Creature report orca3/11/2024 “Within seconds, we realized they were attacking something big. While Totterdell and his team were on their way to their usual whale and dolphin observing site, they spotted white water and dorsal fins. The first documented attack happened during “a really ominous, bad weather day” in March 2019, says John Totterdell, a biologist at Cetacean Research Centre in Esperance, Australia to Science News. Orcas are dwarfed in comparison, at around 30 feet long and an average of six tons. Adult blue whales are commonly between 70 and 80 feet long, but some reach up to 110 feet-the length of three school buses. Their tongue alone weighs as much as an elephant, and they have golf cart–size hearts. "That's probably the reason for their success down there."Īt around 150 tons, blue whales are the largest animals to ever live on Earth. "These killer whales, they work together a lot and there are a lot of killer whales," Pitman tells Live Science. The orcas employed different tactics to take down the whales, including launching onto the animal's blowhole, raking them with their teeth, and on one notably brutal occasion, gnawing on a live whale's tongue. Between 50 and 75 orcas took part in each hunt, and more than a dozen of the same individuals were involved in all three events, per Live Science’s Laura Geggel. In each attack, the orcas-also called killer whales-relied on strength in numbers. “We haven’t seen things like this since dinosaurs were here, and probably not even then.” “This is the biggest predation event on the planet,” says study coauthor Robert Pitman, cetacean ecologist at Oregon State University Marine Mammal Institute, to Science News’s Anna Gibbs. The three separate hunts were described in the journal Marine Mammal Science. While past reports described attempted attacks, no one had observed orcas hunting a blue whale until scientists witnessed a series of events off the southwestern coast of Australia between 20. Now, for the first time, a pod of orcas has been documented viciously attacking the largest creature on the planet: an adult blue whale. Orcas won’t hesitate to attack fish, sea birds, and sea lions.
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