World's Oldest Known Orca Presumed Dead
J2, the killer whale known as Granny, avoided being sold to a marine park in the 1960s and went on to lead a pod of orcas for another half century.
There's the distinguishing cut in her fin, all that acrobatic breaching, and the fact that she was always out front, cruising through the Pacific Northwest and slapping her tail whenever other whales went astray. There was just no mistaking Granny.
The southern resident killer whale believed to be the world's oldest known orca was already an adult in Washington State's Puget Sound in the late 1960s when these creatures were corralled and captured for marine aquariums around the world. Even then she was likely postmenopausal and was considered too old to be shipped off and sold to some park. So wranglers let her keep swimming in the wild.
The always lively whale went on living another five decades after that, until
