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02/08/2009: "Science Prize To Orca Researcher"

Ken Balcomb of the Center for Whale Research has been awarded the first Salish Sea Science Prize.

This is the first and only award of its kind, and comes with a $2,000 cash award given to recognize work that has resulted in the improved conservation of marine wildlife and the Salish Sea marine ecosystem.


The Salish Sea Science Prize will be bestowed biennially by the SeaDoc Society, a non-profit organization dedicated to improving the Salish Sea ecosystem. The award is given in recognition of, and to honor the spirit of the late Stephanie Wagner, who loved the region and its wildlife.

Balcomb was selected from among many worthy individuals and groups nominated for the Prize. Collaborating with Canadian colleagues, Balcomb pioneered the use of photo identification to study and individually identify killer whales and has conducted an annual census of the southern resident killer whales since 1975.

Balcomb’s annual census was the basis of the population assessments that ultimately lead to the Canadian and US listing of the southern resident killer whale community as endangered. His work served as a foundation for our understanding of resident killer whale longevity, toxics loading in killer whales, and the implications of disease on the long-term viability of this population. Other findings stemming from Balcomb’s work included facts that today are understood by scientists and school kids alike: killer whales can be individually identified; Salish Sea killer whales belonged to 2 ecotypes -fish eaters and marine mammal eaters; and resident fish eating whales have a non-dispersing matrilineal society.

“Ken’s life work has been scientifically rigorous and has fundamentally changed the way we think about killer whales and marine wildlife. He really epitomizes the intent of the award,” said Joe Gaydos, Regional Director of the SeaDoc Society which sponsors the award. Gaydos commented, “We’re going to need a lot more science like this as we work to design a healthy Salish Sea.”

Both Canada and the US are working to restore the Salish Sea, a name often used to refer the 17,000 km2 bi-national marine ecosystem that includes Washington State’s Puget Sound, Strait of Juan de Fuca and the San Juan Islands as well as British Columbia’s Gulf Islands and the Strait of Georgia. The name recognizes and pays tribute to the first inhabitants of the region, the Coast Salish.
The award was given Sunday night at the opening ceremony of the Puget Sound Georgia Basin Ecosystem Conference in Seattle, Washington where over 800 scientists and policy makers have gathered to collectively work on this issue.

Ken Balcomb graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1963 with a Bachelor’s degree in Zoology and a special interest in cetaceans. During his college years, Ken beach-combed the coast of central and northern California searching for specimens of cetaceans, particularly beaked whales.

Shortly after graduation he volunteered as a dishwasher on a whalecatcher boat operating from San Francisco Bay, and he was soon hired by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to be field biologist in a whale-marking (Discovery tag) program in the eastern North Pacific Ocean. Between whale marking expeditions in 1964 and 1965, he attended graduate school in Zoology (UC Davis) and worked as a biological technician at the Richmond, California whaling stations, collecting data and specimen materials from harvested whales for the National Marine Mammal Laboratory in Seattle. In this capacity, he became very familiar with cetacean anatomy, particularly respiratory anatomy, and he presented some of his materials and findings to colleagues in the Anatomy and Zoology Departments at his alma mater.

In 1966, Ken worked as a field biologist for the Pacific Ocean Biological Survey Program of the U.S. National Museum, banding and studying seabirds in the central North Pacific. In this year while pursuing his interests in cetology, he rediscovered Fraser’s dolphin, Lagenodelphis hosei previously known only from a single specimen found in Borneo in 1895; and, he made the first known observations of living Longman’s beaked whales, Indopacetus pacificus, previously known only from two cranial fragments from Australia and Somalia. From 1967 to 1972, during the Vietnam era, he worked as an aviator and oceanographic specialist as an officer in the U.S. Navy, where he was immersed in the fascinating and secret world of underwater sound surveillance. In this latter capacity as Operations officer, he tracked whales with the SOSUS system, and made several important contributions to the Navy concerning developing an integrated sound surveillance system. In 1972, Ken took a one year break from the Navy to attend a PhD program in marine biology at UC Santa Cruz and temporarily work for the Fisheries Research Board of Canada as visiting scientist at whaling stations in Newfoundland and Nova Scotia. From there he went back into active duty in the U.S. Navy for two years as an instructor in military oceanography and acoustics in Japan, where he visited all of the operating whaling stations on Honshu and Hokkaido, and did a comprehensive study of Baird’s beaked whales for his thesis (published 1989).

In 1976, Ken immersed himself in non-invasive studies of living whales, following Dr. Mike Bigg’s methods of photoidentification of Pacific Northwest killer whales, and Dr. Steve Katona’s methods of photo-identification of North Atlantic humpback whales. His summer research was land-based with small boats in the Pacific Northwest; and his winter research was ship-based at sea aboard r/v “Regina Maris” in the North Atlantic as chief scientist for the Ocean Research and Education Society of Gloucester, MA. In 1978, he worked with the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service on surveys and harvest monitoring for bowhead whales in the Bering, Beaufort, and Chuckchi Sea. In 1982 and 1983, he conducted whale surveys for the Government of Denmark along the west coast of Greenland; and, in 1985/86 he went to the Antarctic on one of many IDCR whale research cruises conducted under the auspices of the International Whaling Commission. Ken brought high quality photo-identification techniques to all of these studies.

Ken founded the Center for Whale Research in Friday Harbor, WA in 1985 and serves as its senior scientist and Executive Director. In addition to continuing his long-term (28 yr) photo-identification study of killer whales (Orca Survey) in the Pacific Northwest, in 1990 Ken co-founded the Bahamas Marine Mammal Survey to benignly study whales and dolphins in the Bahamas archipelago employing photoidentification methods. The Bahamas study has yielded previously unknowable information on the behavior and demographics of beaked whales and it has developed a novel (totally benign) technique of obtaining samples for molecular genetic studies. In March 2000, Ken had the most phenomenal beaked whale experience of his life when many beaked whales in his study population stranded near his Bahamas field station following a U.S. Navy sonar exercise. The specimens he quickly collected provided the first evidence of pressure traumas that can be “caused” by sonar, although the precise mechanism for damage is still unknown. Ken has authored or co-authored more than thirty published research papers and five books based upon his experience in whale research. He is one of the pioneers of the photo-identification method and other non-invasive studies of cetaceans, and one of a very few marine mammal scientists with military experience and background in anatomy, acoustics, ecology and long-term studies of free-ranging cetaceans.

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(The SeaDoc Society (www.seadocsociety.org) works to ensure the health of marine wildlife and their ecosystems through science and education. A program of the Wildlife Health Center at the University of California, Davis (UC Davis), the SeaDoc Society has a regional focus on improving the health of the Salish Sea.)