The group of fish-eating orcas known as the Southern Resident Killer Whales that ply the Salish Sea several months of the year may go the way of Mystery.

The third and final calf of Misky, Mystery lost his mom in 1994 at the age of three. He spent the next 14 years in the care of his aunt, Olympia, until she perished in 2005.

Easily identified by his fully sprouted dorsal fin that's wide at the base and rounded at the tip, Mystery has no known offspring. 

Now Mystery, who at 33 would be at prime breeding age, has vanished and is presumed dead, according to the Center for Whale Research.

Not a mystery is the likely cause of his death: hunger.

Southern Resident Killer Whales, or SRKWs, feed almost exclusively on Chinook salmon and an adult Southern Resident requires roughly 300 pounds of them daily. But since 2018, research has shown, the whales' diet has been nearly halved.

The reasons are many but foremost is the gauntlet of trollers the salmon must run to get from their natal rivers in Oregon, Washington and British Columbia to Alaska and back. 

The fish make their way from the rivers to the icy, nutrient-rich water off the coast of Alaska, where they typically grow to 30 pounds or so over three or four years before heading south to spawn in the same rivers in which they were born.

Ambushing them off the southeast coast of Alaska are trollers fitted with salmon-seeking sonar and miles of gillnets. The luckiest will haul in fortunes of fish usually sold as King Salmon that can fetch $90 per pound in what amounts to a royal scam. 

"The bulk of the Chinook caught in Alaska are not native to Alaska, but because they are caught there they are allowed to be sold as 'wild-caught Alaskan salmon,'" Dr. Deborah Giles, the science and research director at the nonprofit Wild Orca, told me. 

The Chinook that survive the gauntlet and are eaten by Southern Residents weigh just 12 and a half pounds on average, she said. The fishing and sales practices of the Alaskan fishermen and the unwillingness of politicians to change them are killing the whales, despite their supposed protections under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. 

Historically, the Chinook that Southern Residents preyed on often weighed 100 pounds, Giles said. Overfishing, combined with highly engineered waterways, harmful hatchery practices, and an inability to fight disease and reproduce due to malnutrition and pollution, gradually reduced the size of the Chinook to a third to a quarter of their historic size. 

An adult Southern Resident that could once meet its nutritional needs for a day by catching three 100-pound Chinook could still meet its dietary needs today with ten 30-pound Chinook—if the fish could reach the whales in the Salish Sea or the open water off the West Coast in healthy numbers.

They can't. 

Instead, "the Southern Residents are having to catch 20-plus fish a day," Giles said. And because small fish are far more nimble than big ones, the Southern Residents must expend much more energy to feed themselves. The energy demand and the stress of having to do so much hunting for the same amount of food is itself taking a toll on the whales' immune systems.

The Chinook, too, are on the federal endangered-species list and like the SRKWs, they have rights to protection that aren't being enforced. That's a fact properly framed as big business versus fish with politicians turning a blind eye (the corporations being the fishing industry as well as some large farms; more on the farms, below). 

Or, as Shari Tarantino put it the other day, "It's a lack of political will due to corporate greed." Tarantino is the executive director of Orca Conservancy, which has done a lot to help the SRKWs. The same can be said for Wild Orca.  

Regarding the sight-impaired politicians, Washington's Gov. Jay Inslee made much ado about almost nothing last year when he signed into law a bill increasing the distance some boaters must give the Southern Residents from 300 yards to 1,000 yards.

Absent from the list of boaters from the "1,000-yard vessel buffer" are commercial fishermen, who can cast nets right in front of the Southern Residents. "It's like somebody coming by and sweeping your dinner off of your plate," as Giles smartly put it.

I asked the governor's press secretary, Jaime Smith, for comment. He replied, lamely, that "the commercial fishing industry has always received certain exemptions because when they have gear deployed and are moving very slowly, it is hard to make adjustments."

As if malnutrition wasn't enough, the fish that the whales are left with contain toxins, which become part of the whales when eaten. The proof is in their blubber, as one study after another has shown.

Even the Environmental Protection Agency, which is doing a terrible job of protecting the Southern Residents, states that "contaminants can build up in their body fat, harm their nervous system and brain, weaken their immune system, and affect their ability to reproduce." (For more, Google "EPA SRKW 2023.")

As for the toxins in the fish, a study by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) entitled "Diminishing Returns: Salmon Decline and Pesticides" concluded that insecticides, herbicides and fungicides sprayed on crops often enter waterways used by salmon. When they do they harm all of the salmon and kill many outright.

As for the killer whale, man has never been kind to the ocean's top predator. The minimum historical population size of the Southern Residents was about 140 animals, according to NOAA. That number was reduced by a third during the 1960s, when marine parks captured or killed whales for use in shows.

When the capture era ended in 1976, the SRKW population climbed to 98 animals due primarily to the abundance of Chinook at that time. The whales' number steadily declined since then with the decline of the Chinook population.

By 2017 the population of SRKWs had fallen, stuck in the low 70s in recent years, with 15 of the whales now said to be especially at risk. The whales numbered 74 when Mystery was last sighted in November.

Still, many SRKW scientists and conservationists remain hopeful.

"The house is on fire. It's not yet burned to the ground," said Tarantino of Orca Conservancy. "Meaning, there's still time to save them."

It's a matter of will. The will of the politicians and the will of the people who elect them.

Scott Doggett is a former staff writer for the Outdoors section of the Los Angeles Times. He and his wife, Susan, live in Port Townsend.