What Orcas have for dinner
Serious photographer guy at the beach today said there are orcas breaching at Drumbeg. Have you seen them?
If you’ve been watching orcas around Gabriola and have been wondering what they have for dinner, I’ve got just the thing for you. From the Times Colonist: Orcas choose to eat B.C. chinook for majority of diet.
The palates of endangered southern resident killer whales are refined to the point that they choose to eat Fraser River chinook salmon, say researchers, who hope new information about orcas’ menu choices will help the population recover.
A joint Canadian-U.S. study that used highly refined molecular genetic techniques to look at the DNA of fish scales and whale feces found that, during spring and summer, up to 90 per cent of chinook eaten by the whales come from the Fraser River.
The study appears in this month’s edition of the journal Endangered Species Research.
[The article quoted above is no longer available on the newspaper's website.]
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