traveled to Vancouver, B.C., to meet Moby Doll.

He fed the captive a cod, and that was it.

"It was electric," says Griffin, who now lives in Bellevue and rescues tropical fish. "From that point on, I knew I would risk everything, sacrifice everything, go to the end of the world to get a whale."

He didn't have to go that far. In 1965, two fishermen in British Columbia called to report that they had a big bull trapped in their gill nets near a little cannery town. Griffin quickly scrounged up some cash and headed north to wheel-and-deal.

For $8,000 the orca was his. Ignoring warnings of local Indians who said confining an orca would bring him harm, Griffin and his crew built a floating cage and towed the male orca some 400 miles to his Seattle aquarium.

The bull wasn't alone on his journey. A female and two small calves followed the pen partway south, calling out to their trapped relative, "mewing" and "cheeping," according to witnesses.

The aquarium owner named his orca Namu, and trademarked the name to sell records and novelties. Namu, he said, was his "closest companion," his "personal pet."

He hand-fed the Canadian orca, taught him tricks, donned a black Neoprene wet suit and swam with him. In a 28-page spread in National Geographic, he touted the leviathan's agility and intelligence.

Soon he was selling rights for a Namu movie to United Artists. "They gave me $50,000 to sign, and $50,000 to keep my mouth shut and stay away," says the wry retiree, who did orca stunts for the heart-wrenching film, "Namu: The Killer Whale."

It pitted trigger-happy, orca-hating fishermen with a sympathetic biologist who worried that he was "losing his objectivity" about orcas.

Who wasn't?

The orphaned calf
Soon, Griffin and partner Don Goldsberry were in a chopper, on the hunt for a companion for Namu, armed with a shoulder-firing harpoon rifle.

The harpoon the whale hunters used wasn't supposed to kill, but the adult female they hit -- a member of Granny's J-Pod family -- was fatally wounded. She was listing, her breathing irregular, bubbles coming from her wounded side, as they towed her and the little calf that clung to her side to Rich Cove.

After she died, frothing at the mouth, the hunters weighted her carcass with an anchor and chain so it would sink. "I made the choice to conceal the loss," Griffin wrote in his book "Namu: Quest for the Killer Whale."

It wouldn't be the last orca sinking.

Griffin took the orphaned calf back to Namu, but the distressed youngster kept butting the bull, raking his sides with her teeth. She also rammed Griffin, cracking his ribs. "She was raising hell. I thought I was going to die," he says.

Griffin named the troubled 14-foot female Shamu and leased her to SeaWorld for $2,000 a month, for as long as she lived. Shamu was flown 1,066 miles to San Diego, and a waiting saltwater tank at SeaWorld. There she spent her first day sending distress calls in the J-Pod dialect that had held her family together for generations.

Did the orphaned orca circle the tank looking for an exit, a way back to her family?

She would survive six years in captivity, the first in a long line of trademarked "Shamus" at SeaWorld.

Namu survived only one year. On July 9, 1966, the 17-year-old orca grew sick with an infection and died, tangled up in the steel netting of his captor. Newspapers reported that the 7,520-pound, 25-foot long animal was sent to an area rendering works, his remains turned into poultry feed. His skull was saved in collections at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture.

Griffin, who reduced aquarium tickets from $1.50 to $1 after Namu's death, was devastated.

In a letter to the P-I, he wrote a sad obituary, concluding: "Yes, I would do it again, and so would Namu."

One of them could, and did.

"I continued to capture whales, but my heart was never in it again," Griffin says.

'It was gruesome'

Two groups of resident orcas work the Salish Sea. The northern residents fish the waters of British Columbia, north to Frederick Sound in Alaska. The southern residents, Granny's community, fish south, from lower British Columbia down into Puget Sound, as far as Olympia.

Northern and southern populations keep their respectful distances.

When summer's on, fish are jumping and the living's easy, the three southern resident pods -- J-Pod, K-Pod and L-Pod -- often gather into a giant superpod for ritual, play and sensual delights.

Boaters in the San Juans have witnessed breathtaking spectacles as pods line up for a black-and-white formal "greeting ceremony." Two lines face one another, like kids playing Red Rover. As if on cue, they submerge all at once and arise in a milling, rolling, bumping, slapping, thrashing, all-age move-and-groove orca party, excitedly talking and socializing.

At least 80 orcas -- out of a southern resident population of about 90 -- were congregated off Whidbey Island in August 1970. Odds are good Granny was among them when the nets closed in at Penn Cove.

