Killers: J pod on the brink

The climate is changing. So are we. On What On Earth, you’ll explore a world of solutions with host Laura Lynch and our team of journalists. In 1970, 20 million people showed up to fight for the environment on the first Earth Day. More than five decades later, is it time for this much tamer global event to return to its radical roots?  OG organizer Denis Hayes recounts how – amidst other coun...

It’s 1964, and J pod ancestor Moby Doll is harpooned and put on display at Vancouver’s waterfront. The crowds are delighted, until he dies. It’s the beginning of a fraught love affair with orcas that is mirrored today in aquariums and whale watching. Is our attraction to J pod a killer, or can our love save this family?

J pod is an urban orca family, but have we made the very water they swim in uninhabitable? And why are other orca populations thriving along the same tainted coast line? From pollution to the blob, we ask, are major ocean changes a killer?

A family matriarch, J35’s mother, is showing sure signs of peanut head. The experts agree: the Southern Residents are not getting enough fish to eat. But is it as simple as a decline in Chinook salmon? We head out on the latest research expeditions to investigate: is starvation a killer?

J pod is a poster child in a nation-wrenching debate over a pipeline expansion, and it all comes down to the impact of increased vessel traffic. We take a journey along the noisy west coast waterfront to unravel the mysteries of orca communication, and ask, is noise a killer?

Hope turns to dismay as a new J pod calf dies before researchers arrive. When mother J35 carries its corpse for 17 days and 1000 miles, the world wakes up to the plight of the Southern Residents. Some call it grief; others, a message, and the drama of that hot summer becomes a symbol of the struggle to save J pod.