DOI: 10.5061/dryad.d7wm37q5n
title: Revised taxonomy of eastern North Pacific killer whales (Orcinus orca): Bigg’s and resident ecotypes deserve species status

description: Killer whales (Orcinus orca) are currently recognized as a single
 ecologically and morphologically diverse, globally-distributed species.
 Multiple morphotypes or ecotypes have been described, often associated
 with feeding specialization, and several studies have suggested taxonomic
 revision to include multiple subspecies or species in the genus. We review
 the ecological, morphological and genetic data for the well-studied
 “resident” and Bigg’s (aka “transient”) ecotypes in the eastern North
 Pacific, and use quantitative taxonomic guidelines and standards to
 determine whether the taxonomic status of these killer whale ecotypes
 should be revised. Our review and new analyses indicate that species-level
 status is justified in both cases, and we conclude that eastern North
 Pacific Bigg’s killer whales should be recognized as Orcinus rectipinnus
 (Cope in Scammon, 1869), and resident killer whales should be recognized
 as Orcinus ater (Cope in Scammon, 1869).
description: Dataset information has been previously published, and
 re-analyzed as described in the supplemental materials for the current
 publication.
description: # Revised taxonomy of eastern North Pacific killer whales (Orcinus orca):
 Bigg’s and resident ecotypes deserve species status
 [https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.d7wm37q5n](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.d7wm37q5n) Microsatellite genotypes from Parsons et al. 2013, filtered to include only samples of known ecotype, plus 5 unpublished offshore samples and genotype data that were not included in Parsons et al. (2013). SNP genotypes from whole genome sequences from Kardos et al. (2023) (data provided by M. Kardos, Y. Zhang).  Kardos, M., Zhang, Y., Parsons, K.M., A, Y., Kang, H., Xu, X., Liu, X., Matkin, C.O., Zhang, P., Ward, E.J., et al. 2023. Inbreeding depression explains killer whale population dynamics. Nat Ecol Evol 7:675-686 Parsons, K.M., Durban, J.W., Burdin, A.M., Burkanov, V.N., Pitman, R.L., Barlow, J., Barrett-Lennard, L.G., LeDuc, R.G., Robertson, K.M., Matkin, C.O., et al. 2013. Geographic Patterns of Genetic Differentiation among Killer Whales in the Northern North Pacific. Journal of Heredity 104:737-754. ## Description of the data and file structure Parsons2013_NNP_KW_microsatellite_genotypes.csv. Microsatellite genotype data are organized in a spreadsheet (comma separated values; csv) file, including columns for: Sample ID, Ecotype, Latitude, Longitude, followed by two columns for the alleles of each microsatellite locus (N=26). Missing Latitude and Longitude data are indicated by “n/a”. Missing allele data are indicated by “0”. Kardos2023_kw_147.vcf.txt.gz. SNP data are in a compressed variant call format (vcf) text file containing 6,371,282 single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) genotypes from 147 killer whale genome sequences. File compression was done with gzip. Kardos2023_147_strata.csv. The sample IDs and populations are provided in a csv file. ## **Sharing/Access information** The genome-wide SNP data from Kardos et al. 2023 were derived from the following sources: NCBI data accessions CNR0480140 - CNR0480290, described in the Supplementary Table 5 of Kardos et al. 2023.