Look out baby seal, Look out!

Posted by Greg Laden on June 19, 2009
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Through the filter of time … a repost that may still be interesting to you from two years ago.

This is brilliant. A bunch of Orca, incorrectly known as Killer Whales because, well, they would never kill anything, right? Anyway, a bunch of Orca either trying to eat a baby seal or playing with a baby seal. Or is the baby seal playing with them?

Thanks to Richard Conner.

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Comments

  1. #1 Jared
    June 19, 2009

    I’m pretty sure they are teaching the young how to wave hunt. I’ve seen this video a few times, and when the seal does go in the water, it’s allowed to get back on another ice flow several times without being promptly eaten. This makes me think it’s a lesson.

  2. #2 Tsu Dho Nimh
    June 20, 2009

    Some marine biologists I know observed orca teams doing the “wave” thing but with an orca on the far side of the floe eating the seals. The humans were tagging seals, and what was normally a difficult job was suddenly very easy, because the seals refused to move from the center of their floes despite the humans.

    And the biologists hot-footed it off the floe ice when they saw some of the solo orca first spy-hop to locate prey on a small enough floe and then do a Sea-World like slither across the floe to knock the prey into the water for the other orcas.

  3. #3 Anne Gilbert
    June 20, 2009

    Orcas do a lot of interesting things. Yeah, they do eat seals and such, but around here, they mostly eat salmon(if the pollution in the waters around here isn’t choking both salmon and orcas). They have interesting ways of getting their salmon dinners, though, that involve group echolocation, among other things. These underwater “sound wave blasts” tend to stun the fish and make them easy for the hungry Orcins orca to get their dinners.
    Anne G