Orca - Killer Whales

Types of behavior that Orca exhibit.

This is what started me on my journey into studying the Orca's. I was watching a special on the animal planet with some footage that had been filmed from a cruise ship. There was a single seal on an ice drift and they filmed the Orcas working together as a team to "de-seal" the ice! The exhibited an incredible amount of intelligence as they worked through the problem as a team.

The would "spy hop" this is where they stand almost straight up in the water and bob up and down to see what is on top of the ice and where it is.

They would launch themselves onto the side of the ice, I think in an attempt to tip the ice so the seal would float towards them.

And what happened next was when I realized their extreme intelligence. They worked as a team, with six to eight whales swimming away from the ice, and their they synchronized their swimming, traveling fast right toward the ice, then dove together at the last minute and sent a wave of water over the top of the ice that washed the seal right off of it. With a whale waiting at the other end.

They did not eat the seal right away, it popped right back up on the ice, they may have even put it back up there. Then they did the same thing again. They had a marine biologist narrating, that said she believed they were actually training the younger whale how to hunt for their food.

Eventually they allowed the young to eat the seal as a reward for their learning.

It was just incredible, I was amazed at their intelligence and teamwork!

So let's look at some other behavior known to these whales:

Breaching: occurs when a whale, flips itself entirely out of the water, twists in midair, and lands loudly on its side.

Tail slapping: they slap the water or prey with their tail. Tail slapping when prey is not present is thought to be a form of communication.

Orcas when hunting marine animals will swim fast toward the beach and actually surface on the beach to catch their prey.






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Killer Whales are in every ocean on earth.

There normal range is in coastal waters where there food is plentiful, but they are also found out in the open ocean.

Orca's are more plentiful in the icier waters of the Artic and Antartic. Which makes for a photographers dream with the deep blue water, with the white snow and ice for a background.

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What do Killer whales eat?

Well that varies on what is believed to be the different subspecies of the orca. They haven't officially named the subspecies but they have been called type A, B, or C. More commonly they are named by their behavior, they can actually be identified by distinct differences in their appearance, and there are genetic differences between the three groups.

There are the Resident Killer Whales. These whales stay in their home area, mostly where their food is. They eat a diet of mostly fish and squid. Salmon seems to be their favorite in the summertime when the fish are plentiful. They live in large Pods dominated by the matriarch of the family. They don't travel far from their home. It has been noted that the female whales have a rounded dorsal fin tip that ends in a sharp corner and the saddle patch may have some black in with the gray.

Then there is the Transient population of Killer whales, these whales travel longer distances. They eat a diet of marine animals; Harbour seals, Sea lions, Dall's porpoises, Harbour porpoises, Pacific Whitesided dolphins, Grey, Minke, baleen whales, other toothed whales, walruses, and occasionally sea otters. It has also been noted that the females of this subspecies have dorsal fins that are more triangular and pointed than those of residents as well as the saddle patch is further forward in the transient subspecies and are more solidly gray in color.

There is a third subspecies of whales called the off shore Orcas. These whales are believed to eat a diet of fish, sharks, and turtles. The travel in large groups or pods up to sixty in numbers. The females have a more continuous rounded dorsal fin. This group has not been studied as much as the other two, due to their proximaty from shore.

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Females Orcas become sexually mature at around six to fifteen years of age. The mature younger in captivity than they do in the wild.

Males become sexually mature around ten to fifteen years of age, but do not normally breed until twenty one years of age. Though in captivity they have witnessed a male sucessfully breeding at the age of eight.

The females breed with multiple male partners, they are polygamous.

After breeding the gestation period varies from fifteen to eighteen months.

The mothers calve, with a single offspring, about once every three to five years. Most births observed have been tail first, but head first births have also been witnessed.

Newborn mortality is said to be high, in the wild nearly half of all calves don't make it to their first birthday.

Mother Orcas produce milk and the calves will nurse for up to two years and start to eating solid food at about twelve months of age.

One point I found interesting is the family bond of the Orca residents. All the resident Orca pod members, including males of all ages, help care for the younger calves.

Cows breed until the age of 40, the average cow raises five offspring.

The average lifespan of a female is around fifty years, but they may live into their seventies and eighties in some rare instances.

The average lifespan of a male orca is thirty years with rare longevity of up to sixty years of age.

There is told the tale of one male that lived to at least eight nine years old. He was known as "Old Tom" and was spotted every winter between 1843 and 1932 off New South Wales, Australia.

Healthy adult Orca's have no natural enemies. The young, and weak may fall prey to sharks.

Disease, parasites and stranding on the shore attribute to the longevity of the killer whale.

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Communications and Sounds of the Killer Whale

Killer Whales use sounds to communicate and to "echo-locate".

The whales make all different sounds including whistles, echolocation clicks, pulsed calls, low-frequency pops, and jaw claps that sound like moans, trills, grunts, whistles, squeaks, and creaking doors. These sounds vary in length and volume and the pattern of the sounds.

They make these sounds by moving air between the nasal sacs and their blowhole.

It really makes one wonder what they are saying to each other, doesn't it?

When using their echolocating, the clicks they use much like a sonar, sending out a series of clicks that bounce off objects and send them back to the whale, letting them know how close something is to their proximaty. It also tells them how large it is, what it's shape is, and how fast it is moving.

Each individual group of killer whales, has a distinct dialect that is used by all the whales in that pod.

Shaped a bit like a torpedo, the killer whale can travel quickly through water.

They vary in size, the male Orca are larger than the females. The males average is nineteen to twenty two feet long, and weighs between 9000 and 12000 lbs.

The largest male Killer Whale ever record was a whopping thirty two feet long, and weighed in at 22,000 lbs. That is huge!

The females range in length from 16 to 19 feet and usually weigh around 2500 lbs.

The Orca's have very distinct coloring, their black is very black, their white very white, with a patch of gray behind the dorsal fin, called a "saddle". The white oval spot behind their eye is appropriately called an "eyespot".

Which brings us to the dorsal fin, the tall fin that you most often see sticking up out of the water is called the dorsal fin. They have a blowhole just behind their "melon", which is their head. Their rostum is by their mouth (Don't ask me why it is called that) Baby orca's if they retain any hair at all it will often be around their rostum.






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Their "fluke" is the flat part of their tail that propells them through the water so efficiently. They don't swim with a side to side motion, it is an up and down motion.

They have a flipper, like an arm on each side, called a "pectoral flipper".

The really cool little bit of trivia on the Killer whale that I found is what lies inside their pectoral flipper. Inside their flipper lies their skeletal digits. They actually have five digits inside their flippers, much like the human hand.