It took two lawsuits over nearly a decade to overcome political pressure and get the US federal government to force Hawaii longline tuna fishermen to change their fishing methods and stop killing false killer whales, a rare species that puts our table manners to shame.

An ISLANDS BUSINESS investigation of that process illustrates how powerful politicians can effectively subvert the law—but not forever.

As a result of the lawsuits, an official Take Reduction Team made up of fishermen, scientists and conservationists met in late February for the first time in Honolulu to elaborate a plan to do for the false killer whales what a similar process did for endangered loggerhead and leatherback sea turtles, whose by-catch in the longline swordfish fishery plummeted following court-mandated changes in gear and methods.

“This is no guarantee of success, but at least it makes a solution possible,” says team member and marine biologist Robin Baird of the Cascadia Research Collective in Olympia, Washington, who has written over 60 scientific papers on marine mammals.

The false killer whale is the only animal for whom sharing is the rule, not the exception. After catching some of the fastest, most agile and smartest fish in the ocean, like big tuna, swordfish or mahi-mahi, they politely pass them to each other intact, even though they could easily swallow it. Eventually one whale takes a bite and passes it on to the next one, who does the same. Then it’s time to go fishing again. No other animal does this. Lions and wolves share too, but they have no choice: a deer or a zebra is far too big for one individual.

Baird says the ceremony may be a way of formalising mutual trust in a tightly knit group of hunters.

False killer whales are so named because they were found after killer whales, or orcas, whom they resemble. They are thinly spread out around the world, though most stay in the globe’s tropical waistline, also known as the tuna belt. Hawaii is north of that belt, and it has acquired a genetically distinct resident population of these whales that feed on transient game fish.

It is by far the most studied group of false killer whales in the world and can be observed from whale-watching boats as well as from cliffs.

Over the past 20 years, this genetically distinct population has seen its numbers fall from over 500 to 123. Its exquisite table manners and intelligence notwithstanding, the species—and the Hawaii population in particular— is facing what Baird, the marine biologist, called a “perfect storm” of adverse conditions, even though it’s rarely targeted by humans.

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