It is unclear who won the cetacean showdown.
Whale watchers near the U.S.-Canada border recently witnessed a brutal mass brawl between more than a dozen aggressive orcas and a pair of defensive humpback whales. The intense confrontation, which lasted for several hours, included breaching, breaching, tail-slapping, biting flippers and loud vocalizations that could be heard from above the surface, according to reports. But it is unclear which species swam away victorious.
"I'm still trying to wrap my head around it because it was absolutely unbelievable," Mollie Naccarato, captain of the Sooke Coastal Explorations vessel, said in the statement."At first the orcas seemed to be chasing the humpbacks, but then when it seemed there was space between them, the humpbacks would go back toward the orcas.
Bigg's orcas normally prey on smaller marine mammals such as seals, sea lions and porpoises, but have also been known to hunt larger whales like humpbacks, which makes them the only natural predators of humpbacks in the area, according to PWWA. In May 2021, a group of 13 orcas similarly attacked a humpback mother and calf in the Salish Sea. Onlookers at the time believed that the baby whale had been killed, but there was no direct evidence of this.
All of these violent encounters have one thing in common — at least one of the humpbacks was a calf or juvenile. And that is no accident, said Erich Hoyt, a research fellow at Whale and Dolphin Conservation in the U.K. and author of the book"Orca: The whale called killer."
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