Imagine that your great-grandmother has lived for a hundred years and still leads the entire family every day to the places where they can find the tastiest food. That is how an orca named Granny lived in the waters of Puget Sound, near the American city of Seattle. She led her family for almost a century, and her story is not just about one animal. It is a story about how the disappearance of wise “grandmothers” can threaten the survival of an entire people—the orcas.
Orcas Live in Families, Just Like Humans
The orcas that swim near Seattle are called southern resident orcas. They are not like ordinary wild animals—they live in families that never break apart. Even after a female orca grows up and has calves of her own, she never leaves her mother. In this way, entire clans form, with grandmothers, mothers, children and grandchildren swimming together.
Scientists have noticed something remarkable: female orcas are among the very few living creatures on the planet—apart from humans and a few other whale species—that continue to live for many years after they stop giving birth. Why does nature need this? The answer is simple and beautiful: grandmothers are not needed to give birth, but to teach.
Orca grandmothers remember where and when to look for salmon, the orcas’ main food. This is especially important in difficult years, when food is scarce. Scientists from the University of Washington discovered that when an old, experienced grandmother swims with a pod, its young survive much more often, especially during years of famine.
Granny—the Orca Who Remembered More Than a Century
The most famous of these grandmothers was an orca called Granny, or J2—the name scientists gave her based on her identification number. Researchers estimate that Granny may have been born as early as the late 19th century and lived for more than a hundred years. She was a true star of Puget Sound: for decades, tourists and scientists watched her confidently lead her large family, reliably finding places where salmon swam in great numbers.
Granny disappeared in 2016, and was presumed dead. Depending on the estimate, she was between 65 and 105 years old. With her went the living memory of how orcas lived many decades earlier, before humans built dams on rivers and polluted the water.
“When an old female leader dies, the pod loses more than one orca—it loses a library of knowledge that cannot be replaced,” say researchers from the Center for Whale Research on San Juan Island.
Why the Orcas Ran Out of Food
The orcas of Puget Sound eat almost exclusively Chinook salmon, a large Pacific salmon species. But over the past hundred years, people have built numerous hydroelectric dams on the rivers where salmon spawn. The dams blocked the fish’s path to the places where they were born—and salmon populations fell several times over.
Add to this chemical pollution and noise from ships, which makes it harder for orcas to communicate and hunt using echolocation—their special “radar” for finding fish underwater—and it becomes clear why fewer than 80 southern resident orcas remain in the entire population today.
One story shocked the world and made people truly think about the problem. In 2018, an orca named Tahlequah, known to scientists as J35, gave birth to a calf that lived for only half an hour. Tahlequah refused to let go of her baby’s body for 17 days, carrying it more than 1,000 miles—roughly the distance from Moscow to Volgograd and back. It was as though she could not come to terms with her loss.
The story made headlines around the world. People saw that orcas experience grief in much the same way humans do. Washington State authorities took urgent action: they allocated funds to restore rivers where salmon spawn, restricted ship traffic near orcas and banned certain types of fishing.
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| Late 19th century (approximately) | Birth of Granny the orca |
| 1970s | Scientific observation of Puget Sound orcas begins |
| 2016 | Death of Granny, the pod’s most famous “grandmother” |
| 2018 | Tahlequah’s story attracts worldwide attention |
| 2019–2021 | Washington State adopts salmon and orca recovery programs |
What This Means for Us
The story of Puget Sound’s orcas reminds us that in nature, just as among humans, the older generation is invaluable. Orca grandmothers preserve knowledge that cannot be found in books or on the internet—only in their own memories, built up over long lives.
But this story matters to more than just Seattle. In cities around the world, wild neighbors—birds, fish and animals—live alongside people, and their fate depends on how carefully we treat rivers, forests and the air. Saving orcas begins with small things: clean water in a river, respect for wildlife and attention to what is happening around us.
Granny is gone, but her large family still swims in the waters near Seattle. Somewhere among them, a new “grandmother” is already growing up—one who will someday have to lead all the others.
