“You can learn a lot about how to work together when you practice together as a team.” “Killer whale groups live for human life spans or longer, and so they hunt together cooperatively for decades and decades,” he said.
Pitman says these coordinated attacks are perfected over many years. Meanwhile, a third orca swam inside the mouth of the blue whale and began eating its tongue, which is apparently a nutritionally dense organ. After hours of relentless assault, three killer whales lined up and rammed the blue whale onto its side while two orcas attacked its head. During the first attack, the researchers observed teams of orcas tearing chunks of skin and blubber from the blue whale as well as biting off its dorsal fin. “We don’t have dinosaurs anymore, so for me as a whale biologist and a zoologist, it’s an amazing thing.”. “This is the biggest predation event on this planet-the biggest apex predator taking down the biggest prey,” Robert Pitman, a marine ecologist at Oregon State University’s Marine Mammal Institute, told National Geographic.
The researchers detailed the three attacks in a paper published this week in Marine Mammal Science. A third incident, in which orcas killed a blue whale yearling, took place in March of 2021. As the scientists recorded the scene, at least 12 orcas brutalized the blue whale, with female predators “leading the way.” A month later, the researchers witnessed another group of orcas kill a blue whale calf. The blue whale was between 60 and 70 feet long, while orcas top out at 30 feet. March of 2019, researchers at the Cetacean Research Centre in Western Australia were conducting annual surveys when they spotted orcas attacking an adult blue whale.
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