Across the nation, the '70s were a restless time. The Beatles broke up, National Guardsmen opened fire on students at Kent State, proceedings began over the My Lai massacre. Vietnam was getting messy.

So were the roads, choked with more than 120 million cars. The president of General Motors promised to deliver "pollution-free" cars by 1980 and urged an end to lead additives in gasoline. When the government moved to make gas stations carry unleaded, a fuel additive manufacturer successfully filed suit.

In Seattle the population was in decline, spiraling down to 530,831 in 1970. Between 1969 and 1971, Boeing laid off half its workers. Pulp mills closed. A billboard went up asking: "Will the last person leaving Seattle please turn out the lights?"

One thing revving up in Puget Sound was the "green" eco-movement.

The first rumblings of a Northwest environmental movement occurred in the late 1920s, when oyster growers in the slow-flushing southern Sound went to the government to complain that trade waste from sawmills was killing their stocks. The mills settled out of court.

By 1945, the area's first pollution control board had been established, but it had little muscle. It wasn't until the 1970s that the movement caught fire. The Washington Environmental Council initiated shoreline-protection legislation. A coalition was formed to keep big oil tankers out of Puget Sound.

Suddenly, the planet mattered. All the creatures on it mattered. Orcas mattered. And the tide was turning on their captors. "Remember what happened to Captain Ahab!" protesters shouted at them.

By 1970, Ted Griffin was wearing a bulletproof vest and carrying a concealed weapon. He said he and his family had received numerous death threats.

Griffin's orca-hunting skills had grown increasingly sophisticated. He and Goldsberry used light airplanes and helicopters for scouting, along with sophisticated underwater detection equipment they obtained from the military. They'd sold two killer whales to the Navy in 1968 to train for torpedo recovery.

The going price for an orca was nearing $20,000.

The hunters' prey was often the youngsters. They were easier to maneuver onto stretchers, fit on flatbeds of trucks and less expensive to ship. Less weight meant cheaper freight.

'I was crying' John Crowe was one of the captors at the legendary Penn Cove roundups. The scuba diver was in the water assisting as one of the last young orcas was separated from its kin, netted, tied fore and aft to a boat and taken to shore.

The older orcas were released then, but family members lingered, talking with the calf as it was put in a cradle and lifted out of the water with a cherry picker.

Its shrill little squeaks and shrieks were unnerving. They got to the diver. "I didn't stop working, but I was crying," says Crowe, now in his late 60s.

Crowe remembers a dozen demonstrators showed up at Penn Cove to "flip us off." Maybe it was the protests that convinced captors to deal with a nasty bit of business under the cloak of night.

Several young captives had died, entangled in nets. Their corpses could be a publicity nightmare, and a financial disaster. Dead orcas were supposed to count as part of the captors' state permitted "take." That cut into profits.

Crowe says that late at night, at his bosses' request, he and two other divers slit the dead orcas' bellies open and put rocks inside, then anchored the tails to make the corpses sink. When the decomposing bodies of the juveniles washed ashore several months later, newspapers started asking questions. All hell broke loose.

Crowe would eventually turn state's evidence against his employers, who at first denied responsibility for the illegal dump. The incident would help convince state legislators to end whale captures in Puget Sound. Crowe was already convinced.

"What I was doing was really wrong."

The whales thought so too. One adult female, as he was taking a baby to a sling, went charging after him, her mouth open wide. Crowe's buddies quickly grabbed him by the tank, and dumped him upside down and backwards in their boat.

Could the angry female have been Granny?

Photographs put her inside the nets during at least one capture. But it's likely she was captured more than once, separated from the desirable calves, and released.

Did she, too, linger at net's edge, trying to comfort her young relatives as they were lifted into the air?

Captors and scientists had assured the public that taking a few whales wouldn't hurt anything. A University of Washington professor said the idea that captures would harm the orca population was "absurd."

But by the end of the capture era, as many as 100 orcas in J, K and L pods had been trapped, many herded into Puget Sound inlets with boats, seaplanes and helicopters, frightened by underwater explosions.

"Scores and scores of explosives went off. They were like huge firecrackers," said former Secretary of State Ralph Munro, who witnessed the final Puget Sound capture near Olympia in the spring of 1976.

Goldsberry, working for SeaWorld, led the hunt. Griffin was out of the business by then.

Munro still remembers the mournful sounds of the trapped animals in that last roundup. "You could hear the orcas screaming to each other. It was gruesome."

He raised hell. Within a year, state politicians had pushed through legislation banning the captures.

By then, almost 50 killer whales from the southern pod had been taken to marine parks, some as far away as Japan, Australia, Germany, France and England.

