Video from excited ecotourists reveals how orcas handle an unlikely feat of predation: killing an enormous whale shark. And that’s simply one of many killer whales’ conquests.
4 movies of orca searching sprees, the earliest from 2018 and the most recent from 2024, recommend that an orca pod within the Gulf of California is specializing in searching sharks and their family members, researchers say. Different targets embody such ecotourist faves as mobula rays, says marine biologist Francesca Pancaldi of the marine science heart in La Paz related to Mexico’s Instituto Politécnico Nacional. She and her colleagues lay out their concepts for orca specialization November 29 in Frontiers in Marine Science.
Orcas rank as a high — and intensely versatile — predator on the planet’s oceans. Orcinus orca pods have been documented taking down grownup nice 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 seashore themselves on sandy shores to choose off weak pinnipeds.
How orcas feed within the jap 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 goal are the most important fish on the planet. Adults can develop to 18 meters in size, and probably extra (longer than a college bus). Whale sharks can be summer-movie extravagances of terror if solely that they had biting enamel. As filter feeders, they simply glean the weak background-soup of ocean life.
Orcas’ physiology ought to hamper their potential to catch whale sharks. “They’ve lungs,” says Pancaldi. The whale shark, with gills, can do infinite lurks and dive 2,000 meters deep, whereas its mammal predator has to interrupt off the chase, swim as much as the floor and breathe.
To eat shark, orcas should preserve the shark from diving, and it takes a pod, Pancaldi says. Orcas hound the sharks, and even the younger and the small could take part, snapping or blocking escape routes. Flipping the shark over or in any other case jolting it into the scared-rabbit freeze of tonic immobility is a giant success. Biting off the pelvic fins and claspers from the decrease physique doom the shark to bleed out. Then the orcas can feast on what they actually need, the shark liver, enormous and filled with fats. The remainder is trash.
All 4 doomed sharks within the movies have been younger and small — merely 5 to 6 meters lengthy. Three of the 4 movies present the identical orca, a particular male, which the researchers nicknamed Moctezuma. However, the researchers say, it’s the grandmothers, particularly the matriarch of the pod, who transmits cultural data, such because the method for getting yummy shark livers.
