Five families of orcas joined forces to hunt down and feed on a blue whale, the largest creature on the planet, in what was an extremely rare sighting off Australia.
More than 60 orcas worked together to attack the blue whale, only the fourth such recorded instance of its kind, according to Yahoo! News Australia.
Video of the attack was posted on the Facebook page of Naturaliste Charters Whale Watching, which also posted a series of photos.
“There were five families of the orcas around the blue whale and they all started to hunt it,” witness Machu Yoshida told Yahoo! News Australia. She said watching nature unfold was “bittersweet.”
“I felt mixed emotions,” she told Yahoo! News Australia. “I love blue whales so it was sad to watch its life being taken by the orcas, but they were all so intelligent, it was incredible to watch them do it.
“The blue whale would feed all the orcas and feed other animals under the water too, like sharks and fish, and also birds get the scraps.”
“We witnessed an incredible and rare event yesterday as multiple pods of orcas successfully hunted a blue whale in Bremer Canyon,” the whale-watching charter stated on Facebook. “The intense ordeal lasted less than 40 minutes from when we first saw the blue at the surface to when the battle was over.
“As the blue whale’s fate was sealed, orcas celebrated with breaches and tail slaps.
“This is only the fourth recorded instance of orcas hunting a blue whale here—an extraordinary reminder of their role as apex predators in the ocean.”
The first such sightings occurred between 2019 and 2021 off Australia, according to Smithsonian magazine. In each attack, between 50 and 75 orcas took part.
“This is the biggest predation event on the planet,” Robert Pitman, cetacean ecologist at Oregon State University Marine Mammal Institute, told Science News. “We haven’t seen things like this since dinosaurs were here, and probably not even then.”
Orcas are known to stalk and feed on gray whale calves off Southern California, and in one instance, a pod of killer whales attacked an adult gray whale, though the gray whale survived “bloodied and bruised, but not broken.”
Photos courtesy of Allan Cronin/Naturaliste Charters Whale Watching.
This article originally appeared on For The Win: In rare sighting, 60 orcas attack the largest creature on the planet
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