People have taken many steps in recent decades to help the Pacific Northwest’s endangered killer whales, which have long suffered from starvation, pollution and the legacy of having many of their number captured for display in marine parks.
They’ve made boats slow down and keep farther away from the animals to reduce their stress and to quiet the waters so they can better hunt.
So far, those efforts have had limited success, and research published Monday in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution suggests why: The whales are so inbred that they are dying younger and their population is not recovering. Female killer whales take about 20 years to
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