Ingrid Visser - Champion of New Zealand's Orca

In New Zealand, a marine biologist, Dr. Ingrid Visser has focused the last 20 years of  her life on studying and protecting the orca whales that spend their lives along the coastline of that island nation in the South Pacific.

Ingrid Visser, PhD, with wild orca

Orca is a more scientific name for the whale species commonly called killer whales.  People who appreciate their exceptional intelligence and generally benign relationship with humans prefer to call them orca.

On August 21st, I published a blog entry titled Great White Versus Orca.  One fact in that story was that sea lions and seals are the principle diet of the orca based locally off the Northern California coast. Apparently, they also kill and eat sharks.

The New Zealand orca whales have a very different diet.  Ingrid Visser, who was the first person to study New Zealand's resident orca, discovered that they depend to a large degree on hunting, catching and eating sting rays that they find very often in shallow inlets along the New Zealand coastline.

Sting ray

 People may recall that the well-known TV naturalist, Steve Irwin, was killed a few years ago while swimming in shallow water by a sting ray hiding in the sand.  Rays have a sharp barbed extension atop their tails that they use to defend themselves.  Ingrid Visser discovered that the New Zealand orca  have evolved a very effective technique for hunting sting rays, while avoiding the deadly tail barb.  The orca work together. When they locate a sting ray hiding in the sand, one whale seizes the ray by its tail so it can't use its deadly dangerous barb, and the other whale bites the ray, killing it. Then the two whales and sometimes their friends share the meal.




Orca with freshly caught stingray

Because many of the places where the whales hunt stingrays also serve as industrial harbors, Ingrid Visser was concerned that toxic chemicals like poly-chlorinatred biphenyls (PCP) left over from human industrial activity could be present in the resident sting rays. That posed an even bigger threat to the orca, because PCPs tend to accumulate in the fatty tissues of predators ingesting tainted fish.

Long story short,  Ingrid Visser used tissue samples from locally caught sting rays and also from one of the resident orcas to prove the rays were indeed carrying high levels of PCPs and other toxic industrial chemicals.   

Ingrid Visser is more than a marine mammal scientist. She is also a champion for New Zealand's orca and her nation's  marine environment in general. She founded the Orca Research Trust to advance her work and to report it to the public. She also successfully petitioned the New Zealand government to change its designation for its resident orca to critically endangered.

Because of  Ingrid Visser's tireless efforts, the people of New Zealand know a lot more about the marine mammals that live close at hand with them. Because of Ingrid Visser,  prospects for New Zealand's resident orca are far better than they would likely be othewise.  In my book, that makes Ingrid Visser a hero of the highest order.

Here is a link to Ingrid Visser's webpage.
http://www.orcaresearch.org/