At least a dozen more were killed in the process.

Granny's family, the family she'd held together for so long, was dwindling before her eyes.

PART 4: Orcas' quiet world shattered by sonar, intruding civilization
Thursday, October 12, 2006
By M.L. LYKE, Seattle P-I Reporter

On summer days, Granny may look up through the underwater murk into the funhouse mirror of a surface that separates the human and orca worlds. The dark hulls of boats pass above her.

Maybe there is a small one trailing fishing hooks, maybe a big one carrying whale-watchers, maybe a jumbo tug or super-size tanker, blocking the sun rays that stripe her underwater home.

Their engines rumble. Their depth finders bleep. Their propellers whip up white clouds underwater.

The big ships that commute year-round in Granny's territory make sounds like underwater washing machines: Ch-chuh, Ch-chuh.

Other boats screech: Eeee-uuuu-eee-ooohh!

Some honk: Waaaanh-Waaaanh.

Some just whine: Naahn-n-n-n, Naahn-n-n-n.

By some estimates, the underwater decibel level is around eight times louder than it was in Granny's childhood. It will increase even more if shipping traffic doubles over the next decade, as expected.

For Granny, who holds the memory of a quieter time, it's like living in the middle of New York City, under a busy subway. The underwater cacophony interferes with her family calls and the signals used to coordinate family hunts.

Researchers suggest orcas have to raise their voices to even be heard now. "Birds living by freeways do the same thing," said Rich Osborne, director of the Whale Museum in Friday Harbor.

If Granny's calls are now louder, they're also longer. She sometimes has to repeat herself to be heard.

Despite the congestion, she stays -- and plays. Her J-Pod family has been spotted gaily surfing the bow wakes of big tankers and ocean-going tugs in Rosario Strait, prime family feeding territory.

Maybe they can tolerate the boat noise.

Sonar is another matter.

Robo-scream
Orcas have the most sensitive hearing of any of the toothed whales tested so far. Even the clatter of rain on water commands attention: TT-TT, TT-TT-TT.

So imagine the heavy-metal Robo-screams of underwater sonar.

On May 5, 2003, the Navy guided-missile destroyer USS Shoup was testing its tactical midfrequency sonar near San Juan Island. The sonar, used to detect stealthy enemy submarines, was so loud whale-watchers could hear it pinging through boat hulls several miles away. Divers recorded it underwater. Tide-poolers could hear the screech in the air. Up to 100 Dall's porpoises sped away from the destroyer, high-tailing down Haro Strait.

The pulses reverberated off the rock canyon underneath Haro Strait, where Granny and her tribe herd their prey. Researchers said almost all of the 24 members of J-Pod were in the thick of the blasts, confused, likely unable to determine where the sounds were coming from.

Some researchers described the orcas as "panicked." Research scientist Ken Balcomb, executive director of the Center for Whale Research on San Juan Island, described them as "terrorized."

"I was in the Navy, and I know that sonar is one way to defend ourselves. But practice does not have to happen in our own front yard, our own orca sanctuary," said Balcomb, who served Navy tours as an officer and a pilot.

Did the little ones squeeze in tight against Granny that May day?

Her family members, some less than a year old, abruptly stopped feeding and bunched up protectively, then headed for the island's west side, milling close by shore as the sonar screeches continued, one after another. Balcomb was at the Center for Whale Research when he spotted them headed for the reef below. His video cam was rolling. So was his mind.

"My first thought was, 'Oh shit, a stranding.' "

Scientists believe extreme intensity sounds can damage a marine mammals' lungs and sinuses and cause hemorrhaging of the eyes, ears and brains. They also say loud blasts of active sonar have caused whales to strand themselves on shore and die. After 14 beaked whales, 2 minke whales and one dolphin were stranded in the Bahamas in 2000, scientists concluded the likely cause of death was the Navy's midfrequency, active sonar.

In the Shoup incident, Balcomb estimates sonar blasts could have been up to a billion times louder than the noise of a Zodiac whale-watching boat. Heard through underwater hydrophones at the Center for Whale Research, it sounded as if the blasts might blow out the speakers. To Granny, the sound must have been piercing, an acoustic tsunami.

Her spooked pod split up near shore and took off, divided. None stranded. None died in the four-hour Navy exercise.

But carcasses of about a dozen stranded porpoises scattered around the area were collected after the incident. A team preparing a report for the National Marine Fisheries Service necropsied most of them, but many of the bodies were rotting. Investigators did find signs of illness or injury in some porpoise ears, but said they weren't able to distinguish damage caused by sonar from damage caused by decomposition or other conditions.

