She had a whale of a life.
The world’s oldest known killer whale – J2, or affectionately known as “Granny” — is missing and presumed dead, researchers told the BBC.
Estimated to be about 105 years old, Granny was born around the time the Titanic sank in 1912.
She was the subject of a recent BBC documentary that tracked female orcas as part of a study into menopause.
Like humans, only two other mammals are known to experience menopause because they live long past their reproductive years — orcas and short-finned pilot whales. Orcas normally live until age 60.
Matriarch killer whales help their families survive by guiding their foraging pods, take care of young calves and even feed the bigger males, the BBC reported.
Scientists investigating the puzzle of menopause study these post-reproductive behemoths for clues into how and why females of a species cease to reproduce halfway through their lives.
This research continues, but it is now feared that the venerable Granny from the Puget Sound has gone belly-up. If so, an icon of the most well-studied killer-whale population on Earth will no longer be part of the studies.
“It was inevitable that this day was going to come but it is very sad news and a further blow to this population,” Darren Croft, a professor at the University of Exeter in the UK, who heads the research, told BBC News.
In her later years, he said, Granny had “been helping her family group to survive by sharing her knowledge of when and where to find food.”
The orcas in the Salish Sea near Vancouver and Seattle have been studied by Ken Balcomb of the Center for Whale Research and his fellow scientists for the past 40 years.
Balcomb started the research when killer whales were relocated to marine parks starting around 1965. He first photographed Granny in 1976 and exposed the effects of hunting whales.
He wrote on the center’s website that he last saw Granny on Oct. 12, 2016, as she swam north in Haro Strait – far ahead of the others.
“Perhaps other dedicated whale-watchers have seen her since then,” he wrote, “but by year’s end she is officially missing from the Southern Resident Killer Whale population, and with regret we now consider her deceased.”
Croft said it was “just incredible” to think of what Granny lived through over the decades and how the world and her environment had changed during that time.
“She lived through the live captures,” he told BBC News, “and in recent years her world has changed dramatically with dwindling salmon stocks and increases in shipping threatening the survival of this incredible population.
“Although J2 is gone we will continue to benefit for many decades to come, from the incredible data collected on her life over the last 40 years by the Center for Whale Research.”
Granny’s presumed death brings the total number of Southern Resident killer whales – as they are called — down to 78 as of Dec. 31.
“She was quite frequently the whale in front of everyone else, leading the group,” said Deborah Giles, research director at the whale center, the Vancouver Sun reported.
“I’ve been getting emails from friends saying, ‘Oh my god, who’s going to lead the whales? Who will lead J-pod now?’ My guess is as good as yours. We don’t really have many older females now,” she said.