LIFE IN ECHO BAY Alexandra Morton thinks salmon farms drove away killer whales, in part by infecting the wild salmon the whales eat with sea lice.
ECHO BAY, British Columbia — Growing up in Connecticut, Alexandra Hubbard did not want to be Joan of Arc. She wanted to be Jane Goodall. But instead of chimpanzees, her animals would turn out to be killer whales.
In 1984, 26 years old and armed only with a bachelor’s degree and enthusiasm for her task, she moved to the Broughton Archipelago, in the Queen Charlotte Strait of British Columbia, where the whales, or orcas, were abundant. She and her husband, Robin Morton, a Canadian filmmaker, lived on a 65-foot sailboat and followed the orcas in an inflatable boat with a shelter in the back, stocked with Legos and books for their son, Jarret.
She came to know the archipelago’s long-lived orca clans and the matriarchs who led them. She knew she would find them in Fife Sound at the ebb tide, or moving up Johnson Strait with the incoming tide. Using a hydrophone, an underwater microphone she hung from the boat, she recorded their vocalizations and began to recognize what she called the dialects of the clans.
Her husband drowned in 1986, when Jarret was 4, but Ms. Morton stayed on, supporting her work by writing articles and books, designing T-shirts and working as a deckhand on a fishing boat.More...
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