Balcomb, who worked with the Bahamas strandings, did some investigation on his own. Shortly after the incident, a whale watcher reported a dead porpoise floating in the water. Balcomb collected the fresh specimen, put it in his freezer, and had it privately CAT-scanned by a doctor.

The scan indicated the animal had a brain hemorrhage and trauma to its inner ear, said the researcher.

Though scientists at NMFS said the injuries might have happened as the animal thrashed on a beach, Balcomb has no doubt what caused its death. "I photographed the animal's skin surface. There was not a scratch on it," he said.

The Navy also came to its own conclusions.

Ordered by then-Gov. Gary Locke to do a full report, it cleared itself of all fault in the sonar incident.

The orcas' behavior in the Shoup incident was within normal range, the Navy report said. The midfrequency sonar did not kill, injure or harm the J-Pod orcas and "was not responsible for any subsequent harbor porpoise strandings."

The report concludes: "No further investigation into this matter is warranted."

Navy officials would later advise crews to avoid the training exercises when orcas were known to be present.

Mating with abandon
Swimming alongside Granny during Navy sonar exercises was a storied orca named Ruffles. The male killer whale -- estimated age 55 -- has a flagship 6-foot dorsal fin that ripples in long lazy S's.

He is J-1, the most easily identifiable member of J-Pod. "The Stud," some call him.

Male orcas are mama's boys, even when they're grown. They rarely leave their mother's sides, and, frequently, pine away and die a short time after she dies.

It's one reason Center for Whale Research scientists believe Ruffles is Granny's son. He is usually at her side, or close by, his breathing rhythms matching hers as they travel the Salish Sea. Puh-whew. Puh-whew.

Ruffles could also be Granny's brother. He's not her lover.

Orcas almost always mate outside their own pods, although they will engage in free-wheeling family sexual play, male with male, or older females teasing adolescent boys. For thousands of years, they've limited their procreation to other pods, a practice that prevents inbreeding.

For randy Ruffles, that means mating in K-Pod or L-Pod.

Ruffles puts to rest a number of moldy ideas about orca social structure: 1) that killer whales organize into male-dominated harems; 2) that males always swim with wife and offspring; 3) that killer whales mate for life. Wrong, wrong and wrong.

Orca families organize along matrilineal lines. Moms rule. And Ruffles mates with abandon. He's a love-'em and leave-'em orca.

If there's a bevy of K-Pod or L-Pod beauties lolling on a hot summer day, he can often be found swimming in the middle, white belly up, genitalia on display.

Whale-watching tourists have cried in alarm at the sight, thinking the legendary "pink sea snake" was the orca's intestines spilling out, that the orca was coming apart before their eyes.

"There's girl whales in the water," naturalist John Boyd explained to one embarrassed woman.

"He's happy."

'Crack babies'
Ruffles became the lone mature male breeder in J-Pod with the death of his younger male relative J-18, named Everett.

Everett was born in 1977, the same year U.S. Sen. Warren Magnuson maneuvered congressional legislation past state Gov. Dixy Lee Ray to effectively ban supertankers in Puget Sound -- one of the nation's top petroleum-refining centers.

"Maggie," as he was known in Washington state, had wide support from environmentalists concerned that an oil spill could decimate orcas and other marine life -- a concern brought home with the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Prince Williams Sound.

The Alaskan pod of killer whales that swam through the spill's oily muck there lost up to 22 of its 36 members. Some were spotted with their dorsal fins completely flattened after the spill. They sank, leaving no corpses to study.

Everett's corpse would be studied -- and the findings would not be pretty.

Everett was born to Tahoma, J-10. Tahoma matured from calf to mature female when it was still legal in the U.S. to use PCBs, long-lived industrial chemicals that accumulate in a marine animal's body over a lifetime.

The polychlorinated biphenyls were banned in America around the time of Everett's birth. But he was still bathed in them. So was his entire J-Pod generation, poisoned by their own mothers.

Female orcas dump heavy loads of PCBs and other contaminants onto their newborns from their fatty mother's milk. They offload up to 90 percent of these toxins just as the organs of infants -- who may nurse more than 30 times a day -- are developing.

Some scientists compare the poisoned calves to "crack babies."

Studies indicate such toxic loads affect the reproductive systems of marine mammals, and make them more susceptible to diseases, including cancer, by hampering the function of disease-fighting white blood cells. This immune suppression has been linked to viral outbreaks that caused massive die-offs of dolphins and seals.

Was Tahoma's milk poisoned?

