It seems like orcas are ready for their close-ups. This week, the charismatic marine mammals have made headlines for two very different activities, both captured in unprecedented detail.
On Sunday, a group of scientists in Norway witnessed and recorded a real-time orca birth—perhaps the first time such an event was photographed in the wild. Writing on their Facebook page, Orca Channel recounted the cetacean delivery, which occurred off Skjervøy in the Arctic Circle. “We were floating calmly and watching the feeding, when all of a sudden, close to the boat, there was blood spilling and splashing everywhere ...” Krisztina Balotay, a photographer and videographer at Orca Channel, a wildlife documentary and tour outlet, wrote. “At first, I had no idea what was going on. A moment later, I saw a little head pop above water …”
Read more: “The Story of a Lonely Orca”
Whale watchers aboard Orca Channel’s boat and another group, with the Norwegian Orca Survey, waited nervously while the newborn orca struggled to breathe and swim on its own for about 15 minutes. But with the aid of pod members, who formed a perimeter around the vulnerable calf and buoyed it on their backs above the water until it was able to swim on its own.
“This event represents a historic first: the first-ever documentation of a killer whale birth and the newborn’s first hour of life in the wild,” wrote the Norwegian Orca Survey, a conservation group, on its Facebook page. “Our observations will allow us to identify the individuals involved and understand their roles in supporting the calf during its first moments. We are now working to collate all available data and plan to publish the full documentation as a scientific article in the near future.”
On the other end of life’s spectrum, orcas have been documented employing a deadly strategy to obtain sustenance from one of the ocean’s most lethal predators—the great white shark.
Researchers published a report this week in Frontiers in Marine Science detailing the shark hunting strategy of a pod of orcas in the Gulf of California, off the coast of Mexico. In two separate incidents, both videoed using aerial drones, orcas surrounded juvenile great white sharks, flipping them onto their backs—which immobilizes sharks—and ripping out their livers, sharing the spoils of the hunt. Hey, they didn’t earn the name “killer whales” for nothing.
Orcas are perennially fascinating marine creatures. Scientists continue to learn new things about the species the more they watch its behaviors. From standing guard around a struggling newborn calf to inventive hunting tactics to take down an oceanic assassin, orcas likely have more secrets to share. And humans, equipped now with ever-more advanced tools to record never-before-seen behaviors, seem up to the challenge. 
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Lead image: MuhammadIshfaq1 / Shutterstock
