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Kitchen Table Kibitzing 10/8/22: Don't mess with the killer whales [1]
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Date: 2022-10-08
I will be remote this evening so this is being written on Thursday afternoon.
Carcharadon carcharias, otherwise known as the Great White Shark, has good reason to be cocky, having been featured in no less than 97 movies and television shows, almost all stemming from his riveting, albeit (mostly) mechanical premiere performance in the 1975 uber-blockbuster, Jaws. Since that film the great white has milked his/her role as an “apex predator,” gliding along with hardly any natural enemies (save man, who preys on everything indiscriminately), and more or less killing and eating whatever it feels like, without much pushback from the undersea community. It’s been theorized that certain large underwater species (the giant squid,or the sperm whale, for example) could attack a great white, but little hard evidence that they actually do so.
This guy may have just spotted a killer whale
The one exception to the great white’s relative hegemony, however, is the Orca, colloquially known as the ”killer whale.” Highly intelligent and socially gifted, the Orca, as explained by the Dutch Shark Society, though less popular (featured in only eight human-produced films, most of them in a positive light), absolutely dominates the great white when the two species intersect:
Killer whales have such an intimidating presence in the ocean that great whites actively avoid them. When a killer whale enters a popular great white feeding area, the great whites vacate the vicinity.
A 2009 study of 17 tagged great whites noted their remarkable and immediate exodus — even from prime feeding grounds --once a pod of killer whales showed up. Even more remarkably, the white sharks completely avoided the area not for a day, not for a week, but for up to an entire year. Further research documented this phenomenon even when the orcas were “just passing through.”
As reported by Ed Yong, writing for the Atlantic:
[O]rcas are “potentially the more dangerous predator,” says Toby Daly-Engel, a shark expert at the Florida Institute of Technology. “They have a lot of social behaviors that sharks do not, which allows them to hunt effectively in groups, communicate among themselves, and teach their young.” Combining both brains and brawn, orcas have been known to kill sharks in surprisingly complicated ways. Some will drive their prey to the surface and then karate chop them with overhead tail swipes. Others seem to have worked out that they can hold sharks upside-down to induce a paralytic state called tonic immobility. Orcas can kill the fastest species (makos) and the largest (whale sharks). And when they encounter great whites, a few recorded cases suggest that these encounters end very badly for the sharks.
The visual record of orcas interacting with the great white is understandably sparse. As reported by Jason Daly for the Smithsonian magazine, the first visual recording of such an interaction dates back only to the Clinton administration.
In 1997, during the first interaction ever recorded, fishermen near Southeast Farallon witnessed a pair of orcas kill a young great white that tried to nose in on the sea lion they were eating. The orcas bashed him to death then ate his liver. [***] In 2017, five corpses of great white sharks washed up on the beaches of South Africa, all with their livers almost surgically removed. It was the work of orcas, which kill the sharks then make a wound near the calorie-dense shark liver. They then squish the yummy treat out of the shark and leave the rest of the corpse. “It’s like squeezing toothpaste,” [shark researcher] Jorgensen tells Yong. An Orca in Vancouver harbor
Which makes the below aerial footage (taken by drone) of killer whales off South Africa circling and attacking a great white shark that had the misfortune of disrupting their socializing all the more fascinating.
As reported by the Agence France-presse for the Guardian, “A pod of killer whales is seen chasing sharks during an hour-long pursuit off Mossel Bay, a port town in the southern Western Cape province, in helicopter and drone footage that informed a scientific study released this week.” (Notably the music used to accompany this rare footage is a far cry from the “Jaws” theme)
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