The story of her family reads like Old Testament tragedy.

First of her children to disappear was J-20, Ewok, a reproductive-aged female. She died long before her time, in 1998. Ewok was 18.

Tahoma, age 37, soon followed her daughter in death, in pre-millineal 1999.

The century was coming to a close. More than 130 million cars, most fueled at last with unleaded gas, were navigating U.S. highways as Americans fretted about a Y2K bug. An estimated 150 million Internet users were exploring some 800 million Web pages. In Seattle, with a recovering population of a little more than 560,000, high-tech startups were on fire.

Everett died the year the high-tech bubble burst, 2000. His body washed ashore in Tsawwassen, Canada. He was still a young whale, age 22.

Researcher Balcomb had first seen Everett as a newborn on a snowy day in 1977 off San Juan Island. Like other infants, the little bull's patches were peach-colored, not white, and he still had the folds on his side from birthing. "He was a cute little guy," Balcomb said. He tracked the young whale as Everett entered adolescence, and began to sprout the tall fin that distinguishes mature males from females.

Even in Everett's 20s, Balcomb said, "He was still swimming close alongside his mom, J-10."

Balcomb believes industrial contaminants killed the young orca. A blubber sample taken three years before Everett's death showed a PCB concentration of about 63 parts per million, a large load for a young orca.

The necropsy on Everett's corpse was telling. He died of a massive bacterial infection, with a ruptured ulcer on his flank. His muscles had atrophied.

"His immune system should have defeated the infection," Balcomb said.

There was another troubling sign. Everett's testes had not developed.

Granny's young relative had zero sperm count.

PART 5: Loving orcas once feared as ‘demons'‘?
Friday, October 13, 2006
By M.L. LYKE, Seattle P-I Reporter

Once dismissed by Time magazine as a "savage sea cannibal," the orca is now man's second-best friend, an underwater mystic, a finned Mahatma Gandhi, a frolicking Free Willy and, in the words of one Friday Harbor bartender, "a kindred spirit."

Granny and her J-Pod kin are considered the love-and-peace big-think gurus of Salish Sea. Scree-eeeeee, scree-eeeeee.

"When I see the orcas, I always feel like I could die right now, I'm that content, at peace," said Susan Berta, who oversees a Whidbey Island whale-sighting network (www.orcanetwork.org). "I think we have a lot to learn from them, about sharing resources, and living sustainably, peacefully."

Though a few old-time fishermen in the San Juans grumble about too many "enviros" and say they "hate the stupid whales" that take away their fish, tourists are mad for the black-and-white celebrities.

In 1988, whale-watching boats had about 15,000 customers. By 2001, that number was more than 400,000. Floatplanes and vessels -- including privately owned powerboats, sailboats, kayaks -- have long dogged the whales.

In high summer months, researchers have counted up to 120 boats ringing a single group of orcas.

How much the love-fest cramps the orcas' style is an ongoing debate.

Researchers have tracked subtle changes in behavior when more than 15 boats come near the whales. The animals might change direction, make sharp turns, dive deeper, come up less often to breathe and forage less.

"As soon as the boats get within four to five miles, the orcas' behavior becomes more determined," said Sharon Grace, who lives on San Juan Island and observes the pods from shore. "If the calves are out wandering, when the boats start to come, they tuck right in behind Mom."

Still, many researchers are slow to draw conclusions.

Researcher Bob Otis, a behavioral psychology professor from Wisconsin, has spent 17 summers studying how boat traffic affects orcas in a zone off San Juan Island. In 9,776 hours of orca observation, he and his crew counted 767 orca pec slaps, 601 cartwheels, 1,156 spyhops, 6,544 tail slaps and 3,222 breaches.

In all the tallying, he still can't figure out why an orca breaches, or predict when it's going to happen. "After 17 years, I have no idea, no idea," Otis said at a summer orca symposium.

And surface activity is only a tiny piece of the behavioral puzzle. Granny and her tribe spend 95 percent of their time underwater, out of human view.

Maybe it's the not knowing that fuels the killer whale mystique.

Devotees can't get enough of Orcinus orca. They long for connection.

The boldest have set out in float tubes, inflatable kayaks, even air mattresses seeking eye-to-eye encounters. One professor in Nevada decided to bring his students to San Juan Island to swim with killer whales, a project that luckily was halted by police.

Sometimes, it's orcas, not humans, that make the first moves. Two lost killer whales that made international headlines -- Canada's famous orphaned orca Springer and our wayward southern resident Luna -- sought out human contact when they were separated from their pods. The lonely, highly social animals followed boats, bumped them, even rubbed up against them.

