Whale-on-whale warfare is real—and absolutely brutal.
, older females led the hunting parties and were responsible for the bulk of the attacks. After dealing the final blows, pod members of all ages helped push the blue whale’s massive form underwater to share the spoils. Members of other orca groups, along with seabirds, joined in to feed too.
“The killer whales we research off Bremer Bay are rewriting the textbook on what we thought we knew about this species,” Rebecca Wellard, founder of Project ORCA and co-author of the new study,. But in the paper, she and her colleagues note that orcas in other areas might occasionally dine on blue whales as well. A 2016 video taken by passengers on a fishing boat off Baja California, Mexico, shows a group of male orcas consistently chomping on a blue whale.
Amateurs and experts alike, however, have documented the whale battles off Western Australia. Wellard and her fellow researchers supplemented recordings and testimonies from wildlife cruises with drone footage they took themselves. As a result, they’ve published the most thorough analysis of a behavior that’s surprised even the most veteran whale scientists.
“Now, with the recovery of some blue whale populations, what we may be seeing is killer whales rediscovering a prey base that has largely been absent for the past 50 to 100 years,” Robert Pitman, a marine biologist from Oregon State University and co-author on the story,
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