The Whales Between the Lines
by Chris Amundson
Pacific Whale Foundation
Highly social and caring, false killer whales sighted in Maui Nui share food and watch out for one another. With just 139 individuals remaining and many injured or underweight, researchers say urgent action and better monitoring are needed to protect them.
On a good year, the scientists might see them a dozen times, despite spending months searching Maui Nui waters.
On a bad year, not at all.
False killer whales are there, moving through Maui Nui waters, slipping past Molokaʻi and working the windward edges north of the islands. They are rare, elusive and increasingly difficult to find. Despite the name, false killer whales aren’t whales at all, but members of the dolphin family, highly social animals built for cooperation rather than solitude.
For the research team at Pacific Whale Foundation, spotting one isn’t the end of the work – it’s when the real work begins.
When a pod appears, everything speeds up. The boat adjusts course. Equipment comes out. A long carbon-fiber pole is raised at the bow. If the whales approach and surface just right, a small suction-cup tag may be placed behind a blowhole, clinging to the animal’s back like a temporary hitchhiker.
It’s a moment that can take years of effort to earn.
“There are years we don’t encounter them at all,” said Jens Currie, Pacific Whale Foundation’s chief scientist. “Even in our best years, sightings are limited.”
The animals Currie studies belong to the main Hawaiian Islands insular population. They are genetically distinct, behaviorally specialized and found nowhere else. The most recent estimate puts their number at 139 individuals, divided into four tight-knit social clusters that move through Hawaiʻi’s waters in different ways.
They are declining at an average rate of 3.5% per year, a pace that alarms researchers tracking the population year after year.
If that trajectory holds, Currie said, the population could be functionally extinct within a few decades.
What makes their disappearance harder to bear is how they live.
False killer whales hunt cooperatively, spreading out over miles of ocean before regrouping when one animal makes a catch. They specialize in fast-moving pelagic prey, the same open-ocean fish targeted by some commercial fisheries. And when they do catch prey, they don’t keep it. In dozens of observed events, Currie has never seen a single animal consume an entire fish alone. The prey is torn apart, passed along and shared, an act scientists describe as altruism.
Pacific Whale Foundation
“They sacrifice individual gain for the group,” Currie said.
That social bond has allowed them to survive in Hawaiʻi’s relatively lean coastal ecosystem. It may also be what makes them vulnerable now.
Pacific Whale Foundation’s research, done in collaboration with the Marine Mammal Research Program at the University of Hawaiʻi, focuses on a question long posed by managers but rarely answered with data: Are these animals struggling to find enough food?
To find out, the team uses a combination of photo-identification, drones and custom-designed deep-diving tags – modified from humpback whale technology to withstand depths approaching a kilometer and collect short bursts of high-resolution data. When attached, the tags record movement, depth, acceleration and video, allowing researchers to calculate how much energy an animal expends versus how much it gains.
“It’s like a Fitbit for a marine mammal,” Currie said.
The findings are sobering. Some individuals are losing significant body mass. Others appear unable to regain weight after bad years. When animals become too thin, toxins stored in their blubber are released into their bodies, compounding health problems and reducing the likelihood of recovery.
Overlay that with another threat, and the picture sharpens.
An estimated 30%-40% of the population shows scars from non-lethal interactions with fishing gear. Hooks are sometimes ingested. Lines are sometimes shed. Most of the fisheries suspected of causing harm are small, state-managed commercial operations that operate without observers or electronic monitoring.
“The goal isn’t to shut fisheries down,” Currie said. “It’s to understand what’s happening and fix what’s not working.”
False killer whales were listed as endangered in 2012. More than a decade later, the decline continues.
What’s missing, Currie said, is not science – it’s action.
That action, he said, depends on public awareness and the political will to require basic monitoring where whales and fisheries overlap, particularly in waters north of Molokaʻi and along Maui’s windward coast. A petition calling for those protections is available here: Save Hawaiʻi’s Endangered False Killer Whales | Hawaiian False Killer Whale
Out on the water, the animals keep moving, sharing food, calling each other in, and spreading back out across the blue. Most people never see them. Fewer still know how close they are to slipping away.
It’s not too late.
But the window, like the sightings, is narrowing.
Pacific Whale Foundation