Humans successfully reunited Springer with her tribe in 2004. Luna, from L-Pod, didn't make it. The young male orca -- believed by a tribe of First Nation natives to embody the spirit of their deceased chief -- died this March when he was sucked into the prop of a large ocean tugboat.

Orca advocates went into mourning.

They threw flowers on the water, wrote elegies to the "brave little whale."

His demise, they said, was a "death in the family."

Made for movies
Stories of magical interactions with orcas are legion.

Mary Getten on Orcas Island says she telepathically communicates with southern resident orcas. In a talk with Granny, she asks about porpoises "harassing" J-1, Ruffles.

"That was not harassment," Granny replies to the inter-species communicator. "It was play, and Ruffles, what an undignified name, allowed it."

Fred West communicates with music. For years he has been directing Seattle's City Cantabile Choir in "Orca Sings" off Lime Kiln Point State Park, where local pods gather to feed offshore. The killer whales have shown up -- and chowed down -- for more than half the concerts.

The choir's harmonies mix with their vocalizations, heard through hydrophones placed underwater, as the sun turns apricot and melts over Haro Strait. "They're such magnificent beasts, and their world is a world of sound. They get such a bad impression of us, with our irritating and interfering noises," West said.

"I want them to know we can sing Mozart -- that we can sing in four-part harmony."

Research scientist Ken Balcomb has witnessed many made-for-movies moments.

One day, he was motoring out of Admiralty Inlet across the Strait of Juan de Fuca when he ran into a thick blanket of fog. Within 10 minutes, the southern residents converged on his boat, crowding around. There were more than 80 whales, some only inches from the hull.

Granny was among them. So was Ruffles. The old one and her family swam slowly with the boat for two hours, until the fog cleared.

Were they guiding the boat around shallow shoals? Balcomb wonders. "Wherever they were, there was enough water depth for the boat," he said. "It was a very moving experience."

Ralph Munro, former secretary of state and longtime orca advocate, was party to one of the most publicized J-Pod encounters. The year was 1999, the same year Worldwatch Institute reported that seven out of 10 scientists believed we were experiencing "the largest mass extinction of species in history."

A number of killer whales had died, including J-6, named "Ralph" in honor of Munro, who had pressed to get orca hunts banned in the mid-'70s. To publicize the deaths, Munro decided to throw a commemoration ceremony for Ralph at the Lime Kiln Point State Park Lighthouse on San Juan Island.

Aug. 23 was a sunny day, and the media showed up in force. Munro joked that J-6's family would arrive precisely in time for the ceremony's start.

As if on cue, Granny's family appeared directly offshore, just as Munro was about to launch into the introduction to his "Goodbye to Ralph" speech.

Munro didn't have a chance. Ralph's sister J-8, Speiden, breached six times in a row. All around her the scene-stealing orcas were leaping, splashing, tail-lobbing and spyhopping, popping up like jack-in-the-boxes to peer onshore.

The audience went wild. Munro couldn't get a word in edgewise. "I just gave up trying to talk," he said.

“I'm not a mystic. My wife and I are Methodists," Munro said. "We're just not into this dreamland world -- but I have had experiences with these animals that are just beyond description."

A deadly game
The showboat orcas love games. One summer, they swam around with fish on their heads. The past two summers, Granny and her family have taken up a more ominous game, "porpoise volleyball."

Researchers and naturalists have observed J-Pod orcas chasing harbor porpoises at high speed, lifting them out of the water with their flippers, riding them on their backs and tossing them around for up to an hour.

They prey on the baby porpoises, beating them up and often leaving them dead, or near-dead.

One porpoise mother made bold, selfless charges at the orcas that took away her baby, then spun away at the last minute. "It was dramatic and pathetic," Balcomb said.

Balcomb wonders what it all means. Is it a deadly game or something else?

Are there too many porpoises competing with the orcas for food? Are they ousting the competition by destroying their young?

"It could be a message," Balcomb said. " 'OK, that's enough. ... Whose hunting grounds are these?' "

Granny's hunting grounds are not the ones she knew as a youngster. Her chinook supply has undergone cycles of dramatic decline, hammered by environmental setbacks and commercial interests.

In the flush '20s, when commercial fish traps were still legal, 40,000 salmon might be taken in a fell swoop.

In the '50s, old-timers remember hundreds of gill netters working out of the south end of Lopez Island, fishing Granny's territory. "If those nets had corks a man could stand on, you could have walked all the way from Lopez to Victoria," says Skagit Valley farmer Curtis Johnson, 65.

