Killer Whale Predation in Algoa Bay
By Lloyd Edwards

1. News

On a recent cruise to Bird Island to do the first white shark cage diving attempt of the season, we came across the unexpected. We were nearing Bird Island after a tip off from the marine research vessel skipper, Koos Smith, that they were slightly ahead of us with a school of 3000 common dolphins. We sped off to the coordinates that they had given us. All of a sudden Jake shouted from the roof that there were killer whales off our starboard bow. Indeed, there they were, around 12 of them!

We followed for a while and they seemed to be in hunting mode, spread out and moving fast. All of a sudden, they were gone. They disappeared for around 5 minutes. Suddenly in front of our boat I saw a pool of animal body fluids rise to the surface. The smell confirmed it and the pelagic seabirds started diving in to feed off the scraps. It was difficult to say exactly what they had predated. My guess is that it was either a large shark or one of the deep diving cetaceans.

As I had seen this behaviour on numerous occasions last month while I was at Bremer Canyon off South Western Australia, I can be quite sure that it was an underwater predation. I had spent two weeks there with Naturaliste Charters, observing killer whale predations on the continental shelf, 50km from shore. According to the skipper and the guides, around 90% of the killer whale predations occur underwater. The only evidence of this is the oil slick which reaches the surface. I saw plenty of the under and above water predations on beaked whales while I was there.

And like in Australia, once the killers had eaten their fill, it was playtime. This is exactly what we now observed for the rest of our time with the smiling orcas. The two calves where the most playful, while some of the adults did join in occasionally.

These two calves were having great fun chasing each other around. The calf on the left has a goose barnacle on the end of it's flipper. Taken with a Nikon D810 fullframe, ISO 720, 200mm zoom, f/8 and 1/1600th second.

These three adult killer whales had one of the calves squeezed in between them I'm not sure what was going on here, any ideas?

The calf has got the coolest expression on its face! It is the first time I notice that killer whales has a little bit of white on the upper lip.

This was part of the pod of around 12. Here we see four females with their short dorsal fins and a calf.

This female was repeatedly breaching and landing on her back.