Bigg's annual 2022
Here is our Bigg's killer whale sightings map for the full 2022 calendar year, representing the over 1200 unique sightings we confirmed. A sighting is defined a unique group of whales on a unique day, so each dot represents where that group was first reported on a given day, rather than everywhere the whales traveled. Each color represents a different season (blue = winter, green = spring, yellow = summer, red = fall) and the size of the dot represents the group size, ranging from 1-5 individuals up to 20+ whales.
It can take a little bit of staring at this map to start seeing some patterns, but here are a few things that jump out to me: the central Strait of Georgia sees a lot of winter and spring sightings, while the Strait of Juan de Fuca has more reports in the summer and fall. Large groups can occur at any time of year, but seem to be a more frequent occurrence in the spring.
You can also see that Bigg's will go literally everywhere throughout the Salish Sea, from the open straits to the narrow inlets and from the uninhabited regions right into the big cities. That said, the sightings do tend to be concentrated where we have more eyes on the water, so it's important to remember that this is based on opportunistic reports and not a true representation of how much time the Bigg's spend in certain regions. For example, I'm sure they spend a lot more time in the inlets on the northern part of this map than indicated here, but we just don't have many people on land or on the water to see and report them in those places.
A big thank you to the literally hundreds of people who contribute to making these maps possible. This is community science at its finest, where those who watch whales region-wide enable us to track the presence of whales at a level that would be impossible for any one scientist or research group. Specifically, we would like to thank our partners at Orca Network and the Pacific Whale Watch Association who contribute many of these reports, as well as the admins for all the local whale sightings pages throughout the Salish Sea. And a special shout out to Tomis Filipovic, our map-making wizard!
We will be following up with our Southern Resident 2022 map later this week.
