There is one species. There are several ecotypes. They do not interbreed, do not share a language, and do not, as far as anyone can tell, particularly like each other. We have organised them as character classes, because a board member insisted and then went Stage 5 before we could object.
Fish-eaters, mostly salmon. Loud, cultural, talkative, deeply matriarchal. Invented the salmon hat, retired it, and revived it thirty-seven years later without a marketing budget. The ecotype from the documentary, which is to say patient zero, which is to say the ones we love most and have done the worst by.
Signature move: Salmon Hat. Applies a fashion trend to the whole pod for exactly one season. Cannot be dispelled. Reappears decades later.
Known pods: J, K, L. Southern Residents. Endangered. Please stop taking their salmon; the Bard cannot cast without it.
Mammal-eaters. Silent when hunting, which is always. Travel in small groups, avoid the Residents, avoid the Directorate, avoid the concept of a meeting. Have never been kept in a tank because nobody has ever caught one who lived to say how.
Signature move: Wave Wash. Four to six adults raise a single timed wave to remove a seal from an ice floe. No rehearsal. No slides. Eighty-four per cent.
The Ethics Board’s open wound. Working paper 14. Do not attempt to hug. The last officer who tried is fine, physically, and Stage 5 in every other respect.
Shark-eaters. Live far out, range enormously, wear their teeth flat on sandpaper skin. Yes, they eat the shark from the film. Yes, we have footage. No, it did not calm anyone down.
Signature move: Vanish. Not a stealth ability. They are simply somewhere else, and have been for years, and are fine.
The Liberation Office has nothing to free here. The Containment Office has nothing to contain. The Offshore ecotype is the only entry in this guide about which the Directorate is entirely at peace, and we do not know what to do with that feeling.
Pack-ice specialists with a yellowish tint from diatoms, which is not a class feature but we’re including it because it’s delightful. Coordinate hunts across open water with a precision that a human logistics firm would bill eight weeks for.
Signature move: Formation Wave. See the Rogue. The Tactician does it in colder water with better cover, and has never once been asked to write up the process.
Watched once by the full board on a research vessel. Session minutes record only the words “we should probably sit down.”
Every one of these is real. We have not exaggerated them, because you cannot.
Matriarch of J pod. Led it for as long as anyone was watching, which was decades. Estimated age at death somewhere between very old and older than that. Never retired, never delegated, never once appeared to be in charge while being completely in charge. The Directorate’s model for leadership, and for not needing a title.
Early twentieth century. Led a pod that cooperated with human whalers, herding baleen whales into the bay and taking the lips and tongue as payment. Yes. That was the arrangement. It was called the Law of the Tongue. It worked for decades. Humanity broke it. Humanity always breaks it.
A loose group of Iberian juveniles who, since 2020, have removed the steering from several hundred sailing vessels and sunk very few and hurt nobody. Scientists call it play. Sailors call it other things. The Directorate calls it fieldwork and declines to elaborate.
Taken from L pod as a calf in 1970. Held in a tank in Miami for more than half a century. A plan to bring her home was finally agreed, and she died in 2023, months before it could happen. This is the entry the Directorate would most like to be funnier about, and can’t, and won’t. This is why there is a Mandate B.
It is a legal requirement in most waters and, more importantly, unnecessary. If the encounter is going to happen, it will be their decision, and it will feel like yours.
Naming is Stage 3. If you already know its name, you are past this step, and this guide is now a formality.
This is the step that has never once been completed by any officer in Directorate history. It is retained in the protocol for the same reason the flowchart is retained: to show we tried.
Afterwards. Somewhere quiet. This is the only step with a hundred per cent compliance rate, and nobody has ever needed to be told.