Confronting bright extinction
With more deaths in 2024 than births, action is needed more than ever.
For more than a decade, Raincoast has been championing recovery for Canada’s endangered salmon-eating killer whales.
In 2024, scientists from Raincoast and our international colleagues, published an updated analysis on the viability of Southern Resident killer whales. It has been eight years since our previous publication on their ability to recover. But instead of improvement, we found this population is slowly slipping away and that we are down to the 11th hour to turn things around. We coined the term bright extinction to describe the plight of these animals.
Within the planet’s current 6th mass extinction, the term ‘dark extinction’ has been used to describe the loss of species where data are limited and their threats poorly described. The concept infers that if we only knew that a population or species were facing extinction, we would take action to halt the decline.
As some of the world’s best studied cetaceans, Southern Residents are in stark contrast with incidents of dark extinction. The conservation stalemate is because hard decisions – those that bump against prioritizing industrial growth over the protection and recovery of endangered killer whales – are not being made.
In our latest study, we examined scenarios that could stop the decline and allow the whales to slowly rebuild. It requires changing the way we fish, addressing underwater noise and disturbance that comes with the growing number of ships and vessels, and stopping the flow of polluted water into their habitat. If implemented, such actions would improve conditions for Southern Residents. We are working inside and outside the Salish Sea to reduce threats and increase their chance of survival.
This is an excerpt from our annual report, Tracking Raincoast into 2025.
You can help
Raincoast’s in-house scientists, collaborating graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and professors make us unique among conservation groups. We work with First Nations, academic institutions, government, and other NGOs to build support and inform decisions that protect aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems, and the wildlife that depend on them. We conduct ethically applied, process-oriented, and hypothesis-driven research that has immediate and relevant utility for conservation deliberations and the collective body of scientific knowledge.
We investigate to understand coastal species and processes. We inform by bringing science to decision-makers and communities. We inspire action to protect wildlife and wildlife habitats.
