New Orca Calf Spotted

Following up on Alison's interesting post yesterday about using dogs to track whale scat to determine the health of our local endangered orca pods, the Victoria Times-Colonist reported that L Pod has a new arrival, the first known calf for the mother, L82.
The orca calf mortality rate runs at about 50%, and one calf born earlier this year has already died, as have two older L Pod males, and K11, the 77 year-old matriarch of K Pod. The current number of orcas in J, K and L pods is 87. Historically, the number has been around 120 but decades of hunting and captures reduced that number to 71 in the early 1970s.