Killer whales take a day off

Some of our group had done a three-day pre-trip watching whales and orcas, but we had not. However our guide, Mark Carwardine, is one of the world’s leading marine mammal experts, so you could be sure he would magic up some orcas for us, and he did. In the pair above, the male has the very tall dorsal fin (at six feet, it is the tallest of any cetacean) , and the females and juveniles have shorter ones. Here is a another male:

Orcas, Orcinus orca, also called Killer Whales, are actually the largest members of the dolphin family. We mostly saw them either blowing in the distance

disappearing beneath the surface leaving a ghostly footprint behind, like these three:

or cruising around seemingly lackadaisically:

:

But they are faster than they appear: look at these bow waves:

There are three ecotypes in British Columbia: Residents, Transients, and Offshore Orcas. They eat different foods, use different hunting techniques, have different acoustic dialects, different shaped dorsal fins and saddle patches behind their dorsal fins, (see below), and do not appear to interbreed.

It may be that they are gradually evolving into distinct species. I highly recommend this if you’d like to know more: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/killer-whales-are-speciating-right-in-front-of-us/

These are all Transient or Bigg’s Killer Whales. The name transient is misleading: it is now recognized that they too often stay in one area, but they move in smallish groups of 3-7 immediate family members, led by a matriarch. Any males in the group are likely to be her sons. A second difference between them and other orcas is that they eat only marine mammals, not fish or sharks.

From time to time these groups, or pods, join forces with others in super-pods, where they socialize and breed, but we saw only small groups.

My second-favorite encounter was with this trio, as they swam through glassy dark water making those sculpted bow waves:

but top marks go to a group earlier that morning which included this delightful baby, making his own miniature bow wave:

PS This is Mark’s latest book: