The real Springer show

Springer has taken over the airwaves.

It is impossible to escape; Seattle seems obsessed with the topic. Not the fight-goading talk-show host, but our own Springer, the orphaned juvenile orca whale who spent finals week chasing the Vashon ferry.

No one knows why Springer -- A-73 to marine biologists -- has been left behind. What is known is that Springer is unwell; she has a skin condition that threatens to infect her respiratory system, and her odiferous breath implies a metabolic problem.

Until her capture, Seattleites debated what would be best: to rehabilitate and release, or to let nature take its course. The media attention that surrounds our resident marine mammal seems overblown to many -- why devote precious minutes of televised coverage to an ailing whale? This type of question, however, overlooks the bigger picture. How can "nature" be allowed to take its course when it has been altered beyond a natural state?

As Springer acclimatizes to her new pen in the Sound, most citizens still fail to recognize her greater significance. Springer's plight exemplifies everything that is wrong with our ocean ecosystems today. She is living proof of the ways in which the human species has failed the earth it inhabits.

Springer is alive, but questions have been raised about her future health. Although genetic defects were ruled out by blood tests, Springer's weight is below the average of a healthy juvenile whale. Furthermore, Springer will only be captive until July, when her family arrives at its summer feeding grounds.

The A-4 pod, a subgroup of northern Washington orcas, may or may not accept her. Since she is so young, biologists believe Springer's mother must be dead. The most likely foster parent is her grandmother, but she has a questionable record as a mother; of seven babies, only two have survived.

The deaths of five orca whales under one parent's care seem many, but they may indicate a larger threat that plagues the orcas and endangers Springer's chances: water pollution. Washington's waters are dangerously polluted: 630 bodies of water do not meet standards imposed by the Clean Water Act. As people flock to Washington and utilize more resources, more pollutants enter already-stressed water systems and harm wildlife.

Since 1996, the population of southern orcas has plummeted from 97 animals to 78. Many of the pod members have high blood levels of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). Additionally, blood tests from a transient whale -- one that travels through the region alone -- that washed up on the Olympic Peninsula this year registered some of the highest levels of the toxins ever recorded. The levels of toxins in our water may be only a few parts per billion, but even small numbers as this can disturb entire ecosystems.

Some may recall the DDT scare that decimated pelican and bald eagle populations. Like PCBs, DDT (dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane) bioaccumulates. When toxins enter local biospheres, natural cycles cause them to accumulate in greater concentrations. As an insecticide, traces of DDT regularly washed into waterways. The concentrations were low -- a few parts per trillion -- but the numbers grew as they traveled up food chains. Large predators, including bald eagles, at the tops of the chains had concentrations 8 million times higher than those originally measured in waterways.

DDT and PCBs have devastating effects. For instance, seals with high levels of PCBs in their fat had pups with fins fused to their bodies. And the next step in this chain: humans, who munch in oblivion on the same fish consumed by seals and eagles, and who wonder why one whale's health matters so much.

PCBs, dioxins, pesticides, sulfuric acid, agricultural wastes, slaughterhouse byproducts, human sewage ... the number of substances that we introduce into Washington is staggering. We may not feel the full effects of our dependence upon toxins, but future generations certainly will, and other animals already do.

Even if Springer's reunion with her pod proves successful, she will continue to feed on organisms in our waters, and the levels of toxins in her body will climb. As the transient orca's death demonstrated, even large mammals cannot endure such diets for long. Neither, one concludes, can humans.

Recent headlines about overfishing and threatened species in the Pacific Ocean point to the damaging affects of anthropogenic activity. As bodies of water become polluted and humans continue to fish stressed populations, keystone species -- those upon which food chains rely -- disappear and take additional species with them. Many countries, particularly coastal nations that rely on subsistence methods to survive, already suffer intensely because of the degradation of oceans. We, however, continue to consume our rockfish, salmon, halibut and cod, unable to connect our lives to the steady destruction of the means of their support.

Think Springer is just a lonely, sick whale? Think again. Springer's story is a part of our own.