Development, dams, logging and overfishing took their toll over the decades. "The salient fact about salmon fishing in the 1960s continued to be that more and more fishermen were competing for fewer and fewer fish," wrote Seattle author Daniel Jack Chasan in his book, "The Water Link: A History of Puget Sound as a Resource."

Salmon populations now hover at 10 percent of their historic highs.

For J-Pod orcas, not only are there fewer salmon, but they are smaller in size. Scientists estimate the orca's prey have shrunk in size by almost half since the 1950s.

If the salmon are fewer, smaller and harder to find, does Granny have to travel farther and worker harder for less meat?

Is it possible, in desperate times, that she and her tribe could break ancient tradition and consider porpoise as food?

So far, baby porpoises used in orca "volleyball" games appear to remain uneaten.

Granny's family members are picky eaters, and it's not just marine mammals they eschew. They may locate a school of pink salmon and ignore them. What they're looking for is their gourmet favorite: the king of salmon, the tyee, the hog, the chinook, Oncorhynchus tshawytscha.

A National Marine Fisheries Service sampling of orca feces and prey remains in the San Juans showed they ate 99 percent salmon -- 18 percent of the fish were chum, 6 percent coho and 76 percent chinook.

Those fatty, big-scaled chinook are among the most polluted salmon in the world.

And they are slowly poisoning Granny and her tribe.

PART 6: When Granny is gone, will her story be the last chapter?
Saturday, October 14, 2006
By M.L. LYKE, Seattle P-I Reporter

Granny spends most of her waking hours fishing. She is a keen hunter, skilled at locating salmon with her biological sonar. She uses a staccato series of ultrasonic clicks to locate fish: K-k-kk-kkk-kkkkk.

The echoes that bounce back describe the shape of her prey, the kelp forests and the underwater ridges and rock cliffs where they hide.

Whoosh! She moves fast in the murky blue-green underwater, too fast for the fish to register her huge dark shadow moving in.

In a nanosecond, she attacks, and the thrashing salmon loses his freedom, his life, his memory of rivers and streams and roiling riffs, the smell of his birthplace, the call of his home.

Does Granny savor the animal's rusty blood as the jerking body goes still?

She could devour her prey on the spot. One bite.

Instead, she powers up to the surface, jaws the fish into parts with her two rows of conical teeth, passes the parts to her family.

Family comes first. No matter the cost to old tribal elders like Granny.

Would the matriarch, who eats more than 30 salmon a day, starve herself to save a youngster?

Does she have to?

Could she further poison herself in the process?

If orcas can't find food, they draw on their own blubber, the thick blanket of fat that's increasingly loaded with harmful man-made toxins. Fewer salmon equals higher orca mortality.

Restoring fish populations is the first order of business under new Endangered Species Act protections for southern resident orcas.

The protections were approved last November and went into effect in February. They'll remain in effect until the southern resident population hits a target number: 120. The population this year is estimated at 90.

Scientists say that, at one point, numbers for J, K and L pods might have been 200 or more. But the dirty waters and shrinking food supply can no longer sustain that kind of population.

"The 120 seems acceptable because the habitat is so degraded," said Rich Osborne, director of the Whale Museum in Friday Harbor.

How do protections address that kind of degradation?

Could they translate into limits on vessel noise, restricted shoreline development, removal of seawalls, replacement of faulty septic systems?

Are humans ready to make those sacrifices?

"I don't think any of us really knows where the ESA is going to lead," said Ralph Munro, former secretary of state and longtime orca advocate.

"But I think all of us will have to take 10 steps back from the waterfront."

Already the protections for orcas face legal challenges from farming and building communities. More lawsuits are inevitable.

"You can almost say any individual school of fish can be listed," said Timothy Harris, the Building Industry Association of Washington's attorney.

Dominant tribe
Granny could leave Puget Sound. It's a big ocean out there.

But animals are territorial, and this is her turf. Her family is the dominant tribe in the southern inland waters, as well as the most closely watched. "J-Pod has priority to be here year-round," Osborne said.

Of the three endangered southern pods, researchers say that Granny's is the most likely to carry on here. Population numbers in J-Pod have stabilized. Calf survivability is relatively high: Of 25 J-Pod calves born since the early '70s, when killer whale surveys began, 18 have survived, including calves born in 2004 and 2005.

No new J-Pod calves were spotted this year, but the tribe has a good number of young females nearing reproductive age, at about 11 to 12 years.

Whether they can reproduce is a question that preys on scientific minds.

