Alumni, Arches

A New Org Chart for Orcas?

Research led by Phillip Morin ’86 suggests that the killer whale might be at least three separate species.

Phil Morin '86 — SCIENCE CAREER Morin enrolled at Puget Sound with an eye on being a veterinarian, but fell in love with research as an undergraduate. He’s now a conservation geneticist.

The sign-off on Phillip A. Morin’s emails contains a renowned Albert Einstein quote: “I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.” The quote fell short in describing Einstein. And it doesn’t describe Phil Morin ’86 in his entirety, either.

Morin, a conservation geneticist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, has worked with the famed primatologist Jane Goodall and has built a career helping the world better understand killer whales. He’s certainly passionately curious. But he has almost four decades of expertise to back up that curiosity.

Now, his research has concluded that some of those killer whales, or orcas, should be considered separate species. The results, published this March in the journal Royal Society Open Science, could be a game-changer—and could increase opportunities for whale conservation.

Evolution doesn’t always conveniently provide bright lines between species; there isn’t even a single global standard for how “species” is defined. Within the world of killer whales exist numerous varieties, called ecotypes. Morin and his colleagues focused on two ecotypes that roam the North Pacific—Bigg’s killer whales and resident killer whales—to learn whether the differences between them are just regional variations, or are enough to consider them separate species.

Unfortunately for researchers, killer whales resist being watched. They move around a lot and are hard to get close to—and, well, they’re also usually underwater.

A key to the latest research effort was genetics, made possible by the decades-long accumulation of small skin samples, collected using dart biopsy from live animals and dead beach-stranded animals, as well as DNA from the teeth and bones of museum specimens.

Morin hopes that using genetics to help differentiate whale species can lead to stronger conservation efforts.

The researchers did a quantitative analysis of genes on the Bigg’s and resident whales. In the end, they were able to sequence the entire mitochondrial genome (more than 16,000 nucleotides) from hundreds of individuals— and later, entire genomes (about 2.6 billion nucleotides) from dozens of individuals.

They found enough differences to suggest that the two types of whales were on different evolutionary trajectories—and had been for several hundred thousand years. Morin says there was “minimal or no genetic exchange,” meaning they weren’t interbreeding, even though they live in the same waters. Those and other factors—among them differences in skin coloration patterns and fin and head size; behavioral differences; and dietary variations— made the team confident that the two types of whales are, in the end, separate species.

The two new species will be called Orcinus ater (for the resident killer whale) and Orcinus rectipinnus (for the Bigg’s orca), with all other killer whales remaining Orcinus orca, pending approval by the Society for Marine Mammalogy, which maintains the official list of species.

Comparison images of the Resident Killer Whale (left) and the Bigg's Killer Whale (right) — Images of the Resident Killer Whale (left) and Bigg’s Killer Whale; images courtesy of NOAA

Illustration depicting the differences between the Resident Killer Whale and the Bigg's Killer Whale

Morin hopes that this genetic approach can be applied to larger uses in classifying animals. Being able to “drill down to the genome,” as he puts it, “instantly gives a huge amount of information to researchers. That’s really exciting for me.” Morin enrolled at Puget Sound in 1982, thinking he’d maybe pursue veterinary science. But he fell in love with research as an undergraduate, and spent a year after graduation in a genetics lab at the NOAA Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle. He was hooked.

He did his dissertation work at the University of California, San Diego, on chimpanzees, working with Goodall and living at her house in Tanzania while researching some of her behavioral records, and collecting hair samples at the Gombe Stream National Park for genetic analysis. He eventually gravitated to the field of marine mammals, which “was way behind because they were so difficult to study.” Genetics has helped solve that.

Morin, who currently lives with his husband in Seattle, hopes his group’s research can be used to examine what data are most critical for better understanding the taxonomy of killer whales globally—no small accomplishment, given that they are “the most widely distributed mammal outside of humans on the planet.”

Most important, he hopes that the definitive identification of more species more quickly can produce stronger conservation efforts to ensure that the marine ecosystem continues to thrive. Knowing, for example, that Orcinus ater prefers salmon while Orcinus rectipinnus feeds on larger marine mammals can help influence conservation choices and policies, which can protect each species more effectively.

“Molecular genetics is a huge field, and it allows us to do things more rapidly, which is what we need to keep up with what’s going on in this biodiversity crisis, this extinction that is happening faster than we learn what’s being lost,” Morin says. “Hopefully genetics can help close that gap. We’re trying to do this as fast as we can.”

Passionately curious, Morin is—but (apologies to Einstein) with some serious special talent, too.

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