Johnstone Strait, the channel separating Vancouver Island from the mainland, is a year-round habitat for resident orcas and a key setting for distinguishing their lives from those of other orca populations. Its significance in the novel is ecological and evidentiary: the strait’s residents depend on salmon and face mounting pressure from shipping and damage to spawning rivers, yet they are not implicated in the attacks that spread alarm elsewhere. The place therefore resists treating orcas as a single, interchangeable threat.

A channel and a year-round habitat

Johnstone Strait is introduced as the waterway east of Vancouver Island, a channel between the island and the mainland. That geography gives the strait a defined place in the conversation about which whales have disappeared and which remain. It is not simply open ocean: it is a known coastal passage and the home waters of orcas that stay in the region throughout the year.

Leon Anawak distinguishes three kinds of orcas. Offshore orcas are poorly understood, range far from shore, and tend to travel in large groups. Transient orcas are nomadic, live in smaller pods, and take a broad range of prey. Resident orcas, by contrast, live in large family groups around the island and remain in Johnstone Strait year-round. They eat only salmon. The distinctions matter because a whale’s location, social pattern, and diet shape how its behaviour should be interpreted; the familiar image of a single kind of killer whale cannot account for all three.

The residents’ social behaviour has been monitored since the 1970s. That long-running attention makes the strait a place of accumulated observation, not merely a point on a map. Anawak can contrast local residents with whales that come and go, while the monitoring provides a basis for recognizing that the populations have different habits and ranges.

Human pressure on the residents

The strait’s resident orcas are described as numerous, but their habitat is becoming less comfortable. Ferries, cargo ships, liners, and sport-fishing vessels share their home waters. The pressure is not only a matter of traffic on the water: the region’s timber industry transports entire forests to Asia, and the resulting changes reach the rivers on which the whales depend.

As the trees disappear, rivers fill with silt. Salmon lose their spawning grounds, leaving the resident orcas with less of the food they eat. The chain links industrial activity on land to changes in river habitat and then to the food supply of animals in the strait. It also complicates the idea that a resident population is safe simply because it remains in a familiar place. Their year-round presence makes their habitat and its deterioration easier to identify, but does not insulate them from pressures that travel through connected environments.

This vulnerability stands apart from the circumstances of migratory whales. Grey whales and humpbacks reach Vancouver around the beginning of March after months without eating. They spend the winter in Baja California living on their blubber and feed again when they arrive. Their seasonal movement and dependence on feeding grounds offer another reminder that the region’s whales do not share one uniform pattern of life.

The strait as a counterexample during the attacks

When Anawak and his colleagues compare the whales involved in attacks, the resident orcas are conspicuously absent. The attacks identified in the discussion involved transient orcas, not a single resident. The Johnstone Strait itself was clear of attacks, even though it was full of kayaks at the time. That detail makes the absence meaningful: the strait was not empty of people or potential encounters, yet the residents there were not reported as attackers.

The contrast is sharpened by the identification of particular whales. The grey whale and two humpbacks seen in attack footage were classified as transients. All three had spent the winter in Baja California, and records of their flukes allowed researchers to match them with whales seen there repeatedly in recent years. The evidence situates the attacks within the movements and identities of particular animals rather than attributing them indiscriminately to every whale in the region.

Anawak’s explanation also distinguishes the possible roles of transient and offshore orcas. Transients are linked to the attacks under discussion; offshore orcas remain a possibility, not a confirmed participant in the same way. Residents, by contrast, are separated from both the attack pattern and the roaming populations. Johnstone Strait thus functions as a geographic check on an alarming generalization: proximity to the crisis does not make every orca population responsible for it.

Ecological knowledge and narrative significance

The strait brings together two kinds of knowledge in Anawak’s account: long-term observation of resident orca social behaviour and immediate comparison of attack evidence. The first makes local differences legible; the second tests those differences against a developing emergency. The absence of attacks in a busy channel and the identification of transient whales in the footage are not incidental details. Together, they prevent the crisis from erasing distinctions among animals with different diets, movement patterns, and relationships to place.

At the same time, the strait is not presented as an untouched refuge. Its residents face vessel traffic, while forestry alters rivers and threatens salmon spawning grounds. The same place that supplies a clear contrast between resident and transient orcas also reveals how human activity presses on the residents’ food system. Johnstone Strait therefore occupies a double role in the novel: it is a site where careful monitoring can distinguish populations and behaviour, and a habitat whose ecological connections make its apparent stability precarious.