(upbeat music) - Whales in general and killer whales, specifically have just always been in my conscience.

Not too long before my mom died, She told me a story.

When I was about six, evidently I woke up from a dream and came out and told my parents about this black and white whale that was in a pool.

In my dream I shape shifted.

I changed places with the whale so that the whale could experience not being in the pool anymore.

I have always been very in tune with my personal beliefs that whales didn't belong in captivity.

(gentle upbeat music) - [Narrator] Dr. Deborah Giles is an expert on killer whales.

She's the research director at the nonprofit conservation group, Wild Orca, and works out at Friday Harbor Labs, a 100 year old institution on San Juan Island in the middle of the Salish sea.

- My work very much focuses on collecting whale scat preferentially, Southern resident fish eating killer whale scat.

Those are the endangered population of killer whales.

Come on, Bob.

They're listed as one of the top eight endangered species on the endangered species list.

They're just 73 of them now, possibly 72 individuals.

And for a large bodied long lived animal that's just not enough individuals in the population.

We're watching the decline and the slow extinction of ancient species.

So this board behind me shows for the first time on record in over 30 years, that there were no days at all with the Southern Residents in their summer core critical habitat.

Something is gone vastly wrong or they would be here.

And the thing that's gone wrong is that the fish is not here.

- [Narrator] While other types of killer whales enjoy a very diet that can include seals, porpoises and even sharks.

The Southern Residents only eat fish and mostly one species of fish, Chinook salmon.

This leaves them vulnerable.

Since the population of salmon they hunt is disappearing itself.

- Suffice it to say they are not getting enough quality and they don't have enough quantity or abundance of Chinook salmon.

Pretty much everything we can do to have decimated salmon throughout their range, we've done.

Overfishing, damning of rivers, blocking spawning habitats.

All of these things are working together in a way that is a death by a thousand cuts.

It's a really depressing thing to recognize and own as a human.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] So Giles research takes her out to sea to collect clues about their diet and she finds it in their poop aided by her scat sniffing rescue dog, Eva.

- You wanna go find something?

- One fecal sample can tell us so much about the health of the animals, such as their nutrition status, stress hormones, pregnancy hormones, toxicants, all kinds of man-made, human-made chemicals that are making their way in and around the food web.

I think she's smelling them.

Parasites, fungus, bacteria really it's sad.

The list just goes on and on.

We just got noticed this morning that J pod was seen on the west side of San Juan.

There's one right in front of us, about 500 meters.

When they first come in are really good for us to get out there really soon because they end up having really nice, healthy, large samples.

The more I learn about them, the more I study them as individuals, the more amazing they are.

That's J 27, also known as Blackberry.

They have a Paralympic system that's bigger than ours.

These are areas of their brain that are associated with memory and emotion and language.

They cooperatively hunt and share food.

They're incredibly socially bonded with one another.

They have decades where they're not reproducing and yet they are valued members of the pod.

They take care of each other, in a lot of ways to the detriment potentially of their own health.

So things like that, revering our elders and staying with family for your whole life.

I see them as better versions of us and we have a lot to learn from them.

You know it's never a bad day when you're on the water with whales.

- [Narrator] Saving the salmon and therefore the Southern Resident Orcas requires more than one simple solution.

Many obstacles lie between the orcas and their food source, but Giles is committed to tackling each and every one of them.

- I'm not without hope that we can still recover this population of animals.

And it's hard, it's really hard.

It's not just one issue.

It's not just removing dams.

it's replanting riparian corridors so that those rivers have shaved.

It's repairing coastal ecosystems that are degraded protecting shoreline habitat.

And I feel a deep responsibility to this population.

Having met these whales 30 plus years ago when a lot of these whales were alive and then getting to watch the new ones be born since then and watch them grow up, it is in a lot of ways like watching an extended family grow and die.

And so as hard as it is to see the whales continue to decline, I don't think I have a right to stop doing the work that I'm doing.

I feel like I work for the whales.