Britain Has Only 2 KILLER WHALES Left — and BOTH Are Male! Here's Who's to Blame

In November nineteen seventy-seven a killer whale swam five kilometres up the River Foyle, and the whole of Derry came out on the bridge to watch it. Thirty-nine years later that same animal was identified from a photograph — and it turned out to belong to the only resident pod of killer whales in British waters. Today that pod is two animals. Both are male. Not a single calf has ever been recorded in it, and the reason is not hunting, not hunger and not a shipwreck. It is something we poured into the sea for half a century and banned fifty years ago — and it is still there. This film follows what happened to them: the female found dead on Tiree with the highest chemical load ever measured in a killer whale, the factory that stood on their own coastline, the seal colony Britain saved so successfully that it now carries the poison to them, and the second pod on the other side of the world where exactly the same thing happened. Subscribe if you want more stories like this one — quiet disasters that nobody noticed while they were happening. Every animal in this film is a real photograph brought to life; the two bridge scenes in Derry are reconstructions. The video is marked as altered content. 0:00 A whale in the river 0:38 Two left, and both male 1:15 Nobody hunted them 3:30 Lulu, caught in the ropes 4:16 What was in her blubber 4:43 The factory on their route 5:42 Two thresholds and one number 6:42 How it climbs the food chain 7:52 The only way out is milk 10:06 Fish-eaters and mammal-eaters 12:13 The seal we brought back 14:55 Alaska: the same story 17:21 The one place it goes right 19:16 Banned fifty years ago 21:00 The whale from Derry, named at last 23:47 What will be left is a voice Species photos: iNaturalist, CC0 and CC BY — Charlotte Kirchner, Felix Meyer, Fábio Olmos, Hazel Chang, Henrique Pacheco, Huey, John Hibbard, Joshua Liverman, Julien Renoult, Kat B, Kevin Lynch, Lars Willighagen, Libby Keatley, Mike Duran, Nigel Voaden, Niko Ioannidis, Paul Prior, Ryan F. Mandelbaum, Siddarth Machado, Tser, William Stephens, Валерия Ковалева. Archive stills: Wikimedia Commons, public domain and CC BY / CC BY-SA — ARLIS Reference, Herman Alfred Turja, Hugh Venables, Industrial Wales, Joseph Mischyshyn, Leia Rodrigues, Lexaxis7, Nanashinodensyaku, Northmetpit, Unknown authorUnknown author, kalev kevad, kitmasterbloke. Aerial flyovers: Google Earth Studio. Killer whale call on the subscribe cue: iNaturalist observation 163442616, CC0. Portrait of Andrew Brownlow: Holyrood Events speaker page, used with credit to the photographer. Animal clips are AI-animated from these real photographs; the Derry bridge scenes are AI reconstructions — the video is flagged as altered content.