When whale researchers encountered a pod of orcas in the Strait of Juan de Fuca between Washington and British Columbia on Saturday, they spotted one female swimming strangely: She was carrying a dead newborn orca on her nose.
The Center for Whale Research documented the sad procession. News of it spread at a forum on the future of the southern resident killer whales Monday at Town Hall Seattle.
The female, a 31-year-old known as J31 or Tsuchi, had previously been photographed carrying a dead newborn on her nose in 2016.
J31 has one living offspring, a 7-year-old daughter, but has lost at least eight other calves before or just after birth.
“She's kind of the poster child, if you will, for the pregnancy failure issue in this population,” whale researcher Deborah Giles with the nonprofit SeaDoc Society said.
Less than one-third of pregnancies among the southern resident killer whales, as the endangered, fish-eating orcas of the Northwest are known, result in a young whale living to its first birthday.
“Either they're miscarrying, or they’re giving birth and then the babies are dying right away,” Giles said. “J31 has had so many of these failed pregnancies.”
Researchers say a dearth of the orcas’ main food, Chinook salmon, is the biggest single threat to their survival, though they are also threatened by water pollution, ship noise, and inbreeding.
“It's when a female is not getting enough to eat that the body's natural response is to abort that pregnancy,” Giles said.
The endangered orcas’ population stands at 76, down from 88 in 2005, when they were granted protection under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. They were declared endangered in Canada in 2001.
Researchers and activists say these orcas need aggressive action to boost salmon populations to help them escape the extinction vortex they find themselves in.
“We need to make sure that they have access to enough prey. That's our responsibility,” Giles said. “In the last 170 years, we have decimated the whales' ability to find food within their own range.”
Each summer, the southern residents rely primarily on Chinook salmon that swim through the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the San Juan Islands to return to Canada’s Fraser River. The Canadian government has listed 11 of 13 Fraser Chinook populations as threatened or endangered.
The U.S. government listed Puget Sound Chinook as a threatened species in 1999. Most Puget Sound Chinook populations remain far below the recovery targets set by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
An international panel of researchers urged bold steps to give the orcas more salmon, less noise, and fewer toxic chemicals. They called for restrictions on fisheries that target Chinook salmon returning in spring and early summer to the Fraser River and other spawning grounds, so that orcas can have adequate food supplies year-round.
An orca pregnancy typically lasts 17 months.
In 2018, another member of the southern residents’ J Pod, orca J35, made global headlines as she swam with a dead calf on her nose for 17 days and 1,000 miles. J35 did another “tour of grief” in 2025 for at least five days.
NOAA orca researcher Brad Hanson, who watched J35 carry a carcass between Seattle and Vashon Island, told KUOW in 2025 that it’s not uncommon for a whale or dolphin to carry a carcass around for a day or two, but longer tours are unusual.
“They are highly intelligent and have portions of their brain that are highly, highly developed in areas that we understand to be associated with memory and emotion,” Giles said. “It's not anthropomorphizing to say that they're probably going through a form of grief.”
This story comes to you from the Northwest News Network, a collaboration between public media organizations in Oregon and Washington.