Sounding Orcas on Monterey Bay
The waves tossed and caught our weight like a plaything. I tucked the audio recorder into my pocket and braced against the wind. My headphones slipped forward, exposing my ears and cracking open the fresh noise.
I heard the Pacific thumping against the hull, a deep bass swirling in the barrel of my eardrums. I caught the shaky woah’s of fellow white-knuckled passengers and the wooshs of Pacific white-sided dolphins, their light and melodic breaths flashing against the soundscape like fireflies.
A breezy spring day on land means heavy wind out on Monterey Bay. Our vessel bobbed along, tracing the cliff wall that drops off into an underwater canyon twice as deep – but just as grand – as its landlocked sister in Arizona.
Every spring, gray whales migrate north from their warm, shallow nursing grounds in Mexico, towing their new calves over the formidable canyon for the first time. The whales hug the cliff, spooked by the abyssal darkness of the deep drop-off. Orcas, dark-colored from above and therefore quite suited to ambush from below, come to hunt the baby grays. We came for them.
It was hour two of eight, and three passengers already looked white as the belly of a humpback. I wove in and out of the crowd, spending only enough time in the captain’s helm to feel the blood drain from my face to my gut.
I was invited aboard to report on a new research technique: follow a pod of orcas, collect seawater from their footprints, filter out all the micro-bits of DNA they leave behind, and use the information to study their health and family structures. I decided that audio notes would be more convenient (and waterproof) than a journal and aimed to create a mini-radio story from the field. I had everything I needed, except for the orcas.
I crept from the stern to the bow with my recorder in hand, picking up sound of the ropes creaking against the mast, passengers indulging orca love stories, and Captain Nancy’s two Australian shepherds that never miss a whale watch.
From inside my headphones, I monitored my collection. The foam lining between my ears and the world was a picky filter. It muted the sound of my breath but tuned me into the commands of a boat captain across the bay. I was deaf to the engine’s hum, but I knew as soon as someone ripped open a second sleeve of Oreos. I resolved to navigate all eight hours of travel by ear, just like the whales.
If you’ve never heard a pod of orcas chattering away, they sound a bit like a dental procedure. Or an intergalactic lawn mower. Or wet rubber in a blender. They’ve built a unique vocabulary by layering clicks, pulses, and whistles.
Orcas navigate by echolocation. They propel clicks from their “phonic lips” to their melon—the fatty round forehead that focuses the clicks into a beam directed into the cold Pacific to check if the way is clear. The beam bounces off an object, a baby gray perhaps, and the orca catches the boomerang of feedback in her jaw tissue. The vibrations travel through her jaw bones, up to her ears, and into her brain through the auditory nerve.
By hour six, I’d quelled my nausea with ginger and pretzels and broken all the teeth off the recorder’s battery cage cover. I secured it with an extra hair tie and avoided rogue sea spray. I wandered over to a research technician and asked how to spot an orca pod. He leaned into the microphone. “Open your ears,” he said. “Also, be lucky.” He trailed off, his focus fixed on the wavering horizon.
Researcher distracted by a distant fluke, I whispered to my recorder.
Orcas are evasive and brilliant. I believe the two are related. They’ve never killed a human in the wild, but they have targeted people in captivity, namely their captors. They only hunt the prey their mothers show them, and only in the areas they are taught.
As the peak of the food chain, they are the last receptacle for contaminants floating around in the water and in the fish. In 2021, a dead baby orca washed up in Norway, and scientists found pesticides, industrial by-products, and flame retardants in her blubber, likely passed on through breast milk. Humans make these chemicals for plastics, electronics, and furniture coatings. We’ve since banned many of them from production, but they are still floating around in the water and in the fish, getting caught in orca teeth, breast milk, and blubber, disrupting their hosts’ hormones.
As we rounded out the southern end of our trip and turned to follow the canyon’s edge north, we stumbled upon an afternoon buffet. A group of Risso’s dolphins led us to the table, serpentining over and under the glassy surface like a threaded needle through cloth. They’d discovered a school of anchovies, or perhaps sardines or amphipods. Hundreds of dolphins competed with sea lions for the catch, crisscrossing in front of the boat and riding our momentum through the fog of fish.
I imagined the orcas beaming their clicks at this frenzied potluck and catching the pinballs ricocheting back at them. Sea lion. Dolphin. Boat. Girl. Recorder. Different tenors of a sound boomerang thrown into the blackness, bouncing back and informing them that a boat full of researchers and tourists wants to dip a bucket in the water and gather up their fingerprints. I’m not sure I’d show up either.
Monterey Bay is 4,600 square nautical miles—about the size of Connecticut. The orcas could be watching us from afar, debating a dramatic entrance. They could be miles deep, flashing their dark petticoats, undetectable both to us and the cormorants enjoying the seafood tornado. Like a bullfrog on a lily pad or a puma on a bare desert trail, they appear only when they want to be seen.
That’s the magic, I think. The sheer potential that remains when you’ve yet to find them, when you don’t know if you will, when they exist only in the majesty of your imagination. We had stumbled into their home—tried the front door and found it unlocked, eased it open, crept across the foyer and into the kitchen, and found their untouched meal. The stove was still hot. We looked out at the horizon—their playgrounds, breeding grounds, graveyards. They listened to us, we for them.
As we watched the sea feed on itself, the soundscape changed. Nancy cut the engine and turned off the speakers. Conversations fizzled. Even the wind lowered its voice, whispered listen into my ears. I dialed into the gentle, alternating puffs of dolphin breaths.
Then, the water darkened. A new gravity emerged, vacuuming up the streaming sunbeams that landed all around the boat like a meteor shower. A glossy boulder emerged from the sea. No, an SUV. No, a spine. It lifted up and out of the water like an island born, exposing a small hooklike fin at its peak. The humpback whale arched, flipped its fluke and slid beneath the boat. I marveled at her, dancing in the open above all that is terrifying.
During the gray whale migration, this boat goes out daily from sunrise to sunset, with all fingers crossed onboard. But passengers don’t sign up to see the blackfish, not for sure, they sign up to look for them, to imagine them exploding out of the water or silently tracking the boat from below. We may not have found the killer whales, but we smelled their fishy breath and dipped our toes in their fluke prints. We wandered through their living room and crept out the backdoor. They were out there, same as us. They, too, deserve clean water, teeth, breast milk, and blubber.
As we pulled into the harbor, spirits were high. I listened to the chattering through my picky filter and heard only gratitude—for whales, dolphins, sea lions, for the good luck of being out on the sunny bay with no cell service and a few packs of Oreos.
Maybe we’d missed them, passed over cold clues and washed out-footprints without noticing. Perhaps they were far away, feeding on squid near San Diego or Canada. Maybe they were just below us, nestled deep in the canyon, cloaked by blackness, waiting for us to leave so they could eat their meal in peace.
RCC National Environment Leadership Presidential Fellow – Molly Herring –
University of Santa Cruz
RCC Presidential Fellow Molly Herring is pursuing a Masters in Science Communications from UC Santa Cruz. She recently graduated from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill with a double major in Biology and Global Studies and a minor in Creative Nonfiction. She has been published in Oceanographic Magazine, Coastal Review, The Marine Diaries, and Cellar Door.
