These are highly intelligent animals.
Are you telling me that they will only eat salmon and not pinnipeds?
I can't believe they don't have the ability to adapt to eating pinnipeds.
If only it were so simple; not long ago, someone suggested, quite seriously, we should “teach” them to eat our wasted food. “Win, win,” he said.
Tunajoe, do you smoke? No? You must have some long standing habit you couldn’t change, to something completely foreign, overnight, with ease. And you’ve only been at that for what, 50 years?
Existing on a single, abundant food source for 11 million years, it is not an easy switch to make.
Killer whales which do eat pinnipeds have different brains. They hunt by stealth, mostly in pairs or threesomes; always have. They could not just switch to oysters.
The southern residents whose diet is not only salmon, but 80% Chinook salmon, hunt as a family, by communication and echolocation. They can detect a single Chinook in a school of many species.
Before they could adapt to eating pinnipeds, they would need to learn to be quiet. Learn how to drown sea lions. Learn to not eat the lungs.
For either of those cetaceans to just up and switch is a physical, if not genetic, impossibility. It would be more logical for the southern residents to increase consumption of other fishes, like their northern resident cousins. But, the chinook isn’t just feeding a preferred taste; the fat, specific to the chinook, feeds everything about their biology.
If only it were so simple.