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Vancouver — When Luna, the lonely orca who lives in Nootka Sound on the west coast of Vancouver Island, began to exchange calls with a passing pod of killer whales, it was a conversation heard around the world.
It soon started a flurry of e-mails among killer-whale researchers who say the contact, and the nature of the calls, raises hope that Luna will one day reunite with the family group it lost contact with several years ago.
"It's very exciting . . . a very rare event," Allan Muir, a research volunteer, said in an overnight e-mail from Scotland, where he was the first to hear the whale-to-whale communication.
Mr. Muir is part of a worldwide web of researchers who, via the Internet, have been monitoring a hydrophone listening post on a 24/7 basis for the past year, as part of the LunaLive project.
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Mr. Muir is a marine mammal medic with British Divers Marine Life Rescue, an organization that saves stranded cetaceans. It was 2:41 a.m. Wednesday in Nootka Sound when he heard Luna's distinctive voice on his computer.
Luna, who has lived apart from other whales in Nootka Sound for the past three years, has a high-pitched voice that rises and falls as it calls out.
Luna, who is known as L-98 to scientists and Tsu'xiit to B.C.'s Mowachaht and Muchalaht native population, belongs to the southern residents pod, an endangered group of killer whales usually found in Puget Sound in Washington State.
It isn't known how Luna came to be isolated in distant Nootka Sound, where the only other killer whales are usually passing transients, a different subpopulation from residents.
Luna jumped into international headlines a few years ago when it began bumping into boats and sea planes, and nudged around the dock at Gold River.
The orca's familiarity with humans, which at times became dangerous to boaters, brought the whale under intense scrutiny by scientists who at one point debated capturing and transporting it back to its home group.
Scientists have been watching Luna from shore-based observation sites, tracking it in boats and listening to its calls with a hydrophone that was placed in a bay it likes to visit.
Mr. Muir was at home preparing whale-stranding posters to put up along the coast of Scotland when he heard Luna over his network connection.
It was about 10:30 in the morning where he was, and whale researchers on Canada's West Coast were sound asleep.
"Some of the calls were unfamiliar to me, which had me wondering," Mr. Muir wrote. "Suddenly I realized the calls were overlapping and that there was more than one orca present. I could clearly hear Luna's 'rising call' and the other vocalizations intermingling . . . I had heard Luna vocalizing before, but this was different. . . . There being other orca in close proximity was very special."
He immediately sent an e-mail to whale researcher Keith Wood, who was on his boat in Tofino, B.C.
"[It] was a milestone event," said an enthused Mr. Wood, who heads an organization called Act Now for Ocean Natives. He was the one who placed the hydrophone in Nootka Sound.
"It's really exciting . . . transients and residents rarely exchange calls."
Dr. Paul Spong, director of OrcaLab, a B.C. whale-research station, said that in 30 years researchers have heard transient and resident whales vocalizing together only three times. "This is a very rare event," he said.
Resident killer whales are naturally vocal, calling to one another as they travel and search for their primary food source, salmon.
But transients, which feed on seals, sea lions and other whales, usually travel in silence.