"We have to wait and see," said Ken Balcomb, executive director of the Center for Whale Research on San Juan Island. "We're reaching the critical years."

Have the younger generation's reproductive systems -- like Everett's, the polluted young orca who died with undeveloped testes -- been damaged by PCB loads dumped on them from mother's milk?

Even though PCBs were banned in the U.S. in the '70s, the long-lived industrial chemicals still come across the Pacific Ocean from Asia, in the air and ocean currents. They leak from underwater waste dumps in American waters, along with other industrial toxins and heavy metals.

"We know there are military and industrial dumpsites all over Puget Sound with 55-gallon drums of really nasty stuff buried in sediment," Osborne said.

Scientists who've taken blubber samples say the southern resident orcas are among the most PCB-contaminated marine mammals on the planet. Their PCB levels are three to six times higher than northern residents in Canada.

Everett had a PCB load of 63 parts per million.

Toxicologists say Granny's could be more than 100 ppm.

A blubber sample from Ruffles, the orca many believe is Granny's son, showed a count of 192 ppm.

By contrast, a human may accumulate less than 1 part per million over a lifetime.

Urban orcas
Granny rises to a different world than she knew as a youngster. On the top half of her world, glaciers melt, oceans rise. Her home grows warmer and more acidic every decade.

Her seas are full of raw sewage that spills from old septic tanks. It runs straight to the sea off Victoria, B.C. -- more than 30 million gallons a day. Some marine animal species around sewage outfalls there have disappeared.

What does that mean for an aging orca matriarch?

The waters she feeds and plays in are full of our artificial hormones, our antidepressants, our caffeine and heavy metals that can accumulate in an animal's liver and kidneys.

In it, too, are dangerous chemicals from fuel additives, cleaning materials, fertilizers, creosote from pilings, residues of the one-time "wonder insecticide" DDT and PBDEs, chemicals used in fire retardants that disrupt thyroid hormones and development in animals. Scientists say PBDE use in North America has doubled every four to six years over the past few decades.

Researchers call the southern resident orcas that live in this toxic stew the most "urbanized" killer whales on the planet.

And the urbanization of Puget Sound has barely begun.

Seattle is on the rise, growing higher, denser, condo after condo packed with newcomers. The population has rebounded to more than 580,000, with almost 4 million in the outlying metro area.

Within the next 10 to 15 years, another million people are expected to swell the population of the Puget Sound basin.

As the population on land booms, a population at sea flounders.

Studies have rated the likelihood of the southern orcas going extinct as high as 19 percent in the next 100 years, and as high as 94 percent over the next 300 years.

Could Granny's kin gradually disappear from the Salish Sea?

Could they go the way of the Puerto Rican sloth, the Jamaican monkey, the woolly mammoth, the dodo?

It's a difficult scenario to grasp. Our state's official marine mammal, gone. The black-and-white animals that swim across our T-shirts and curl around our morning coffee mugs, vanished.

Do legal mandates have any power in the face of that?

Granny and her family are oblivious to regulations. They are laws laid on water, human words, human promises.

Though their bodies are loaded with toxins and their seas dirty, though more of their time is spent hunting for less food, J-Pod still revels in family time.

The youngsters do gymnastics, noisy belly-flops, shove driftwood around with their noses and play catch-and-release with seabirds as Granny baby-sits.

Does she notice there are fewer seabirds now?

Family members chatter, in the rusty-hinge squeals and squawks of their dialect, calves imitating their elders.

Sometimes they rest, float motionless on the surface like logs, half-asleep, bunched together, diving and surfacing in slow motion.

Does Granny see the boats approaching?

First there is one, then two, then a half-dozen, packed with gawkers. The humans line the boat rails, armed with video cameras now, not harpoons.

Suddenly, the old female surfaces, slaps the water with her giant fluke, sending up curtains of white spray that turn into thousands of backlit diamonds.

The whale-watchers scream in delight. "Granny! Granny!"

The J-Pod matriarch, who has lived from the dawn of the automobile to the building of a space station, doesn't know her name. But the voices lie deep in memory.

She pokes her head above water, turns her head side to side, regards the humans with an unblinking eye.

What does she see?

Could she be people-watching the whale-watchers?

"Maybe they're curious about us, too," Balcomb said. "Maybe they're asking, 'Who are you?' "

It's a good question.

Who are the two-leggers who have abhorred and adored Granny, shot at her, netted her, crowded her waters, despoiled her home, called her their "kindred spirit," wooed her with music and poisoned her body?

What kind of an animal does that?

The old female turns, dives, plunges into the deep, where their eyes can't follow.