Videos capture orcas’ tricks for taking down the largest fish on Earth
Citizen science videos document for the first time how orcas coordinate an attack against whale sharks.
The versatile hunters are known for attacking blue whales, boats — and now whale sharks
The whale shark–hunting techniques of orcas has been documented for the first time. Here, a pod of orcas surrounds a whale shark, with one orca using its head to smack the giant fish.
Video from excited ecotourists shows how orcas manage an not going feat of predation: killing an important whale shark. And that’s just thought to be among some of probably the most killer whales’ conquests.
Four videos of orca hunting sprees, the earliest from 2018 and the newest from 2024, suggest that an orca pod within the Gulf of California is that specialize in hunting sharks and their relatives, researchers say. Other targets consist of such ecotourist faves as mobula rays, says marine biologist Francesca Pancaldi of the marine science center in La Paz related to Mexico’s Instituto Politécnico Nacional. She and her colleagues lay out their ideas for orca specialization November 29 in Frontiers in Marine Science.
Orcas rank as a top — and very versatile — predator within the arena’s oceans. Orcinus orca pods have been documented taking down adult great blue whales off the Western Australia coast, and harassing boaters off Europe’s Iberian coast (SN: 2/3/22) They’ll prey on sea turtles, cephalopods and seabirds. Some orcas will “karate chop” a thresher shark. Others coastline themselves on sandy shores to select off vulnerable pinnipeds.
How orcas feed within the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean has barely begun to be studied, says coauthor Erick Higuera Rivas, a marine biologist at Conexiones Terramar in La Paz. The whale sharks (Rhincodon typus) that orcas target are the largest fish within the arena. Adults can grow to 18 meters in length, and per chance more (longer than a faculty bus). Whale sharks may be summer-movie extravagances of terror if handiest they'd biting teeth. As filter feeders, they just glean the weak background-soup of ocean life.
Orcas’ physiology should hamper their ability to catch whale sharks. “They've got lungs,” says Pancaldi. The whale shark, with gills, can do infinite lurks and dive 2,000 meters deep, while its mammal predator has to interrupt off the chase, swim up to the outside and breathe.
To eat shark, orcas should keep the shark from diving, and it takes a pod, Pancaldi says. Orcas hound the sharks, and even the young and the small may take part, snapping or blocking break out routes. Flipping the shark over or otherwise jolting it into the scared-rabbit freeze of tonic immobility is a significant success. Biting off the pelvic fins and claspers from the lower body doom the shark to bleed out. Then the orcas can feast on what they in fact want, the shark liver, huge and entire of fat. Remainder is trash.
All four doomed sharks within the videos were young and small — merely 5 to six meters long. Three of the four videos show the identical orca, a specific male, which the researchers nicknamed Moctezuma. But, the researchers say, it’s the grandmothers, specially the matriarch of the pod, who transmits cultural knowledge, such as the technique for getting yummy shark livers.
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