RICHARD W. OSBORNE
 

Dr. Osborne began studying marine mammals at the old Seattle Marine Aquarium as a college intern in 1975, where he worked with captive seals, sea lions, dolphins, beluga whales and orcas. In 1976, when the aquarium closed, he started working with Ken Balcomb during the first field season of the Orca Survey. By 1981 he was working full-time at The Whale Museum, where he has been employed ever since; except for short periods in order to pursue graduate study.

He is the lead author of Marine Mammals of Greater Puget Sound and several scientific publications, primarily on orca behavior, acoustics and ecology. He has also participated in field studies of bottlenose dolphins in the Gulf of Mexico, humpback whales in Hawaii and Alaska, and orcas in western Alaska, as well as gorillas in a zoo setting. His current research is focusing on management issues of the Salish Sea Resident Community of orcas, Marine Protected Area management, and marine mammal stranding assessment in the San Juan Islands.

ABSTRACT

MANAGEMENT CONSIDERATIONS FOR CULTURALLY ADAPTING CETACEANS: EXAMPLES FROM SALISH SEA RESIDENT KILLER WHALES... Synopsis: Using the example of Salish Sea Resident killer whales, Dr. Osborne will illustrate how the high level of cultural intelligence attributed to whales can potentially create as many problems as it resolves in their struggle to survive human impacts. The likelihood that long-term cohesive groups of cetaceans pass-on learned traditions from one generation to the next has recently become a subject of interest and debate among cetologists. Most of the discussion thus far has continued to focus on evaluating empirical evidence as proof of cultural behavior in cetaceans. Killer whales (Orcinus orca) live their long lives in cohesive social groups and have demonstrated a capacity for learning that automatically leads to learned traditions being passed-on from one generation to the next. In this presentation it will be taken as accepted that killer whales do have culture. The findings presented here will attempt to take the discussion further by addressing the implications of making management decisions for cetacean populations that exhibit cultural mechanisms in their adaptation to the environment. The differences between a population that is adapting with culture relative to one that isn't is significant in terms of: 1) the speed at which the population can potentially adapt to environmental stress, 2) the diversity of behavioral mechanisms the population can employ to adapt to the stress, and 3) the addition of potentially over-riding social and historical influences on the adaptive response of the population. This wider context of influences makes predicting the outcome of a management intervention much more difficult for populations with culture, and recommends a management strategy of improving underlying resiliency drawn from documented observations of the Southern Resident community of orcas, whose core habitat is the Salish Sea area of Washington State and British Columbia.