Puget Sound's orcas will remain under protection from the Endangered Species Act, NOAA announced Friday.
After a year spent reviewing a petition to delist the creature by the agency's National Marine Fisheries Service, officials decided the animals that spend their summers in the Washington sound are, in fact, a distinct population.
"They have their own language, own food source," NOAA Spokesman Brian Gorman said, according to the Associated Press. "They don't interbreed with other groups of killer whales. They meet the legal standard for a distinct population group."
The petition to delist the animals was brought by the Sacramento-based Pacific Legal Foundation on behalf of California farmers facing water restrictions designed to protect the salmon that make up the primary source of food for the orcas.
Puget Sound orcas, they argued, were simply part of the larger north Pacific population didn't qualify for the 2005 endangered species listing.
At present, scientists are aware of three pods containing a total of 82 Puget Sound, the AP reported.
With water quality in the sound suffering and salmon limited, Miyoko Sakashito, oceans director for the Center for Biological Diversity in San Francisco, says she believes NOAA's decision was the right one.
"It was troubling to even think that the killer whales might have their protections stripped," she told the AP in an email.
According to the Puget Sound Partnership's "Vital Signs," the orcas that call the region home play an important role as the king's of the food chain. Once numbering as many as 200 whales, numbers dropped in the late-1990s, landing them under the Endangered Species Act in the mid-2000s.
Goals going forward, according to the group, include an end-of-year census of 95 orcas by 2020, or just 1 percent annual growth between 2010 and 2020.