On Puget Sound, It's Orca vs. Inc.

ON PUGET SOUND, Wash. -- For creatures that eat 400 pounds of salmon a day, killer whales are startlingly human. They live as long as you do. They never escape the controlling influence of their moms. They love to show off.

Consider J-22, also known as Oreo. She is a 21-year-old killer whale -- or orca -- with serious family obligations. She has three offspring to watch over and rarely ventures far from J-pod, her extended family, which is led by a vigorous 92-year-old matriarch named Granny. On a recent day, Oreo slipped briefly away from Granny and approached a whale-watching boat. As cameras clicked, Oreo launched herself high out of the water, jumping for the sheer, showoffy heck of it.

She is about 25 feet long and weighs more than 8,000 pounds, so it was an energy-expensive heave. Resident killer whales in Puget Sound routinely do this sort of thing to the delight of human beings.

In return, over recent decades, humans have destroyed about 90 percent of their salmon supply, contaminated the sound with toxic chemicals and, in the 1960s and '70s, kidnapped scores of young killer whales to perform in aquatic shows.

Now, federal amends are being made. Southern resident killer whales of Puget Sound -- there are just 89 of them in three pods, all numbered and named, with birth dates and family trees posted on the Internet -- were listed late last year as endangered species.

In June, the National Marine Fisheries Service proposed protecting most of Puget Sound as critical habitat for the whales, which are actually the world's largest dolphins. The proposal, encompassing 2,564 square miles at the heart one of the nation's busiest commercial waterways, has alarmed local industry.

Building and farm groups have sued to stop the proposal, due to become law by November, arguing that it would require complicated and costly review of future industrial development, home construction, sewer treatment, road construction and water use around the sound, an inland waterway surrounding by nearly 4 million people.

Russell Brooks, managing attorney for the Pacific Legal Foundation, which is leading the legal challenge, warns that the listing of killer whales as endangered could create unforeseen economic fallout in the Pacific Northwest comparable to what followed the listing of northern spotted owls in the early 1990s.

Then, 80 percent of federal forests from Washington to Northern California were closed to logging and an estimated 30,000 timber industry jobs disappeared. The spotted owl, by the way, is still in severe decline, and scientists do not know how to save it.

"This is not really about killer whales at all," said Brooks, whose group specializes in trying to rein in the economic impact of the Endangered Species Act. "This is a tool used by those who wish to impose their own version of non-land use on Puget Sound."

But for champions of the orcas -- and their numbers are growing, with an estimated 150,000 people paying about $70 each to go out every year in boats to watch and wonder at the whales in Puget Sound -- federal protection has been welcomed as an overdue gift.

"We are very, very happy about this," said Ralph Munro, a former Washington secretary of state and a longtime activist who, like many ardent orca admirers, says he's had "mystical" encounters with the creatures.